Posted on 07/12/2019 8:03:50 AM PDT by robowombat
My thought also.
Progress at a peace table? Is that what you see as progress, the Taliban winning , General?
Norm..... there is Taliban and there is Taliban.
But, we must stay in Afghanistan until Iran is brought to heel
Iran is an exdistential American enemy. Iran is a flanking position
Low yield nuclear weapons and neutron bombs for a while.
If we had invaded New Zealand, and there was no additional 9/11 attacks that followed, would it be logical to conclude the invasion prevented the attacks?
Not to mention that Afghanistan wasn’t involved in 9/11 in the first place.
These guys think the U.S. should occupy every nation in the World.
This guy is wrong.
“...It will leave America broke, flooded with foreigners who laugh at anything America was always about....”
We pretty have much one entire political party - the democrats - doing that now. And counting on the invading hordes to help them continue eradicating us.
You’re completely correct.
No, he is not
Whatever happened to MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?
We send our kids off to die and lose limbs in pointless and never victorious or ending wars while our cities AND TOWNS fill up with 3rd worlders and Africans who stay here and rape, pillage and plunder?
Are they f-ing kidding me? They are nuts.
We all know where the war is, no need to board a plane to get there.
We, Kimosabe? Remember the Taliban is into Fanatical Islam.
Iran brought to heel? You mean until Tehran reaches 10,000 degrees and glows in the dark, right? ;-)
Coddling enemies is no way to secure the future nor is bribing them as Obammy has shown.
The Middle East is full of sand traps and bunkers, and now we have a President that actually knows his way around the course. He has a bag of clubs up to the task .. the question is, will he use the wood or will he use the iron to reach the green?
I agree. No reason for us to be there when we cannot even stop the invasion of our country
Consider that the original military objective, the driving of the Taliban from formal governance, was completed in a matter of weeks. Defined, measurable, and accomplished. That's what militaries are supposed to do, it's what they're good at. "Keep" the Taliban out is a mission that is ill-defined and so hindered by constraint that it is little wonder we're still scratching our heads over the thing. "Keep" them out, but don't do this, that, the other thing: don't cross the border (huge mistake), don't kill too many civilians, don't cross the line set by whatever international press or political organizations have decided to stick their noses in after the fact, don't risk war with Pakistan, don't alienate the tribals; come on now, this isn't a mission objective, it's a mess, and these are Rules of Non-Engagement.
Nevertheless, it's the mess we're stuck with, and forward from here is going to require some real compromises that we shouldn't have to make. Part of the problem was that Bush and his administrations were hypnotized by a sort of neocon conviction that unending nation-building was a price not too big to pay for their own idea of a New World Order, and that 0bama's succeeding administrations were simply too self-absorbed and incompetent to even know what they ought to have been doing. Recall "I'm really good at killing people" (meaning droning from afar) from 0bama himself? That was the echo of Johnson and McNamara with their little pushpins, directing bombing runs half a world away in Vietnam. They never learn.
The current situation is a little valley of misery that is likely to take more effort to escape than simply to sit in and let people bleed. The latter position is just fine with the cynical MSM, incidentally, because it gives them a political club to use on their opponents in office. One struggles to recall any pressure ever put on 0bama by the MSM to resolve the matter, only a pathetic let's-pretend game that he was doing so. That's in the past but shouldn't be forgotten.
Many think you are mistaken. From britannica.com:
In 1996 the Taliban seized Kabul and instituted a severe interpretation of Islamic law that, for example, forbade female education and prescribed the severing of hands, or even execution, as punishment for petty crimes. That same year, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was welcomed to Afghanistan (having been expelled from Sudan) and established his organization’s headquarters there. With al-Qaeda’s help, the Taliban won control of over 90 percent of Afghan territory by the summer of 2001. On September 9 of that year, al-Qaeda hit men carried out the assassination of famed mujahideen leader Ahmad Shah Masoud, who at the time was leading the Northern Alliance (a loose coalition of mujahideen militias that maintained control of a small section of northern Afghanistan) as it battled the Taliban and who had unsuccessfully sought greater U.S. backing for his efforts.
The September 11 attacks and the U.S.-British invasion
The hijacking and crashing of four U.S. jetliners on September 11, 2001, brought instant attention to Afghanistan. The plot had been hatched by al-Qaeda, and some of the 19 hijackers had trained in Afghanistan. In the aftermath of the attacks, the administration of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush coalesced around a strategy of first ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan and dismantling al-Qaeda, though others contemplated actions in Iraq, including long-standing plans for toppling Pres. Saddam Hussein. Bush demanded that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar “deliver to [the] United States authorities all the leaders of al-Qaeda who hide in your land,” and when Omar refused, U.S. officials began implementing a plan for war.
To talk about casualties if war, WW2 was very costly but a lot of that was politically motivated. They built bombers and flew them to the Pacific theater and a significant percentage of them never lasted long enough to complete the journey. They put guys in planes and sent them to die in the ocean. Buy more planes! And D-Day. They sent thousands of men into direct machine gun fire with the only plan being the enemy can’t kill all of them so if we send enough men the enemy will run out of bullets. Monday quarterback and all but maybe it could have been done differently.
Afghanistan broke the Soviet Union and it could break us. We should never have gone there in the first place. The 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was living in Pakistan. Where is Afghanistan in all this?
Just parking lot the whole place and be done with it.
A Strategic Mistake is only a mistake if you are following a specific strategy. Who is to say what the best strategy is if not the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief, in a conflict where there is no Congressional Declaration of War?
The Taliban took out Ahmad Shah Masoud just prior to the war we’re in.
Peace
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