[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
You can’t expect an Ivy League education to have given Obama the smarts to realize that al-Qaeda now sees that they have victory assured by a promised date, so long as they merely survive that long.
I mean, that would take a SUPER-DUPER-ULTRA Ivy League education to figure out. [/quote]
Interesting theory. Maybe George Bush’s Ivy league education was the reason he screwed up in Afghanistan to begin with?
[quote]orion wrote:
To “liberate” the 5% that acctually want to be “free” the way you find freedom to be acceptable justifies the killing of the rest?
[/quote]
Let’s imagine your 5% is correct. Aren’t rights independent of the majority’s will? Or, have you decided their rights can’t be fought for because, collectively, the majority would rather enable Taliban rule?
[quote]orion wrote:
Interestingly enough the Taliban were never active outside of Afghanistan, the Wilsonians however…
[/quote]
But their allies Al Qeada, whose leaders they provided safe harbor, certainly were. You gotta keep with up the news, Orion.
Old Thread, I know. Any comments about the so-called peace treaty with The Taliban. I give them a couple of months to go North Vietnam against the legitimate Afghan Government. Can’t trust them. Never could. I know we want to get out. Could we have ever beaten them? And why did we fail? People bitched when Obama released 5 Taliban prisoners…Trump is poised to release 5,000. I’m not hearing any complaining. Is this deal worth the paper its’ written on?
Shitty. They’ll be gathering steam in no time
Not a chance in hell.
It’s staggering how long we’ve been there to me still. I’ve often made jokes on here about how it’s our 51st state.
I think you’re often bound to fail when you don’t know what the end goal is. We put ourselves in a pickle of “well if we leave and things get worse than if we are here then we lost so we may as well stay.” I can understand the thinking behind that for sure but at some point you have to cut your losses to me. Sometimes I think Americans have such a hard time with the idea of us “losing” in anything that we’d just as soon stay forever so as not to have to say that.
You could certainly argue we won or lost depending on what one thinks the criteria for those are. We have lost lives and spent a staggering amount of money in the longest war in US history. For me personally at this moment after all that time there I’m failing to see exactly what we gained that was worth all that. Perhaps we learned a lesson that you can kill bad guys with bombs but you can’t create successful modern western democracy with them alone.
I feel like in America on the whole no one has talked seriously about Afghanistan in a long time. To me from the perspective of most it’s been at the out of sight out of mind state for almost a decade.
Read “The Decadent Society” by Douthat. It has explanatory power.
Bill Lind has written a lot about 4th generation war and Afghanistan. You can find his books on Amazon. We were never going to win there. I served in the military but not there. The stories from friends coming back from that place and Iraq and the handling of it by our leadership should make our boys think long and hard before joining the military. I will discourage mine from doing so and just about every male in our family has served since at least 1898.
I’m glad I didn’t say anything too dumb in this thread.
I will check into that book thank you for the suggestion.
Soooo… why make an agreement?
I do agree with Trump saying at some point countries need to take care of themselves. I’m by no means an expert on Afghanistan but short of being there for forever I’m not sure what the point is anymore.
Let’s just hope this is a good lesson for future military leaders and presidents.
I guess you’d have to ask is The Taliban (as bad as that group is) going to attack us or anyone else in the world? Best of my knowledge, they have not. There were many attacks in France, Europe, Indonesia & other countries & continents, yet those people sited ISIS as an inspiration. Has any terrorist group, Al-Qaeda included, sited The Afghanistan Taliban as inspiration for an attack? Plus Al-Qaeda as a group has migrated to Iraq, Kuwait & other areas also. Hell, speaking of ISIS, they moved into Afghanistan and are trying to set up a base there and are at war with who? The Afghanistan Taliban!
So how’s this assessment? Right on? Totally off? Correct? Wrong?
For the same reason Trump does a lot of what he does…
To make it appear he has done something President Obama wasn’t able to do.
I’m not very hopeful, @H_factor…
Somebody will come along who will try to prove that they can do what no other leader has done…“tame” this part of the World.
No question I agree with that. It’s one of the few things he’s said that’s both sensible and agreeable! My question is, if you have a group that you’re sure isn’t going to abide by the agreement, why do it?
We fucked that campaign up completely, no question. It’s a no win situation in my mind, even though we had a
completely legit reason to start said campaign.
No doubt. I just think it took us way too long to realize we were going to “lose.” I hardly remember anyone truly being against the campaign at the time. I get the idea of feeling like we’ve been here and we’ve invested dollars and lives and leaving might make that all seem a waste. But to continue to do that indefinitely is a mistake we needed to correct long ago.
Insane to me to think that their are kids who just graduated high school who haven’t lived a day without us in that war.
Lose? Some people made a lot of money. That’s how we define winning in America.
I agree. That theater succumbed to mission creep in a much less visible way than say, Iraq.
I suppose my frustration is the way this happened
Always a good reason for some to say we can’t leave a war now.