Which might be the *real* reason we're there.
Incidentally, in keeping with the title of the thread:
Cheers!
As much as I detest Moran, he is just saying what a lot of people are thinking, and they are correct.
1) NATO forces are about 175,000 + 100,000 fairly useless Afghan army. Afghanistan has 30,000,000 people, and is next door to 177,000,000 Pakistanis. Afghanistan is about the same size as Texas.
2) Though at any time there are only about 30,000 active Taliban forces, they have continual and perpetual reinforcement from the madrassas, radical religious schools, in Pakistan. This means that practically speaking, no matter how many NATO forces die or are incapacitated, there will still be 30,000 Taliban.
3) NATO can neither hold ground, nor can they change “hearts and minds”, because as soon as they leave an area, the Taliban return to reassert their control, beating and killing anyone who cooperated.
4) The Taliban still have major money pipelines providing them the resources to fight, as well as the occasional radical foreign expert who provides them with technical guidance so they can maintain more than a primitive level of hostilities. This is strongly augmented by the Iranians, and many in the Pakistani government and ISI, their intelligence agency who are sympathetic to them.
Now, this being said, we cannot “win”. But importantly, this does not mean that it is not important to be there, nor that we can “lose”, either.
Right now the US is spending about $100m to build a very advanced installation out of the fray, in more peaceful northern Afghanistan, a city called Mazar-i-Sharif.
It is of enormous value, because it is near the borders of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and the small arm of Afghanistan that reached to the border with China. All of which are of great importance to American intelligence operations.
Which might be the *real* reason we're there.
Incidentally, in keeping with the title of the thread:
Cheers!