Now Is as Good a Time as Any for the U.S. to Quit Afghanistan

WSJ ^ | Dec 10 | By Gil Barndollar and Sam Long

[RandFan]

"... It isn’t new to have U.S. politicians who are disconnected from the facts on the ground in Afghanistan. In 2013, two years after President Obama announced that American troops would soon come home, we discovered that the military was still expanding its footprint in Afghanistan. Our team assumed control of a series of bases that had been enlarged in a costly engineering operation only months before. Five months later, when word finally came to withdraw, we tore down many of these newly remodeled outposts. The rest we refashioned into smaller versions of themselves, at significant additional cost, so that the outnumbered Afghan forces would have a chance of holding them in the face of the assaults we knew they would soon face.

Whether it comes this winter, next spring, or even years from now, the final U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan will inevitably be a messy and destabilizing affair. Members of Congress, and America’s generally hawkish foreign policy establishment, need to reject the comforting, now decadeslong illusion that if we stay just a little longer, we can leave under better, cleaner circumstances.

The opposite is closer to the truth: Each passing month increases the odds that the small U.S. force remaining in Afghanistan eventually departs in real haste, either as a result of the collapse of the Afghan state or a dramatic Taliban military breakthrough.

Waiting for the “right time” finally to depart Afghanistan, at an annual cost of nearly $40 billion and a slow trickle of American combat deaths, is a feckless attempt to kick the can down the road. Our troops should not be held hostage to policy makers’ vain hopes for an immaculate withdrawal, or to the calamities conjured up on Capitol Hill."

[Dagnabitt]

Depart today. Then ban all immigration from that garbage pit.

But instead with Biden, we will have unlimited migration from all of the Muslim world.

[PGR88]

My suggestion on September 12 2001 was a total travel ban from mid-east, south asian and North African countries. I would have been the cheapest, easiest, least offensive to Americans’ Constitutional rights “anti-terror” measure that could be taken. It still is.

Our betters decided it would be more wise to keep open borders, invade and destabilize a dozen or so mid-east countries, and turn America into a surveillance state. Stay or leave Afghanistan, I don’t expect any of this to change.

[Lurkinanloomin]

2002 would have been better.

[eyeamok]

the final U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan will inevitably be a messy and destabilizing affair.

You are damned right it will be, you are taking about leaving $15-$20 Billion Dollars in Profits from Meth and Opium, Currently that is OUR Money, That is why we went there in the first place. We, The US control the Opium in Afghanistan and always have. Some call it Fundraising for the CIA and assorted three letter agencies. Who will get the Money if we Leave?? Will the US still get a Cut?? Will HSBC Facilitate it like all the other Illegal Profits of Governments around the world??. There is a hell of a lot more than just packing up and leaving.

https://undark.org/2020/05/20/afghanistan-meth-ephedra/

it is quite possible for the ephedra and meth industry to equal that of the opium and heroin economy.” The opium and heroin trade in Afghanistan is worth as much as $6.6 billion per year, according to a 2018 report

[Howie66]

Texas needs to quit the US.

Our agreement to join the Union was not meant to be a Suicide Pact.

[Drew68]

Now Is as Good a Time as Any for the U.S. to Quit Afghanistan

Now is too late. The military will just drag their feet until after Biden is sworn in and reverses the policy.

2017 was when it needed to happen (much earlier, really).

[Onthebrink]

Now is truly the time to leave. We spend 20 years there and the Taliban is still the ruling power—using opium money to fight us and buy some really powerful weapons. Unless we are prepared to use massive force we won’t win.

[dakine]

No - we’re (The U.S.) are pulling out so many assets (or destroying in Country) , there will be “build back up” in the future.

On to Africa..!!

[HighSierra5]

Nuke em on the way out.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

The Brits failed in Afghanistan and the Russians did too.
What exactly would you have us do there?

[eyeamok]

What exactly would you have us do there?

Stay There, Keep the Drugs Flowing . You CAN’T have a War on Drugs, without Drugs!!

[Red6]

Not quit!

Strategy change which trump largely did or started.

Dude, if you quit you’ll be forced to return because whatever cancer comes back will spread elsewhere. You can’t stick your head in the sand and pretend this away.

Afghanistan should have NEVER been about nation building.

