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Sorry, I don't get my history or philosophy from movies.
Did you even read the fine article above?
This is a war against the islamic fundementalist, not just taliban afghans. -- Sure, we can occupy, and TRY to convert them to 'democracy'. The lessons of history say we will fail.
-- The germans & japs of WWII had our basic capitalistic values.
Fundamentalist islam, [millions of people, far beyond afghanistan] does not.
We will never win their hearts & minds. Only THEY can change themselves.
Currently, the Taliban is so hated and despised that even their own members are deserting it and heading for high ground. This will not be as difficult a task as the Russians or the British took on. We have millions of Afgan allies that will do the battle for us. Ridding the Taliban is not even in question, we ARE taking them out period. The only thing we must decide is weather we destroy them and leave Afghanistan with another anarchy to deal with, or we assist them in building a democratic government. Bring men and women from Afghanistan over here to go to college and learn how to successfully run a country.
I don't care what your religious beliefs are, nobody wants their fingers cut off if they put fingernail polish on them. No one wants to be tortured and beat to death if they watch television.
The taliban will fall.
As for the other muslim extremists, hopefully they will come to Afghanistan to fight and die with the Taliban. If not they can fight and die with Saddam.
There will most likely be many confrontations over there, but one thing we cannot do is to close our eyes to that area and ignore it. We would be signing our own death warrant. These extremists don't teach to kill only the Jews, Christians, or any other religion that meddles in their affairs, they teach to kill ALL of them.
LOL, Great call. I was going to make that same point but after repeated attempts to wade through the mire, I thought, I must be crazy as he is to even try again.