Afghanistan--can you believe we fell for it?
I think it was Kipling who said something like "Woe betide the man who tries to hustle the East". And apologies to General Westmoreland if it wasn't him who indicated we might have to destroy a Vietnamese village in order to save it.
We should have left Afghanistan after it was clear Osama had left.
We should have devoted all of our military might (and, while it may have been oxymoronic, intelligence) to finding his cave in Waziristan or Pakistan or his warren of rooms in Peshawar, and then penetrating the complex with bunker-busting ordinance. We still should.
But it doesn't take 40,000 troops to do this--it might take a couple of thousand and just like any manhunt, it would eventually come to an end with the culprit Dillingered and lying dead with a somewhat surprised look on his face.
Having chased the cruel Taliban out but not having won the hearts and minds of the Afghans (who knew?), we have now joined the long list of invaders who have been repulsed or who are about to be repulsed, or at least to go home in a military form of tatterdemallion, without having achieved any objective.
To be fair to the President, he never said he was hoping to pull out of Afghanistan. But that was then. There's no good reason to stay there. And you knew he couldn't have said he wanted to pull out of there anyway during the campaign because then McCain would have clenched his teeth even tighter and maybe even would have convinced someone that Obama would make a poor Commander in Chief.
I don't want to make this a referendum on Obama--but it's time to quit fooling with Afghanistan. To heck with what General McChrystal says. Nobody elected him. He's a fighting man and he's telling the boss what it would take to win.
But we don't need to win there, and should get out before they kill more American soldiers for no good reason. We should just focus on Bin Laden--that's all.
Support the Troops in Afghanistan. Time to come home.
--Renaissance
