“oo bad Pakistan has the Bomb. It’s a never-ending war with our military getting maimed and killed on a regular basis.
It was worse than that... the MSR for all military supplies ran thru... Pakistan. This means that anything that wasn’t light enough to come in by air had to be trucked in through that country. This meant that in a very real sense Pakistan had their hand on the main throttle that governed the war effort. If relations with Pakistan had gotten bad enough (below the nuclear threshold) the military occupation of Afghanistan would necessarily have to end regardless.
Exactly, and glad you pointed that out!
The only sea-land routes are through Iran (ahem, forget that one) or Pakistan (problematic at the least). In other words, a logistical nightmare. Further, we were forced to handle with kid gloves the very country giving safe haven (and more) to the Taliban — and even refuge to Al Qaeda’s bin Laden himself.
Why we thought we could succeed with a decades-long “nation-building” effort there in the first place is quite baffling to me for many reasons, the simple question of logistics being among them.