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"I’ve been to Afghanistan. You haven’t - obviously. You do NOT know how things are run there, not at all. The Afghans DO run things their way, and we go along with what THEY want. That is the reality. Period. Afghanistan is sovereign. The US is there to assist. We do not run the country."

But then you've got a guy like Chuck Devore who has been there, who has a long history with Afghanistan, and who also says that our current tact isn't going to work from a strategic standpoint. Afghanistan's Constitution is inherently flawed for the make up of that country, its government is weak and corrupt and Afghanistan's only income is from foreign aid and opium.

So what does that ultimately mean?

It means that at the end of the day we will ultimately have two choices -- either find a way to make it unprofitable for the Afghan Taliban to do business with al Qaeda (which if we had a solution to that, we would have used it years ago),--- OR we have to "nation-build" (rewrite Afghanistan's Constitution, put our own choice of people in there to run the government, create industry and infrastructure that replaces opium as Afghanistan's sole income-producer, and ramp up foreign aid to much higher levels).

It's doubtful that we have options for Alternative 1, so we will likely have to go for Alternative 2, Nation-Building. There goes "Afghan sovereignty" out the window.

Please don't mistake what I am saying. We had every right to retaliate militarily against Afghanistan for having harbored the al Qaeda who attacked us. Even Ron Paul voted for the authorization of the use of force in Afghanistan. And our military troops have served us nobly.

However, our politicians should have decided what the plan was for finishing it before we ever started and Congress should have formally declared war so that there was no obligation for us beyond stopping what we wished to stop there. All questions of a declared enemy's "sovereignty" go out the window with a formal declaration of war -- and that's fine -- that's what a war is.

Instead because we chosen the tightrope-walking tact we have, ultimately we are going to get forced into nation-building Afghanistan --- while our own national infrastructure is crumbling, we are going to have to spend money that we don't have to prop up a country thousands of miles away --- while our own country's ability to shoulder the massive debt we already have is being sorely tested.

IMHO, the best way to really "Support the Troops" is to only send them where they have something worth fighting for and something possible to accomplish. And no military -- no matter how good they are -- has "magic fairy dust" in their arsenal that can turn cave-dwelling Pashtun Tribal Leaders into peaceful, flag-waiving lovers of democracy -- that's an impossible mission for soldiers.