The buzzword on Afghanistan is "trust."

Having routed the Taliban, liberated millions, midwived a (Sharia-supreme) constitution, assisted in elections, propped up a government and routed the Taliban some more, all the United States needs now to win victory in Afghanistan is to win the "trust" of the Afghan people.

So, cockamamiely, wrote Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in a column appearing in the Washington Post just days before President Obama ordered 17,000 new troops to Afghanistan, nearly doubling the American presence there.

The president's top military adviser explained the policy this way: "We have learned, after seven years of war, that trust is the coin of the realm -- that building it takes time, losing it take mere seconds, and maintaining it may be our most important and most difficult objective."

Sorry, admiral, but if that is what we have "learned" in a war that has claimed more than 600 American lives, wounded and maimed thousands more, and cost billions of pre-bailout dollars, we are practically done for.

Why? The short answer is that in making a primary objective out of winning the "trust" of the Afghan people, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs has, by definition, abandoned all rational war policy. Indeed, he has placed the marker for American success not on the ability of U.S. forces to execute their missions, but on the emotional reaction of the average, illiterate, infidel-hostile, modernity-challenged Afghan to those missions.

"Lose the (Afghan) people's trust," Mullen writes, "and we lose the war." I wish I could say I've never heard such fatuous counsel, but the entire so-called war on terror, from start to non-finish, reverberates with this same sort of line. It tends to turn profound Islamic differences from the West into profound Western failings toward Islam. Rather than walk our nation up to the cultural chasm between Islam and the West and show us what it looks like, our leaders have, in effect, made that chasm into their own personal responsibility, something to fill in, paper over and, above all, never, ever mention.

Thus, Mullen blames the Afghan failure to hail the United States as the conquering hero on a purely American failure to maintain Afghan "trust" -- an unfair rap, frankly, on dedicated troops stretched thin by far too many years of deployment. Indeed, Mullen broaches the "trust" topic with a distasteful allusion to Pleminius, a Roman tyrant, who, around 200 B.C., became notorious for his and his soldier's raping, pillaging and plundering of the Locrians, who expected and ultimately received restitution from Rome.

"We are not Romans, of course," Mullen writes.

Gee, thanks a lot.

He continues: "Our brigade combat teams are not the legions of old. But we in the U.S. military are likewise held to a high standard. Like the Romans, we are expected to do the right thing, and when we don't, to make it right again."

And what exactly has the United States done that isn't right?

"It doesn't matter how hard we try to avoid hurting the innocent, and we do try very hard," Mullen writes. "It doesn't matter how proportional the force we deploy, how precisely we strike. It doesn't even matter if the enemy hides behind civilians. What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it. In the end, all that matters is that, despite our best efforts, sometimes we take the very lives we are trying to protect." Continued...