I need not convince you at all. It is you that need to do the convincing, as you stand on the side of a continuing war that has been absolutely ruinous for the American people.
I fully agree that the Afghan war is a bootless adventure in which a relatively small number of Americans get screwed over trying to fight a war with a claque of lawyers and ‘human rights’ specialists trying to micromanage the proceedings as though it were a moot court at Harvard Law. The people who are invested in keeping the ball rolling either have professional or financial interests in it. I can assure you that Gen Milley will be a millionaire several times over a decade after he retires from the Army. He will be an excellent mouthpiece/shill for K Street or some defense contractor such as the Carlyle Group. I truly despise this whole culture of greedy backscratching and semi-legal boodle more than you can know having grown up around it and once respecting highly the people at the top of the Executive Branch and the armed services.
However I do not get the ‘continuing war that has been absolutely ruinous for the American people’ part. I doubt if a majority of Americans know the war is still on over there. So it has not been ruinous to a huge majority of Americans. Unless one is in the military, has a loved one deployed or worse, has had a family member killed. or seriously injured or badly affected psychologically or neurologically Afghanistan means little or nothing to the man in the street. That is one of the reasons we have an ‘all volunteer force’ or using a term the military dislikes a career professional ,military. Our armed forces are increasingly like those of Victorian England, led by a professional class of officers and recruited from deep red flyover country and , too often, from the brightest men from places with little economic opportunity. Since no one inside the beltway thinks of the rank and file as being really human rather as an invisible service force that executes their brilliant concepts, sort of akin to the people who repair their motor vehicles, clean their offices, or serve them their over priced meals in some expense account supported restaurant.
In the words of an officer more candid than Milley, ‘Sorry, when you take Uncle Sams shekel that means you go where you are sent and do what you are told. Get killed or screwed up, it's on you, to bad so sad, move along nothing here to see.’