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Oklahoma’s National Guard brigade combat team in Afghanistan now has suffered significant losses (14 to date, IIRC, since June) and I’m really tired of seeing these young people on the front page. This general’s comment seals the deal for me that it is time for the US to get out while retaining armed drone sorties and some Special Forces like the “Horse Soldiers” that went in there in 2001-2. Keep any Taliban off-balance and make smoking holes where al-Quaeda leadership pops up on the landscape.

[I]t is time for the US to get out while retaining armed drone sorties and some Special Forces like the “Horse Soldiers” that went in there in 2001-2. Keep any Taliban off-balance and make smoking holes where al-Qaeda leadership pops up on the landscape.

I'm with you. I'd only add that I think it's worth keeping enough US troops in Kabul to prop up a more-or-less stable government there. It'd be a crying shame to let the capital fall to the worst Islamic loonytunes after all the blood and treasure we've spent there. But that would surely take no more than a brigade; bring all the rest of our troops home. As for the rest of Afghanistan, there's no civilizing it. Just interdict terrorists in the hinterlands using drones and special forces strikes where needed. After all, history gives no example of a government in Kabul that managed to extend its writ to all Afghanistan, a fundamentally ungovernable land (I won't even call it a country).