Honolulu’s battle for rail is becoming the Afghanistan moment for local Democrats. The once politically popular incursion into Afghanistan is now a questionable invasion. The decade-long American war is seen as a bad decision.

Those are the first three sentences of Richard Borreca’s column today in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (subscription required). Most of the piece is actually pretty tame — Filipinos are usually reliable Democratic voters, but find themselves in league with Republicans who support Ben Cayetano’s anti-rail candidacy for mayor.

But the top and the bottom are pretty dramatic. Borreca writes that rail’s declining poll numbers are “like our quagmire overseas.” He concludes by wondering whether “rail leaves Kapolei before the U.S. is out of Kabul.”

The comparison is offensive, and it really wasn’t necessarily to make the main thrust of the column work.

Declining support is one similarity between transit in Honolulu and war in Afghanistan. Maybe they’ve both taken too long and maybe they’re both too costly. But there’s at least one significant difference that Borreca and the newspaper’s editors seem to have overlooked: Rail does not kill people.

Almost 2,000 U.S. soldiers have died in Operation Enduring Freedom. Lt. Clovis Tim Ray, based out of Schofield Barracks here in Honolulu, was one of them. He died less than a month ago. That number doesn’t include other allies in the U.S.-led coalition, militants fighting on the other side or thousands of civilians whose deaths can be attributed either directly or indirectly to the fighting.

Violent terminology is used in political (and even sports) stories all the time. Battle. Fight. Target. Others have written about those metaphors before. But this isn’t the passing use of “battle” in a local news story. It’s a direct comparison of rail to war.

Even if you oppose Honolulu’s project, likening it to war seems like a stretch.

(Photo from the U.S. Army’s Flickr account)