General Petraeus would have maintained a lasting, working peace if he had been allowed to remain. Ask ANYONE with any knowledge of these fights and they'll say the same thing.
Obama has worked hard lose these fights and the Left has worked equally hard to paint them as failures.
Looks like it worked with you.
That's correct, 100% correct.
But the only victory that really matters is final victory. To Bush, final victory meant more than just disrupt the Taliban. His goal was to transform the Middle East; to turn dictatorships into democracies. The thinking was that democracies do not engage in terrorism. They do not wage wars of aggression.
That was a noble goal, to be sure. But by 2006 it was clear that Iraq and especially Afghanistan were not going to become peaceful democracies.
It's very much like with Vietnam. Our troops were NEVER defeated in the field, yet we lost the war. Sadly, same will happen here. It was obvious by 2006, and nothing significant has happened since then - under Bush or Obama - to reverse course.