Posted on 11/19/2013 9:34:53 AM PST by sunmars
Looks like Bozo’s gonna do some apologizing in some letter that Carney won’t admit to..gee, which part of the time in Afghanistan might The One apologize for??? I despise this POS fraud.
For a time I led a UN project office in Afghanistan. The oldest and wisest white-haired Afghan once told me "We'll always need an international to lead us, other wise we will fight among ourselves." Sure enough, several years after I left an Afghan stayed a coup, driving out the internationals, leading to corruption and the eventual dismantling of the organization.
Keep in mind that the present predicament of the US goes back to the British, who deliberately created national borders that split the Pashtuns between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and hobbled together opposing ethnicities to cause strife and weakness. The US could have begun fixing this problem by splitting Afghanistan in multiple nations, however, it's also easier for the US to exercise influence over a piecemeal weak nation, than several stronger nations of unified ethnicity.
The dollars involved aren't huge. We're spending about $80b on Afghanistan sustaining close to 65K troops there, combined with aid packages. Taking it down to 8K troops, combined with Afghan aid, might take it down to $20b a year. Which is a rounding error (0.1%) as a % of national output. Obamacare alone will probably cost $300b a year due to the massive Medicaid expansion and the subsidies for low income households. Our problem with military spending has always been related to concurrent increases in welfare state spending. The Europeans have avoided this problem because by slashing defense to the bone. But even they are running out of defense budget to cut.
Afghanistan pre-existed the Brits. The reason Pashtuns are split between Afghanistan and Pakistan is because the Brits never mustered the force to both overrun and administer the place. They overran local forces several times, but it was an expensive proposition to garrison the place and there was not enough government revenue from trade to justify placing a large permanent force there. Afghans will give you all kinds of conspiracy theories, but they are given to conspiracy theories. The reality is - way before the Brits showed up - the Pashtuns built an unwieldy empire of Tajiks, Pashtuns, Uzbeks and Hazaras but can't control it because they've repeatedly run into the same problem as the Brits - the country is composed of vast swathes of wasteland that can't provide enough revenues to keep the empire together.
I’m shocked! No, not that Obama was lying about pulling out of Afghanistan. I’m shocked that NBC is doing some actual reporting.
If you try to defend everywhere, you wind up defending nothing. If you try to solve all the world’s problems, you wind up solving no problems.
ping
Nuke and salt the poppy fields.
Get our US Troops out, dammit! Quit wasting US Blood & Treasure in that filthy shithole.
Israel is the only thing worth protecting in the ME; screw the Petro-Dollars. We’ll survive the SHTF crash.
He’s advancing the islamist/muzzie caliphate.
The Afghanistan inheritance serves only to bolster the CIC’s credibility.
You can’t civilize tribes. Africa is proof.
Trash-can-istan Ping.
I just came from a thread where I disagreed with the characterization of our action in Afghanistan as a meat grinder by another freeper.
Iwo Jima was a meat grinder. We lost as many men each day on iwo Jima as we have lost on average in an entire year, each year since we have been in Afghanistan. That in no way diminishes the sacrifice of youth, blood and money that we have put into Afghanistan since 2001, but I think it is important to keep things in the proper perspective. It is three times more dangerous to be a citizen of Chicago than it is to serve in the US Military in Afghanistan.
Our military have done an excellent job under the circumstances they have been asked to serve in, especially the way they have been increasingly stabbed in the back and asked to do ever more worthless missions since the Democrats took power in 2006.
Given how they are being increasingly ignored, underfunded, handcuffed and betrayed by the civilian (and some of their own) leadership, we should have brought them home in 2006.
“If you like your IED deaths and multiple deployments, you can keep them.”
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