Afghanistan

Tell me again, why are we in Afghanistan? September 11th, 2001, that’s right. Good reason. Good move. Needed to be done. But its December of 2009 now. We militarily engaged in Vietnam for only 9 years (1965-73). How long will we stay in Afghanistan? Like Vietnam and Korea the US isn’t really fighting the country in which the battle field is located. In Korea we fought China. In Vietnam we basically fought the Soviet Union. Now in Afghanistan and Iraq we are really fighting Iran. These kinds of displaced wars don’t accomplish much.

I was all for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. But I’m tired of seeing Americans come home dead. We went in and cleaned house. Our military is the best there has ever been in the world. We did the same thing in Iraq. Thank you veterans. But how long must we stay and why are we still there? The surge proved very successful in Iraq, but violence is coming back. That’s not a military problem and cannot be fixed with a military solution. Muslim extremism is a socio-religious problem. Solutions to that are harder to find.

The Afghani government is corrupt. They love American dollars pumping into their country. They want to keep the status quo. They put severe limitations on our forces in how they can conduct “war” that costs American lives. I don’t see the benefit of our remaining. Are we there because the government will collapse when we leave? Then why are we not in Somalia whose government did collapse? Are we there to prevent terror attacks in the US? Many attempts have been made in the last 8 years, few successful. Ft. Hood was terrorism plain and simple. Calling it a tragedy doesn’t change what it really was. Little Rock was terror when a Muslim extremist gunned down a military recruiter. But ten times that amount have been successfully prevented. Lets continue that kind of progress in the war on terror.

There was a time to fight this war in Afghanistan and Iraq, but now the war on terror needs to be fought through intelligence. Protect Americans through active intelligence gathering and pro-active efforts against would be terrorists. America looked on terror with passive eyes in the 90’s. That cost us in 2001. Let’s not make that mistake again, but neither let us keep sending our brave men and women to fight in a war with no end in sight.