I doubt there’s anything President Obama can say tonight to convince me we should be sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
We went into Afghanistan to get Bin Laden. We screwed up and he got away. End of story. There’s no further reason for us to be there unless Bin Laden is sighted. If a feuding, fighting, tribal society wants to keep fighting and destroying itself from within, it’s not our fight. It never was. Spending U.S. blood and treasure to pacify and democratize another country is nation-building, pure and simple, and we’ve got no business doing it.
Al Qaeda and the Taliban reside nowhere and everywhere. They’re not a state-sponsored army; they’re a diverse group of religious extremists. If we drive them from Afghanistan, they’ll just go someplace else, most likely Pakistan. Will we then go to war in Pakistan? And after Pakistan, where? Back to Afghanistan? On to another country?
We’re already stretched thin, financially and militarily. Let’s focus our finite resources on this country and get some things done here (eg, rebuild New Orleans, police our borders, get the economy back on track).
Let’s end Bush’s wars, not prolong them.
But we can’t just leave either, otherwise we’re like a little puppy just pooping all over the place and never cleaning up our messes. Whether we should be nation building or not, we need an exit scenario that doesn’t leave the US looking like it left a country in worse condition than it was when we came in. If they fall apart after we’re gone, fine, but we can’t walk away with it like this. It needs to be at least partially stable (so that it can hold together long enough for us to be able to claim that it wasn’t our fault when it falls apart again and they start a civil war).
Is that even possible? I don’t know, which is probably why you should never go to war in another country without already figuring out how you plan on leaving it when you’re done. Thanks GWB, for planning so far ahead.
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Afghanistan was a mess before we got there, and no matter what we do, it will be a mess when we leave. We helped the Afghans conduct a nationwide democratic election in 2004 and they elected Karzai who, despite the presence of our troops, did virtually nothing to unite, rebuild, modernize, or secure his country. He was re-elected this year in an election so corrupt it was almost thrown out. His brother has close ties to the lucrative Afghan opium trade. Nice place, huh? We’ve already sacrificed too many American lives trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. It’s way past time to get out.
I agree with you.
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Thanks. BTW, I listened to the speech, and haven’t changed my mind about anything.