[Now 14 months away from having soldiers die in Afghanistan who weren’t even born yet on 9/11.]
Would I prefer it if we had nuked Afghanistan out of existence? Sure. But Bush would have been prosecuted as a war criminal and spent the rest of his years in prison. So I understand why he never considered it. The war in Afghanistan is our way of convincing criminal organizations like al Qaeda and the Taliban that the US will never stop killing them if they conduct a large scale massacre of Americans on the scale of 9/11.
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, we lost 400,000 Americans fighting the Nazis and the Japanese. That’s almost 300 dead GI’s a day for almost 4 years. So far in the war against the Taliban, we’ve lost less than 2,500 Americans. http://icasualties.org/oef/ People say “never forget” re 9/11. One way of doing so is to keep on appropriating funds to fight the Taliban.
Should have gone in, killed or captured the people we felt were responsible, and gotten the hell out.
Instead, we have spent a mind blowing amount of money in an interminable conflict where almost all the people who have been killed or wounded have had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 or the people who were responsible for it.
Just in terms of right and wrong, this war is wrong, wrong, wrong, and it has been since its conception.
Well, US$10 Billion/year isn’t exactly small change, even for the United States. But I agree it is a sound investment to let the “radical Islamic extremists” (as opposed to say, “ultraconservative Muslims” (distinction without much of a difference)) know that, as you say, the “US will never stop killing them if they conduct a large scale massacre of Americans on the scale of 9/11”
Personally, I think we should never (with emphasis on “never”) stop killing them (or assisting others willing to kill them) as long as they are trying to impose their version of Islam anywhere in the world.
I appreciated your ending comments about the tremendous differences in casualty rates between the prolonged guerilla war being fought in Afghanistan and combat involving fully trained and equipped combatants. The US needs to be careful not to mistake what is going on in Afghanistan as anything other than Low Intensity Conflict (LIC). It is certainly not the face of future conflict between peer, near-peer, or even strong regional powers.
I sounded those same figures several years ago in developing a presentation the development and deployment of MRAP vehicles. I wanted to emphasize how many US service deaths could be attributed to the lag time between realizing the armored versions of the HMMWV were not cutting it vis-à-vis IEDs and getting the MRAP fielded. To give some added perspective, I also presented casualty rates for several wars the US fought in during the 20th century.
The final slide in the presentation was for Iwo Jima where the Marine Corps had nearly 7,000 Marines killed and over 19,000 wounded in the course of 36 days of fighting. Even in the face of overwhelming US superiority, No! SUPREMACY in air, land, and sea power, the Japanese demonstrated that they knew how to organize and conduct a determined defense against an amphibious invasion. Iwo Jima, along with the casualties the US would experience beginning on 1 April 1945 during the Japanese defense of Okinawa, weighed heavily on estimates of future casualties from the invasion of mainland Japan. The expected losses were a factor in President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima