Posted on 06/24/2017 6:59:39 AM PDT by rktman
Our involvement in Afghanistan is untenable because the country is untenable. No matter what is done, Afghanistan will fail because of its galloping population growth.
When the U.S. became involved in 2001, the country had a population of 20.5 million. Now it is 34.4 million, up nearly 70 percent. In the intervening 16 years, the U.S. spent about one trillion dollars and 2,000 lives in stabilizing Afghanistan. All the stability and free food provided just created a perfect breeding environment for the natives.
The population growth rate has settled at 3.0 percent per annum. At that rate, in another 16 years, there will be 55.2 million Afghans, most of whom will need imported grain to keep body and soul together. The Afghani proclivity to breed will only be curbed by starvation. That will happen at some stage because, even if we wanted to underwrite that population expansion, getting the necessary quantity of food into the country will become more and more difficult. Perhaps that situation is beginning now. The U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization has reported that 8.4 million Afghans are in an acute food insecurity crisis.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I don’t understand why free markets and democracy won’t work there. I guess Afghanistan lacks the magic dirt we have here.
Defoliate every crop.
Poison every well.
Dynamite every bridge, dam, and power plant.
And leave.
opium
Salt the earth and leave.
That was basically the Soviet strategy (it might have been accidental) when Hitler invaded in June of ‘41. They fell back, leaving nothing, until the Germans reached Stalingrad, exhausted and with an over extended supply line.
We are breeding an enemy...
It isn't magic dirt, it's the Culture. Our Founders openly acknowledged that the Constitution would only work for a Christian population. What they meant was that it can only work for a society of civil people who are already mostly self-policing, and thus don't need a heavy-handed federal government to be big and all-encompassing. The Afghans have a Islamic culture that is clearly very aggressively self-policing, but it is not civil by any stretch of the imagination. Freedom, laissez-faire economics, and rugged individualism do not work well in Evil ideologies. That's the difference. Once they get rid of Islam, they will have the "magic dirt" to become a positive force and a good nation... but not until then.
The Bush administration's Democratic folly in Afghanistan was doomed from the start.
One of the worst counties on earth and they breed like rabbits. Are they just slow growing bomb guidance systems?
Tsar Alexander used that strategy against Napoleon long before the Soviets.
> Obamas war. <
I must respectfully disagree. True, Obama made a bad situation worse, as he did with everything else he touched. But Afghanistan was W’s war, to win or to lose.
Vietnam belongs to LBJ. Afghanistan belongs to George W. Bush.
We need to do away with the entire concept of post war nation building. Go in, destroy the enemy capability to wage war (or whatever’s the goal is) and come home. Warn whoever that if we have to come back it’ll be worse.
Yup, it was the good war, dontchyaknow.
Yes we are.
Foreign entanglements.
“I dont understand why free markets and democracy wont work there.”
They only work where contracts & laws are respected.
The biggest problem is Islam.
In the 1950-1960 era Afghanistan was somewhat modernized.
Afghanistan belongs to the Taliban, who supported bin Laden who brought down the Towers, the Pentegon and Flight 93. We kept a relatively small foot print in Afghanistan until the Ossoff Obama took over, who increased the foot print and changed the ROE.
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