It’s a retard society. You might as well be hop in a time machine, go back, and try to teach Neanderthals about how to run a country, democracy, human rights... Don’t get me wrong, there are smart people there, even good people, but enough of that society embraces an ass backward view of life to where trying to bring them into the 1800s will take another 30 years.

What you do is focus on the enemy. I.E. you avoid building bases there, you forget about trying to be the “nice guy” because most of the crap you build someone will end up blowing up anyhow since it threatens their power base. You simply come and go into that place to kill the bad guys, you drone the shit out of them (as Trump did), and you pay some to do your dirty work, or you train and equip a few that are actually decent, but you minimize your footprint there. Leaving Afghanistan completely will once again create a vacuum as after the Cold War, and nature hates a vacuum.

You are either oriented on the enemy or the terrain in war. In Iraq it should have been the terrain, but we made it about the enemy (AQ etc). We gave that place up because of national politics/elections (backwards on our behalf). In Afghanistan we should be oriented on the enemy but are pretending to be oriented on the terrain/i.e. holding ground, playing the big humanitarian nation builder, bla bla bla (backwards on our behalf).

Afghanistan has a 34% adult literacy rate. They are tribal and highly religious (but with the most regressive version of Islam) in thinking with no true national identity. There is little to support an economy (wasteland). There is no true preexisting government structures or bureaucracy other than what we have created over the years. There is no true infrastructure other than what we have created over the last few years. Bridge to far-

[ImpBill]

I guess with acting SecDef Miller saying we did the best we could is helping us to get out.

Don’t get me wrong I am one for bringing all our troops in combat home, sooner rather than later. It was just a shock to have the SecDef who is ex-Green Beret making that statement.

[ImpBill]

2017? Oh you mean back when the GOP controlled both the Legislative and Executive branches of government.

[Jimmy Valentine]

Let the Russians try to control Afghanistan again. “Graveyard of empires”.
“When you are wounded and left on the Afghanistan plain, and the women come out to cut up your remains, just roll on your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your God like a soldier “- Kipling

[Carriage Hill]

Before leaving, destroy ALL of their profitable Opium Poppy Fields. Salt them and Use nuclear waste.

Get the hell out of that shithole.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Spray the place with Agent Orange.

[Zhang Fei]

[Let the Russians try to control Afghanistan again. “Graveyard of empires”.
“When you are wounded and left on the Afghanistan plain, and the women come out to cut up your remains, just roll on your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your God like a soldier “- Kipling]

---

Not the Russians. The Chinese. China will eventually add two provinces to the realm - Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of which were once part of the empire.

http://www.bestchinanews.com/History/1522.html

Its carrot - the full rights and privileges of Chinese citizenship, such as they are. Its stick - exemplary massacre, but at a micro level. I’d expect a bloodbath and a flood of refugees, as mullahs are exterminated along with their kin, visible signs of Islamic faith become one-way tickets to prison and the seriously devout are herded into labor camps to make products for foreign multinationals. The Uighur thing is possibly a trial run. China won’t have a problem with guerrilla warfare. It will simply kill entire villages the way it wiped out 100K Vietnamese civilians during its 6-week incursion into Vietnam in 1979, all the way to Lang Son.

https://www.historynet.com/war-of-the-dragons-the-sino-vietnamese-war-1979.htm

It’s not unprecedented, either in China or elsewhere. Alexander killed all the men in the Persian capital and sold the women and children into slavery:

https://www.livius.org/sources/content/diodorus/alexander-sacks-persepolis/

After the siege of Jerusalem, Titus killed all the armed men and the elderly, and sold the rest of the population into slavery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_(70_CE)#Destruction_of_Jerusalem

While Chinese governance would fall well short of the preceding, its response to rebel disturbances is traditionally draconian - collective punishment is the rule rather than the exception. The Communist victory in 1949 was cemented by the slaughter of 5m possible irreconcilables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Land_Reform to avoid the possibility of counter-revolution in the near future, something that previous Chinese regimes had failed to do.

[Vehmgericht]

The American peasantry has to learn to be more subservient. There is a lot on money to be made in Afghanistan for our lumpenaristocrats. President Harris will resume the efforts to turn Syria into another Libya. Return of the Arab Spring.