At one point, it seemed that victory meant once we had killed Osama bin Laden. But then again, we could have argued that bin Laden was essentially crippled on the international scale, so I don’t have a clue anymore.
My younger son and I recently watched this movie, “Restrepo”. It is a documentary that follows a US Army platoon over a 15 month assignment in the Korengal valley.
My main take-away was that the mission seemed to be without focus, and that the troops were fighting a largely defensive battle and spending a lot of energy trying to build goodwill with the locals. The locals, mostly farmers, who clearly did not care for the Taliban, seemed to just want the fighting to stop, even if it meant the return of the Taliban.
Even allowing for a healthy liberal bias on the part of the film-makers, it paints a very grim picture of the situation there.
I was skeptical about Afghanistan even when Bush was CIC. Afghanistan is not like Iraq. Iraq has in past centuries been a reasonably civilized place, and it has natural resources (oil) that can give it a vibrant economy. Afghanistan is a thankless sh*thole, with only one viable export: opium. So even if you buy into this nation-building business, it is hard to fathom it being successful in Afghanistan. On top of that, the terrain there that makes it impractical to wage the kind of air war we did in Iraq. The enemy just disappears into the mountains and waits for you to leave.
With Odumbo in charge, and what I am sure are libtarded ROE, I am convinced that we need to get out of there ASAP.