Why? They are now advising the Administration!!! I don't see Cindy Sheehan camped outside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave...
Why? Their guy is CIC, so it's now a "good" war. As long as we don't use 21st Century weapons and rely on check points and kissing the sandals of filth with bombs strapped to their chests!!!
Everyone here should be pissed and screaming with rage as to what is going on!!! What is on TV? Missing kid in Missouri, World Series, filth bags protesting Wall Street now claiming they are the reincarnation of the troops at Valley Forge (not making that one up...), other non stories.
Had 13 troops died under Bush, had those Navy Seals died under Bush we'd never hear the end of it. But because Obama is CIC, 300 of our troops could get blown up tomorrow and the MSM would still focus on the Michael Jackson trial and any missing person case.
I don’t disagree with you that our CIC and our congress are seriously messed up.
But just this year, we FINALLY got the surge funding for Afghanistan. Obama AND Bush treated Afghanistan like an afterthought.
Petraeus finally got support for this war and we’ve only been going at it seriously for seven freakin’ months - not ten years. Even Hillary Clinton is starting to see the light. The State department is just this year getting their act together in that region.
Now things are starting to turn around. Is now the time to cut and run?
If we ditch now the Taliban will retake that country within a year. Terrorists who’ve been dislocated from Iraq will flood into the unsecured area. Afghanistan will become the terrorist hot-bed of the world.
And if we ever have to back in to clean it up again, the locals who *did* put their faith in us will never make that mistake again. At that point, we WILL have to nuke the entire region to regain control.
Why not finish what we’ve started and do it RIGHT?
Let’s hold out until we can retake congress and the white house next year. Then we can end this correctly and not let the loss of lives and treasure be in vain.
Undiplomatic as your case is, you're not entirely wrong. The average American never signed up for decades of blood soaked nation building, either for Iraq or Afghanistan. You can't really blame the American people for losing interest in pursuing goals they were never really sold on.
In either Iraq or Afghanistan, we'd have been better off overthrowing the enemy regime, finding whoever was most opposed to that regime, putting them in charge and then leaving, with the warnings that (a) they need to continue to hunt down our mutual enemies and (b) they must never mess with us or we will return and put a new faction in charge, one that is hostile to them as well.
In and out in six months.
With the public example set that we can to it again, at will, to anyone who develops WMDs or threatens us with terrorism.
We'd have achieved the same results as now, except that we'd have spent a trillion less dollars, still be feared, and be fresh to apply pressure to other bad actors and WMD developers.
Instead, our conventional might is basically exhausted. In no more than 20 years, all of our potential enemies will have nuclear weapons. The lessons of how we have dealt with Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq vs Iran, North Korea and Pakistan have proven instructive to our enemies. In 40 years, you'll be hard pressed to find any patch of real estate calling itself a nation that wants nuclear weapons but still doesn't have them.
The wars we are fighting now are 20th century anachronisms. We made a deliberate choice to fight in the restrained manner we did, sadly based on political expediency instead of strategic vision. The world is now evolving in a way that makes nuclear conflict more likely, not less. The U.S. military will be made smaller and weaker by increasingly war-weary citizens and tightening budgets.
Focusing on nation building for remote tribals at exorbitant costs is to lose sight of what the looming threats the 21st century really are. That's really the big picture tragedy of all this. All we've done is set the stage for a very ugly century.