Obama unnecessarily prolonged it.
After 8 years of Obama suddenly the Afghan war is an issue again.
I’m reluctant to care what the Afghans think.
Lets be kinda honest...the ‘17 year’ thing mentioned....is not when the real war started. You need to go back to 1979 when the Russians invaded and created the environment rich in thug-ism. You can go back to the 1960s and 1970s to see a lot going on....western capital showing up in Kabul...and even some tourism starting to show up. Next year will be forty freaking years of an unending war. They are right to be frustrated, but there’s a ton of blame to throw around.
The problem is that we’re fighting this the American way. If we had fought this the Afghan way, the war would have been over a couple of years after 9/11. Of course, a few million Afghans (with a 1 to 10 or lower Taliban to Taliban civilian supporter ratio) would also be lying in mass graves. Unfortunately, to defeat an enemy that has been defeated conventionally, but won’t surrender, you cannot apply the Geneva Conventions to them.
The problem is not that we can’t defeat them, but that we won’t take measures that have worked in the past, continue to work in the present, but are now interpreted as cruelty for the sake of cruelty. They are not. We have devoted hundreds of billions of dollars towards fighting the Taliban our way. It can’t be done at a reasonable cost in American and friendly Afghan lives, never mind money. The Taliban and their civilian supporters must be slaughtered root and branch.
Fine, let’s get out.
Good.
Of course. Many if not most Afghans or more importantly the muslims who live in Afghanistan, are the enemy of the United States and did not mind bin laden attacking us.
They would prefer peace on their soil while living sharia law and war on our soil.
Of course, we are making the war against islam an away game as much as we can.
JoMa
We are not in Afghanistan as benevolent heros, we are there because the country is full of rare minerals.
But girls can go to school.
That’s worth American treasure.
Certainly a possibility.
No offense to anyone who has served in the U.S. military, but for the life of me I can't imagine why anyone would sign up to put his or her life on the line in a Third World sh!t-hole somewhere ... just because a bunch of @ssholes in Washington think it's a good idea.
Bush gave them warning to escape. The office workers & ordinary American citizens had no warning. Bush and the rest of the government had warning something was going to happen. Instead, Bush warned Osama and the rest of those in Afghanistan. We even changed the name of the campaign as it offended the muslims! We could have started bombing September 11 or 12. Instead, we warned them! Complete insanity.
No mention of Islam as the root of all their woes.
Meanwhile, the Taliban bide their time, as always.
Their benefactor Pahkeestahn remains as crazy as ever.
The mullahs of Tehran still breathe air.
Mecca is still on the map and not a mass of glazed sand.
...and we still play nation building games while allowing our nation to collapse into a borderless craphole.
I agree.
Leave!
If obama prolonged it, well trump has to stop it.
They said that it would be a “quagmire,” so we thought they wanted a quagmire. So we brought them a quagmire. ;-)
Anti-U.S. nations, don’t mess with the U.S.A. If you do, you will be caught in a quagmire forever. ;-D
You can end a war immediately, by losing it.
But another view is, what do we expect to achieve? You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. You can’t create a western style republic from a ninth century culture. And, I think that was the goal going in. Who knows what the goal is now. But nothing there is worth an American soldier’s life. What other ways are there to achieve America’s goals, whatever they are? (And, maybe, the better of the bad options is an eternal, unwinnable war there over terrorism here.)
I'm at the point of, kill them all, let Allah sort it out.