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HK

wrote:
On Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:36:29 -0700, jps wrote:

If he is just doing what Bush was going to do, where is the "change"?
I was excited about a candidate who was going to end this stupid 18
year war, not keep it going another 18 years.

Afghanistan is even worse. Now Obama is saying we will have the
Russians "help" us in Afghanistan.
How do you think the Afghan citizens will feel about that?
We are certainly creating terrorists far faster than we can kill them.
1. Obama is keeping his word to get us out of Iraq. Bush took a 3 day
raid and turned it into six years. Surely you understand that
withdrawing is a sensitive endeavor for many reasons.

Actually this was a 100 hour mission from 1991 that has gone on for 18
years. Do you want to bet whether we will still be there in 2012? How
about 2016?
2. Afghanistan is complicated. I didn't want to go in originally and
still would prefer we weren't there but the situation is among the
scariests on the planet. Not in Afghanistan of course, but Pakistan.
If al Qaeda and those Afghani fundamentalists team to take Pakistan,
we've got a serious problem on our hands. That's not very far afield
at this point. Our presence there is probably the best investment we
could make to ensure nuclear war doesn't break out.

Nobody has really explained why we went to Afghanistan in the first
place or why we are still there.
All of the excuses really sound like "Ho Chi Minh trail" stories to me
and we know how that worked out.

I don't think we as a society have internalized the concept that our
military might basically is useless in fighting dedicated insurgencies
or religiously backed organizations in underdeveloped countries.

Obviously, we have the wherewithal to take on a uniformed military force
like Iraq's, one that is organized along traditional military lines and
orders of battle. That's why we were able to impose a peace in Bosnia.

But we're really not facing that sort of adversary these days. We didn't
learn from our loss in Vietnam, and we didn't learn from the loss the
Soviets suffered in Afghanistan.

The reality is this: Iraq will collapse when we leave, no matter when we
leave, and Afghanistan will never settle down with us around. Pakistan
is likely to go down the tubes, too. Our best bet there is to help our
Indian friends keep crazed Pakistanis from destroying their country, too.