Time to Get Out of Afghanistan

washingtonpost.com

"Yesterday," reads the e-mail from Allen, a Marine in Afghanistan, "I gave blood because a Marine, while out on patrol, stepped on a [mine's] pressure plate and lost both legs." Then "another Marine with a bullet wound to the head was brought in. Both Marines died this morning."

"I'm sorry about the drama," writes Allen, an enthusiastic infantryman willing to die "so that each of you may grow old." He says: "I put everything in God's hands." And: "Semper Fi!"

Allen and others of America's finest are also in Washington's hands. This city should keep faith with them by rapidly reversing the trajectory of America's involvement in Afghanistan, where, says the Dutch commander of coalition forces in a southern province, walking through the region is "like walking through the Old Testament."

U.S. strategy -- protecting the population -- is increasingly troop-intensive while Americans are increasingly impatient about "deteriorating" (says Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) conditions. The war already is nearly 50 percent longer than the combined U.S. involvements in two world wars, and NATO assistance is reluctant and often risible.

The U.S. strategy is "clear, hold and build." Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.

Military historian Max Hastings says Kabul controls only about a third of the country -- "control" is an elastic concept -- and " 'our' Afghans may prove no more viable than were 'our' Vietnamese, the Saigon regime." Just 4,000 Marines are contesting control of Helmand province, which is the size of West Virginia. The New York Times reports a Helmand official saying he has only "police officers who steal and a small group of Afghan soldiers who say they are here for 'vacation.' " Afghanistan's $23 billion gross domestic product is the size of Boise's. Counterinsurgency doctrine teaches, not very helpfully, that development depends on security, and that security depends on development. Three-quarters of Afghanistan's poppy production for opium comes from Helmand. In what should be called Operation Sisyphus, U.S. officials are urging farmers to grow other crops. Endive, perhaps?

Even though violence exploded across Iraq after, and partly because of, three elections, Afghanistan's recent elections were called "crucial." To what? They came, they went, they altered no fundamentals, all of which militate against American "success," whatever that might mean. Creation of an effective central government? Afghanistan has never had one. U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry hopes for a "renewal of trust" of the Afghan people in the government, but the Economist describes President Hamid Karzai's government -- his vice presidential running mate is a drug trafficker -- as so "inept, corrupt and predatory" that people sometimes yearn for restoration of the warlords, "who were less venal and less brutal than Mr. Karzai's lot."

Mullen speaks of combating Afghanistan's "culture of poverty." But that took decades in just a few square miles of the South Bronx. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, thinks jobs programs and local government services might entice many "accidental guerrillas" to leave the Taliban. But before launching New Deal 2.0 in Afghanistan, the Obama administration should ask itself: If U.S. forces are there to prevent reestablishment of al-Qaeda bases -- evidently there are none now -- must there be nation-building invasions of Somalia, Yemen and other sovereignty vacuums?

U.S. forces are being increased by 21,000, to 68,000, bringing the coalition total to 110,000. About 9,000 are from Britain, where support for the war is waning. Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.

So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

Genius, said de Gaulle, recalling Bismarck's decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870, sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. Genius is not required to recognize that in Afghanistan, when means now, before more American valor, such as Allen's, is squandered.

I agree. Do you?

I agreed in 2005. There is no military solution in Afghanistan. We should be focusing on reducing our footprint.
 
Once you've started something, you finish it. By the way. My relative is a British soldier. It isn't just the USA fighting this war you know...although it was started by you guys.

While I abhor American militarism and elective wars, it's a little bit of a stretch to say that we picked this fight.
 
i wasn't ....we shouldn't be there ....we should not have one troop anywhere in the world other than on us soil or in a country that has asked us to be there and is paying the bill to have us there....

further we should not be spending one us tax dollar on anything but us soil and us citizens.....
I agree.
 
Much as I would be among the first to see the withdrawal of ALL our troops - having a family member about to deploy there yet again - the situation is not that cut and dried.

I see so many platitudes of puffery written by journalists who know not what they talk about. This appears to be yet another example.

