Girl haters and goat humpers ...

This post stays on top today - G

I've written until I'm blue in the face about our involvement in Afghanistan. It's five or six years past our 'window of opportunity missed', when we could have done something worthwhile with that place. Unfortunately, both for our troops whose lives were/are wasted over there and the Afghan people, the conflict was merely a stepping stone for George Bush, an entry into Iraq. I doubt anybody even gave a shit at the time about the outcome (well, except for building a Caspian Sea gas pipeline). Now, with almost double the amount of troops on the ground since January (thank you, Mr. Obama), the theater commander says the situation "is serious and it is deteriorating".

So, once again, we see that going to war for the wrong reasons ("liberation", "winning hearts and minds", nation-building, oil, gas) has landed us in the middle of a "quagmire". Once again, our "American exceptionalism" has led us to believe we are able to do things other empires (British, Soviet) couldn't. U-S-A!

We've been there what, seven or eight years now? It'll be a decade before we leave (if then) because the unit commanders are talking about "turn[ing] this thing around from a security standpoint in the next 12 to 18 months." So we'll actually start to see progress in a year and a half? How long after that before we start to leave? Another year? Two? How long is that in terms of lives lost and money wasted? Just asking, being that everybody's all concerned about how much health care costs. We coulda paid for a 'public option' six times over for what we spent in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Listen. You go to war for two reasons (ideally). Vengeance and defense. Going to war for any other reason usually presages a bad outcome (not that the aftermath of war is 'good' in any estimation). Afghanistan should have been about vengeance, and you can't exact vengeance if you're worried about collateral damage. You go to war to destroy an enemy's capability to attack you anymore. It's an all-or-nothing deal because a lot of people die in war and a lot of shit is blown up. War is not about kid gloves, it's about making sure the idiot will think twice the next time he gets the idea to kill your people. Remember 9/11? It should have been a retaliation, vengeance.

Sending a couple hundred thousand Afghan souls to sit at Allah's right hand probably would have done it. Cold, yes, but that's war. Don't go to war if you ain't serious. Ask Bob McNamara's ghost how that goes. Ask a half million Japanese ghosts how that goes, but Japan has sworn off war for 60-odd years so far, so have the Germans. Wonder why? I know what happened to Germany during that war and I know no one there wants war again (no one in their right mind anyway). We should have created the situation where, for the better part of a century, the Afghans* would never dream of giving safe haven to international criminals. A situation where, after a year of burying their dead, they would say no mas. What we have now can only end badly, as it is in Iraq.

It's time for us, as we've done in Iraq, to set a timetable to leave Afghanistan before we waste more lives and money. We, like with everything we've done under Bush/Cheney, did it completely wrong, for the wrong reasons, and it's time to end the bloodshed. The "War on Terror" was an ill-conceived notion from the start, more a propaganda exercise than national defense and it's time for us to realize fighting terrorism is a law enforcement effort with a military component if needed. Sending soldiers and Marines traipsing through the Hindu Kush chasing these clowns is like eradicating an anthill, one ant at a time. We have to face the fact we've fucked up a lot over the past 8 years and Afghanistan is one of those major fuckups. It's time to go. It's time to put the "War on Terror" to bed, once and for all.

Update (Tuesday morning):

*After sleeping on it, Pakistani Waziristan should've got some of this too instead of throwing money at them. Loyalty over there only lasts as long as the money faucet is open (many times, not even then).