I will agree to stop fighting the overseas wars if our enemy will also agree to stop fighting.
If he doesn’t agree, I don’t think we can stop fighting. Rather, we have to have a clever plan on how to continue fighting effectively, using our strengths against enemy weaknesses.
Pres Bush did a great thing, using our strengths against the terrorists in Iraq, and sucking in terrorists all over the world where they could be identified by Iraqi allies, processed by US intelligence, and killed by US firepower.
Iraq as Flypaper. Thanks to our success on that campaign, Saddam was hanged, Libya agreed to fork over its (and Iraq’s) nuclear program. Iran, sandwiched between Iraq and Afghanistan mothballed its nuclear program.
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If you want to win a war, you have to fight to win a war. What we are doing in Afghanistan is a holding action. For every village we ‘liberate’... we then leave, and the enemy ‘retakes’ it.
If we aren’t going to seriously plus-up the number of military personnel in our armed forces to the level necessary to occupy each and every town and village in Afghanistan... then we need to consider reducing the number of towns and villages to the level that accomodates permanent garrisons of military personnel.
And doing anything like that is now considered a ‘war crime’. Relocation = ethnic cleansing = war crime. So we are now bound to a failed set of rules in this.
So, since we ain’t fighting to win, why bother fighting at all? It just exhausts our treasury and our troops, making us vulnerable to our enemies when the time comes.
(And as an aside, smart weaponry was one of the biggest mistakes we ever made. For it shields our enemy’s citizenry from the horror of war. And as long as they don’t experience the horror of war, they will continue to support armed resistance after we win. In other words, the enemy is not their military, it is their citizenry. Get the citizenry to give up their support for war, and their armed forces stop fighting.)