The objective is to provide security for the Afghanistan government while we build and train their own forces to take over the role of security. Remove all the troops and the opportunity to train an Afghan army and security forces is removed. The country would simply fall back into Taliban oppression and the lives of those who made the ultimate sacrifice would have been wasted.

I certainly understand the idea that the effort will be wasted if we pull-out.

The fact is we can be there for 100 years and not change a thing.

We need to remove all troops from Muslim Lands, and then stop immigration from Muslim Lands.

Don't bring them here, don't train them.

Because if we are gonna stay in Afghanistan and expect to win, then we have to change the religion that they follow.

If we had occupied Nazi Germany with the idea that Nazism is peaceful and they just need moderate Nazi's in power... we'd still be trying to figure that out. It would still be a mystery to us.

It's the Islam that is the problem.
 
Pakistani nuclear weapons.

Taliban going back and forth at their will over the mountains of tora bora.

How would you like to live in a world with the taliban having nukes?

if we had no troops in the middle east and cut off all funding world wide.....the taliban wouldn't be fucking with us.....they would be someone elses problem....if the decided to launch a nuke at the us from whereever.....that would be the end of wherever as well as the taliban....

if we had no troops in the middle East and cut off all funding world wide we'd be in deep shit on a thousand other fronts also.

And I know I'm Canadian, but I like to pretend I'm American for a minute and say "we"
 
Much as I would be among the first to see the withdrawal of ALL our troops - having a family member about to deploy there yet again - the situation is not that cut and dried.

I see so many platitudes of puffery written by journalists who know not what they talk about. This appears to be yet another example.

The objective is to provide security for the Afghanistan government while we build and train their own forces to take over the role of security. Remove all the troops and the opportunity to train an Afghan army and security forces is removed. The country would simply fall back into Taliban oppression and the lives of those who made the ultimate sacrifice would have been wasted.

I certainly understand the idea that the effort will be wasted if we pull-out.

The fact is we can be there for 100 years and not change a thing.

We need to remove all troops from Muslim Lands, and then stop immigration from Muslim Lands.

Don't bring them here, don't train them.

Because if we are gonna stay in Afghanistan and expect to win, then we have to change the religion that they follow.

If we had occupied Nazi Germany with the idea that Nazism is peaceful and they just need moderate Nazi's in power... we'd still be trying to figure that out. It would still be a mystery to us.

It's the Islam that is the problem.
The West is the problem not Islam
 
Much as I would be among the first to see the withdrawal of ALL our troops - having a family member about to deploy there yet again - the situation is not that cut and dried.

I see so many platitudes of puffery written by journalists who know not what they talk about. This appears to be yet another example.

The objective is to provide security for the Afghanistan government while we build and train their own forces to take over the role of security. Remove all the troops and the opportunity to train an Afghan army and security forces is removed. The country would simply fall back into Taliban oppression and the lives of those who made the ultimate sacrifice would have been wasted.

I certainly understand the idea that the effort will be wasted if we pull-out.

The fact is we can be there for 100 years and not change a thing.

We need to remove all troops from Muslim Lands, and then stop immigration from Muslim Lands.

Don't bring them here, don't train them.

Because if we are gonna stay in Afghanistan and expect to win, then we have to change the religion that they follow.

If we had occupied Nazi Germany with the idea that Nazism is peaceful and they just need moderate Nazi's in power... we'd still be trying to figure that out. It would still be a mystery to us.

It's the Islam that is the problem.
The West is the problem not Islam



The West is the problem in the sense that we have yet to accept what Islam really is. We want to pretend that Islam is compatible with the West and can live peacefully with it's neighbors.

Why we believe such a thing, I do not know.

There is no evidence of that, anywhere.

I would like nothing more than a complete separation between Islam and the West.

And, America should leave all Muslim Lands.

Going into Afghanistan and Iraq was the worst possible thing. The only thing worse was stopping Saddam in Kuwait. That was a huge mistake.

Who knew that Saddam was better than most in the region?

Oh well.
 
Tens of millions of Muslims live peacefully in western countries such as America, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and many other's with no problems.



