Posted on 02/27/2012 5:24:35 AM PST by shortstop
Kiss it good bye.
It’s time to pack the truck and leave these savages to themselves.
Adios Afghanistan. Screw you very much.
After a decade of our blood and treasure being poured into their hellhole, our allies are our enemies, Afghanistan is still a sewer, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
We won in Afghanistan years ago – we deposed the Taliban and chased out Al Qaida – and since then we’ve been spilling our blood for people who hate us, throwing our money at people who rob us, and destabilizing our future for a nation that isn’t a nation.
It’s time to case the colors and come home.
Afghanistan II is Obama’s Iraq and it didn’t work. We have learned yet again that nation building is a fool’s errand, that you can’t impose civilization on an uncivilized people, and that the only country we should be underwriting is the United States of America.
Over the weekend, in some crap hole of a government ministry building, completely paid for by the American taxpayer, one of our dear allies opened up on two of our officers. One more in an interminable line of good guys getting greased by our coalition partners.
We’ve been training them for a decade. We’ve been supplying them with bullets and beans, but we can’t buy them brains. And we can’t buy them consciences, and we can’t buy them out of the Dark Ages which engulf that whole region.
Our entire operating premise – to win hearts and minds – is failed. It is ill-conceived and doomed. From the jungles of Vietnam to the back alleys of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, we can’t kiss enough arse, we can’t write enough checks, we can’t issue enough apologies. We will never win a war by groveling for peace.
Because, no matter what the generals say, it’s not about building schools and clinics. It’s not about putting in wells and wires, it’s about killing the other guy and breaking the will of his society.
It’s about blowing him to hell and leaving the next guy shaking in his boots so bad that he throws down his gun and runs. Peace is on the other side of victory, and victory comes from smashing the living snot out of any person, nation, culture, tribe, organization or religion that dares look at you cross-eyed.
The last general who understood that was a guy named Patton. The last president was his commander in chief, Franklin Roosevelt.
Since then, from Korea to Kandahar, we have fought in half measures, tethered by inanities called “rules of engagement,” lacking the national will to claim victory, much less do what is necessary to secure it. We have had the best warriors, and the worst leaders, from political generals to castrato presidents. We have won on the battlefield and lost in the conference room, and an unfolding era of technology and legality traps our warriors between enemies in the front and referees in the back. Our GIs can survive the battlefield, but not the courtroom, and the lessons of history lie ignored while we dissipate our national security in undeclared, unnecessary wars.
It’s time to come home.
Because if some accidentally burned books turns this entire society against us, if a decade’s investment has not bought us any good will or them any good sense, then it’s not worthwhile. It’s not working. Their military and police are fools in starched uniforms, lacking both discipline and basic intelligence. Afghanistan is today no more a stable, modern nation than it was before the first American arrived in late 2001.
We tried. It didn’t work. Screw ‘em. Let’s come home.
Or let’s be men and kick in the afterburners.
Either roll some thunder across this opium-growing cesspool and get these savages’ attention, or kiss the whole mess good bye. Simply put: Go big, or go home.
Be a superpower, or be a spectator, but don’t keep bleeding our military by dithering in the no-man’s-land in between. The question of life is “Is you is, or is you ain’t?” And, in Afghanistan, we ain’t.
And we shouldn’t be there.
The last week has shown us that.
Again.
We must robustly defend our nation and our national interests. We must have a strong defense and the grit to use it.
And we must stay out of the quicksand.
To hell with Afghanistan.
World conflagration is where this is all headed... Obama and Hillary both said they were going to do things smarter than the Bush administration... smarter by their standards is the same as not knowing you are deceived because you are deceived.
The basis of rational thought is knowing truth, not the truth you dream up, but the truth that is. Jesus said, “know the truth and the truth will set you free”. Pontius Pilate asked, “What Is Truth?”
God!
The Truth IS Yahweh...“He Brings Into Existence Whatever Exists”; “He is the great I AM”; “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the word was God”. If you don’t have this as the beginning of all truth then rationality becomes vain imaginings, fable dreaming with no moral bearing, and the mystery of iniquity is brought to life, destroying all who embrace it.
To dis-embrace God for the fable of this fallen world is bringing damnation down on our heads. The whole world is dis-embraciing God and embracing the lie. The time of the end is near... embrace God and His Son and live, for it is appointed unto all Men, once to die, then the judgement!! Accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, see clearly what is coming.
a) you've obviously managed to completely miss the strategic point of the author's statement;
b) how that quote unleashed your apparent Bilderberger-ish fixation is a bit puzzling;
c) but this is the bit that absolutely doesn't pass the smell test: And our man child president .. is doing a capable job
Yours wouldn't be the longest-term signup to get the zot, but it'd surely be right up there.
