There have been some excellent and simple posts here today. Most of them I agree with.
Afghanistan is not a country, it is a region where tribes who share some commonality live.
Afghanistan is nearly stone age in development, it has stayed that way for centuries. After all this time I must conclude the tribe who reside there like it that way.
Without wiping them out we can’t change Afghanistan. To do so would require what God did to the Israelites, wipe out a generation and reeducate the remaining younger one.
We accomplished the “mission” with 5,200 special troops. Everything after that has been a very very sad waste. As one writer sagely pointed out, we can see the hairs on a mouse and take it out with a UAV. Failing that we can inject special operations people to get the job done.
Nation building is not our business and if we know how to do it we won’t do it right. The evidence that we don’t is overwhelming.
I only care about trying to preserve our society. We can’t control the world. We don’t have the means, the resolve or the right.
Get as much out of Afghanistan as we can, destroy the rest. Leave nothing behind but scorched earth. Remove all of our American heroes, living an dead, from the field and bring them home.
I don’t know that we have to leave altogether. We just need to change the mission from building a nation to disrupting the bad guys. We can do that with a much smaller footprint, mainly just a few lilypads from which to launch operations, and without the absurd, morale-killing ROEs. The mission would be to keep the taliban types from coalescing into something strong enough and organized enough to pose a threat to our interests (whatever they are). Something along these lines would actually be doable. In fact, negotiating with the taliban might even make sense within this concept. We’d divide them into two groups: the tolerably bad and the intolerably bad. We’d negotiate with the former and harass and kill the latter.