Yes they do.

But, what does that mean?

Perhaps a Muslim Scholar can tell us:



Our followers ‘must live in peace until strong enough to wage jihad’

Andrew Norfolk

From The Times
September 8, 2007


One of the world’s most respected Deobandi scholars believes that aggressive military jihad should be waged by Muslims “to establish the supremacy of Islam” worldwide.

Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani argues that Muslims should live peacefully in countries such as Britain, where they have the freedom to practise Islam, only until they gain enough power to engage in battle.


His views explode the myth that the creed of offensive, expansionist jihad represents a distortion of traditional Islamic thinking.

Mr Usmani, 64, sat for 20 years as a Sharia judge in Pakistan’s Supreme Court. He is an adviser to several global financial institutions and a regular visitor to Britain. Polite and softly spoken, he revealed to The Times a detailed knowledge of world events and his words, for the most part, were balanced and considered.

He agreed that it was wrong to suggest that the entire nonMuslim world was intent on destroying Islam. Yet this is a man who, in his published work, argues the case for Muslims to wage an expansionist war against nonMuslim lands.

Mr Usmani’s justification for aggressive military jihad as a means of establishing global Islamic supremacy is revealed at the climax of his book, Islam and Modernism. The work is a polemic against Islamic modernists who seek to convert the entire Koran into “a poetic and metaphorical book” because, he says, they have been bewitched by Western culture and ideology.

The final chapter delivers a rebuke to those who believe that only defensive jihad (fighting to defend a Muslim land that is under attack or occupation) is permissible in Islam. He refutes the suggestion that jihad is unlawful against a nonMuslim state that freely permits the preaching of Islam.

For Mr Usmani, “the question is whether aggressive battle is by itself commendable or not”. “If it is, why should the Muslims stop simply because territorial expansion in these days is regarded as bad? And if it is not commendable, but deplorable, why did Islam not stop it in the past?”

He answers his own question thus: “Even in those days . . . aggressive jihads were waged . . . because it was truly commendable for establishing the grandeur of the religion of Allah.”

These words are not the product of a radical extremist. They come from the pen of one of the most acclaimed scholars in the Deobandi tradition.

Mr Usmani told The Times that Islam and Modernism was an English translation of his original Urdu book, “which at times gives a connotation different from the original”.

Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd.

Our followers ‘must live in peace until strong enough to wage jihad’

:cuckoo:

That explains a lot.

It's not like the warnings are not flashing out at us. It's not like we are traveling down this road blindly. Not at all.

We are being fully informed.

Our problem is... ahhh, we just don't want to believe it. Just don't want to.
 
If we can not defeat these stone throwing, troglodyte women killing cave men, then we might as well pack up Western Civilization now.

Come on, give it some fucking effort. This effort is worth it.
 
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If we can not defeat these stone throwing, troglodyte women killing cave men, then we might as well pack up Western Civilization now.

Come on, give it some fucking effort. This effort is worth it.

We defeated two military super powers in WW2 in four years.

We've been in Iraq and Afghanistan for over seven years now with no end in sight. Time to recognize a losing proposition and get out now.
 
if we had a real prez who knew his first job was C-IN-C and not this ninny i'd say go ahead. since we don't. bring em home. he'll kill em all if we don't
 
if we had a real prez who knew his first job was C-IN-C and not this ninny i'd say go ahead. since we don't. bring em home. he'll kill em all if we don't

An historic moment in history for sure; peaceniks and war mongers all agreeing on the same thing.
 
Haven't you heard?

The Pentagon announced TODAY the formation of a new 500-man elite fighting unit called the United States Redneck Special Forces (USRSF)
These boys will be dropped off in Afghanistan and have been given only the following facts about terrorists :

1. The season opened today.
2. There is no limit.
3. They taste just like chicken.
4. They don't like beer, pickups, country music or Jesus.
5. They are directly responsible for the death of Dale Earnhardt.
6. They think Daisy Duke is a slut.

So, the problem in Afghanistan should be over by Friday!
 

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