Clive Crook thinks so. So does Milton Beardon. And the LA Times. And PBS. Newsweek takes it a step further and asks if Afghanistan is Obama's Vietnam.

I guess it's an easy argument to make—Obama had a choice of which of the two wars to end and the option to pull out of both, and he made it clear even in the campaign that he wanted to double down on Afghanistan. Success or failure now rests on his shoulders, and even stems from his definitions of the terms. The money spent and lives lost—both American and Afghan—going forward are tied directly and indirectly to his decisions and orders.

But something about the phrase bothers me. It has become conventional wisdom too quickly, and the political value (for his opponents, at least) of anchoring the war so securely to Obama's future is too transparent. I recognize my own biases, that I want both Afghanistan and Obama to succeed for deeply personal reasons, so if those were my only objections I probably wouldn't bring it up. There's something else troubling about it, though. It's as if the ubiquity of the phrase represents some sort of collective memory lapse. In two words it rewrites—forgets, even—recent history.

We're talking about a war that went on for seven years before Obama even took office. Was it Bush's war before that? Iraq certainly was. But there was a lot more collective ownership of Afghanistan, and a sense that it was America's war of necessity, not that long ago.

And it didn't have to turn out the way it has. Today's memes rationalize the failures of the past eight years as inevitable consequences of Afghanistan's own flaws: It is the "empire of graveyards" and unbearably hostile; it will never be able to stand on its own legs under the weight of its own corruption, the pundits write.

But what if it was the priority in 2001, 2002, and 2003 that it has become today? What if more resources had been dedicated toward shaping the governing structure when its clay hadn't yet hardened? What if the United States hadn't lost so much goodwill in the region? Underlying all these questions: What if Bush hadn't turned the world's attention to Iraq before the dust had settled in Afghanistan?

There's a reason a pitcher isn't eligible for a save, and also isn't credited for a loss, in a baseball game he enters when his team is already down several runs. I don't want to get bogged down in a muddy metaphor, but Obama is entering in the seventh inning after Bush blew a lead by packing up half the team in the second to go play a game in another stadium. It'll take a lot to pull out a win, and Obama will deserve some of the credit. But if it's a loss? He can certainly make it worse (civilian deaths from more drone strikes aren't helping, for instance), but we're a long way from being able to put the entire mess on his shoulders.

I don't want to absolve the current administration from the repercussions of how it proceeds or create some sort of "heads Obama wins, tails Bush loses" scenario. I also don't want to waste too much time parsing a phrase that most likely only exists because a handful of editors and writers thought it made for a concise, catchy headline.

But I also don't want America's policymakers and wordsmiths to gloss over how Afghanistan got to where it is today or the decisions that got it there.