Yep... also, more dust, less fuss.
Nah, we have an all volunteer military for that.
Obama comes in & it's time to be 'friends' with Afghanistan. Do the 'Nation Building' thing. I don't know about you, but I think Bush had the right idea.
Can we hang Karzai before we leave?
Sure, go ahead. It's fine with me. You have my permission. s/
America should go further into debt because you want babysitters policing a bunch of ingrates? Apparently we have not learned the lessons of Vietnam. On top of that, we have cheerleaders behind keyboards that actively root for quagmires.
To answer your premise, so what, that would be the Nationals problem. Did you have a problem when Al Qaida’s influence of the “Muslim Brotherhood” take over of Egypt, Lybia, etc...? That whole area is a convoluted mess which surprisingly emulates the Islamic religion. We give Al Qaida access in one area, yet prevent that group in other areas, sounds great apparently in your eyes. The "enemy's friend" apparently is ringing loudly in the Middle East while you promote soldiers getting picked off because of COIN, hell no.
Don't forget Syria as well. Al Qaida is in the process of infiltrating the resistance over there with their tag team partners Hamas. All these acts are at the blessings/wishes of our foreign policy masters.
How much of a military threat is Al Qaida anyway? How many Aircraft Carriers do they have? What is their nuclear range? In fact, how many nukes do they have? Pakistan? China will never let Al Qaida get near their pathetic arsenal. What is Al Qaida's AF comprised of btw?
Oh my, if Al Qaida takes over Afghan we are all doomed. Al Qaida's Super Power status would be solidified with control of Afghanistan.
“Since Obama took over the management of the Afghan War, 37 months ago, 1,836 Coalition troops have been killed. During the 87 months under the Bush Administration, 1,069 military were killed.”
AND where oh where are Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink, et al. protesting all of these deaths as they did when Bush was President?????? ))))crickets((((
What the hell are you talking about?
You obviously know nothing about the international financial system. Wars are for making money....period!
[ We have been trying to reuse the “Marshall Plan” model for decades. While it frequently works, it doesn’t always. It seems that the majority of the Afghan people want to keep living the way their ancestors did 1000 years ago. Fine. ]
Nation building only works when the nation your are rebuilding is within 1/2 a century apart in terms of “level of civilisation”. The wider the gap the more difficult the prospect of nation building and when that gap gets to be over 500 years it becomes practically impossible unless the people you are occupying actually WANT to advance their civilisation.
[ AND where oh where are Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink, et al. protesting all of these deaths as they did when Bush was President?????? ))))crickets(((( ]
Some of them still are, but since their usefullness as useful idiots is no longer “en vogue” they are ignored my ALL the MSM news.
Unnecessary effort.
Just cancel his ticket for the last helicopter, and nature will take its course.
In about five minutes.
See what happened to the last one.
“From the jungles of Vietnam “
We did just fine there. What we lost to were the hippies, liberals, and Walter Cronkite claiming “The war is lost” after the Tet of ‘68 when actually the viet Cong got demolished during Tet and we took significant advances.
We won abroad, we lost at home.
I was watching a CBS special on youtube awhile ago done right after the La Drang valley battle - our first major battle. (We Were Soldiers once and Young).
They talked about the battle, the historic nature of the helicopters, our victory, and our casualties. And at that end it had some comment like “It remains to be seen how the mothers and fathers and the American public will react to the growing numbers of dead and wounded of its young men in this faraway country.” I don’t recall the exact wording, but it was something very defeatist like this. I was only six at the time, and thought the anti-war press only happened after awhile - not after the first battle!
All good questions. All reasonable arguments. But I don’t remember anyone here bringing them up when Bush started pouring blood and treasure down the rathole. Go figure.
We didn’t win. No one has won Afghanistan from Alexander the Great on.
The only way to win is to kill them all, and repopulate. Alexander tried that, and it didn’t work to well.
Simply put, we need to stay out of Asia and the middle east. We can’t make them love or think like us. We need to realize that they truly don’t want to be like us, and never will.
Good points, except for the fact we are not fighting WWII. Our infrastructure is very weak. They don't have to bomb New York, just blow up a few pipe lines. They don't need a carrier battle group, just start shooting up malls. All the drones in the world won't protect the pilots when they clock out at night and get shot at a McDonalds.
We are entrenched in fighting the Nazi's, when we need to remember how we fought the Indians.
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