SEARCH BLOG: OBAMA and AFGHANISTAN.
Points on which I generally agree with President Obama are few. The one point I strongly agree on is that the U.S. should be out of Afghanistan. It is a war that should not have been fought because it is a war that never had an overriding reason to be fought... and it has become a money-pit and a cultural cul-de-sac for Islam meets and rejects West.
Has there been some good achieved? No doubt. There are individuals... mainly women... who have benefited from the U.S. presence. But it is a tenuous benefit hardly supported by the many of the population who would happily revert to 7th century misogynistic Islamic customs of southwest Asia.
Yet, the reasons for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan have expanded well beyond reasonableness. Nation-building has become its own reason with flimsy arguments that it is needed to fight the illiterate, but fierce, Taliban. The reality is that the Taliban held sway in a largely tribal area simply because it reflected the values of that area. In its place, the U.S. has installed a largely corrupt and devious Karzi government that tries to play all sides against themselves for the sake of power, not progress as defined in Western terms.
The only way I differ from President Obama's perspective about Afghanistan is that I would have ceased sending new troops to Afghanistan long ago and told Karzi to figure it out for himself how to deal with the Taliban or leave. The U.S. has no overriding interests... strategic or humanitarian... to send its young men and women into harms way in Afghanistan. That is even more true given the politically correct approach to fighting opposing forces which has done little more than make targets out of our troops.
Better to have let things stay as they were in Afghanistan. At least everyone knew where the military targets were. It would have made great target practice for drones.
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