( CNN ) -- Let 's face it : Barack Obama has not exactly been the second coming of Alexander the Great . He swept into office vowing to step up the war effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan , and he did , sending 30,000 fresh troops into the former and vastly expanding drone strikes in the latter . Obama managed to get Osama bin Laden , an achievement will likely be hearing about ad nauseum on the campaign trail over the long months ahead . But he has n't realized the much more difficult goal of bringing stability to Afghanistan , a land we have now been trying to stabilize for more than a decade . The recent spectacular attacks in Kabul , in which insurgents were able to once again paralyze the capital for 24 hours , may not have been Tet II , but they did underscore just how the fragile the planned 2014 handover to Afghan control really is . Enter Mitt Romney , whose positions on Afghanistan have been all over the map . He 's criticized the Obama administration for setting a timeline for withdrawal , but he has endorsed the timeline in practice . He 's denounced the idea of negotiating with the Taliban but has n't explained how he plans to defeat the insurgent movement on the battlefield . His main substantive complaint seems to be that Obama is withdrawing the surge troops by September instead of ... December . Indeed , his campaign 's few pronouncements on this subject are reminiscent of Richard Nixon 's `` secret plan '' to end the war in Vietnam , which turned out to be a plan to cut and run without ever admitting as much . The truth is that Romney holds more or less the same position on Afghanistan as the president -- steadily turning control over to the Afghans in the run-up to 2014 , while cajoling the Pakistanis to be more cooperative -- but he just ca n't admit it . Politically speaking , this is a smart strategy . Poll after poll has shown that Americans simply are n't interested in spending billions of their dwindling tax dollars to prop up Hamid Karzai , a deeply unimpressive leader who appears to them as ungrateful as he is incompetent and untrustworthy . That is , to the extent that Americans still think about this long-forgotten war at all . One way or another , we 're leaving Afghanistan , and I suspect we 'll someday look back on the conflict and wonder just what we were doing there for so long -- why , for instance , we thought it made sense to spend more money there each year than the country 's entire GDP ( excluding opium production , that is ) , and why we thought an impoverished , land-locked strategic backwater was such an important chess piece in a new `` Great Game . '' As long as Pakistan sees its interests as diametrically opposed to ours , and shelters and colludes with our enemies , this war could grind on forever . As long as Afghanistan is led by venal and weak-kneed partners , counterinsurgency is a waste of time . And nothing in the past decade suggests any of that will change on any time scale the American people will accept . None of this is to say that leaving Afghans -- especially women -- to their fates after all we 've promised them is a comfortable moral decision to make . I do n't envy the American officials having to explain that all the talk about saving Afghan women was just political rhetoric from a country that , at the end of the day , makes its national security decisions based on hard-nosed interests , not sentiment . But those conversations would happen under a Romney presidency just as they would under a second Obama term . We 've gotten our revenge for 9/11 . Bin Laden is at the bottom of the Arabian Sea , and the core of his al Qaeda network is much diminished . Karzai 's government has been given an ample chance to succeed or fail on its own . As for Alexander , let 's not forget -- Afghanistan was where the greatest general in history met his match . History may not be repeating itself today , but it sure does rhyme . Join us at Facebook/CNNOpinion . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Blake Hounshell .
Blake Hounshell : Obama got bin Laden but has n't brought stability to Afghanistan . Enter Mitt Romney , he says , who denounces Obama but whose positions are all over the place . He says Romney would do about same as Obama ; Afghanistan is an intractable conflict . Hounshell : U.S. will leave Afghanistan under Romney or Obama ; not easy , but necessary .