toledoblade.com --

WHEN you're preoccupied with jobs, families, and futures, it's easy not to think of the U.S. military stuck in two war zones. It's easy to lose interest in Iraq knowing our nightmare will end even if the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds self-destruct.

And it's been easy to overlook the unraveling military efforts in Afghanistan like our government did when it shifted attention and resources to Iraq. Certainly we're saddened by reports of soldiers dying far too young, but when U.S. military engagements drag on, a collective indifference can develop about war waged in our name.

We just have more pressing day-to-day problems to worry about at home, not to mention vexing domestic concerns from health reform to swine flu. They put the latest clashes from Kabul far down on the popular priority list.

Besides, no one seemed to have a clue about how to handle the spreading tumult in Afghanistan, and the U.S. casualties of that war, while tragic, didn't grab many headlines until now. So it was easy to delude ourselves into believing things weren't that bad for the 65,000 U.S. soldiers holed up in a region ruled by corruption, lawlessness, drug trade, tribal militias, and terrorists.

As a country, we were mostly content to drift along aimlessly in Afghanistan - on the road to repeating history a la Vietnam - until the warning signs flashing trouble for military operations there became impossible to ignore.

The death toll for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan shot up to its highest ever in October, the deadliest month of that war for our troops since 2001. A day after 14 soldiers were killed in a pair of helicopter crashes, returning from a firefight with suspected Taliban drug traffickers in western Afghanistan, eight more troops died in multiple roadside bombings.

The situation is so dire the chief field commander in Kabul says without a fresh infusion of men and material the counterinsurgency could collapse. Former vice president Dick Cheney, always a measured voice of reason, pressed the White House to stop "dithering while America's armed forces are in danger," and other Republicans, including Sen. John McCain, rallied behind Gen. Stanley McChrystal's request for as many as 40,000 more troops.

The new urgency for a major troop surge in Afghanistan, after years of catastrophic neglect by the Bush administration, has suddenly pushed the forgotten war onto the front burner, demanding decisions that could pull America deeper into a protracted war. Fortunately, the rush to act, urged by those who rushed the country into the costly Iraq debacle, does not appear to have clouded the administration's strategic brainstorming on the Afghan war.

To his credit, President Obama has assured U.S. service members he would never make short work of "the solemn decision of sending you into harm's way." Thank God. The President has to weigh America's vital interests against the uncertainties of an open-ended commitment with debatable success.

Compounding any campaign to do that is a hopelessly corrupt government in Kabul that has virtually no ability to govern or maintain order outside the capital, and a thriving opium trade. Nevertheless, the pressure is on to boost American troop levels in Afghanistan to more than 100,000 for a dubious counterinsurgency campaign that could keep our soldiers mired there much longer than the brutal nine-year entanglement of the former Soviet Union.

But to what end? The American public needs to know. As preoccupied as we are with jobs, families, and futures, there are still enough of us who remember how another war, advanced with vague, shifting military missions, wound up costing the country more than 58,000 lives.

Caution borne of that hindsight and others had better precede any troop build-up in Afghanistan.

Marilou Johanek is a Blade commentary writer.

Contact her at: mjohanek@theblade.com