It's Time to Leave Afghanistan

I have long been an opponent of the Iraq War and the continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan. As a student of history, it wasn't difficult to figure out that the USA could not win in a nation that has never fallen to outside empires for over 2,300 years. Once the Bush/Cheney regime dropped the ball and let Osama bin Laden escape to Pakistan while launching a fool's errand war in Iraq, the USA should have faced reality and withdrawn from Afghanistan. Bush, the delusional, self-envisioned Christian crusader who took the nation into this debacle has thankfully disappeared from American life. But the fruits of his delusions and the megalomania of Emperor Palpatine Cheney continue to cost Americans billions of dollars and more and more young American lives. Andrew Sullivan has a good analysis on his blog of what the USA has wrought in the Middle East. And surprisingly, although for some very different additional reasons, even a local libertarian/far right news blog, VirginiaNewsSource, is likewise calling for an end to a war that we could never win in the first place. Here are some highlights of Andrew's thoughts: :
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What has neoconservatism achieved? In Afghanistan, the best possible option is a country dominated by an increasingly Islamist and nuclear-armed Pakistan. In Iraq, the best possible option is a country dominated by Shiites far more aligned with Iran than many Sunni Arab states. And so the upshot of the Bush-Cheney years is an empowerment of both Iran and Pakistan, the two Muslim countries either with or close to nuclear capacity. That is the end result of a policy designed above all to prevent WMDs getting into the hands of terrorists. I mean: you couldn't make this up.
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And still they want more war. In fact, they are now angling for American support for Sunni Arab states (and Israel) to launch a war against the Shiite power of Iran. Not content with enmeshing the US in two intractable wars, they actually want America to take sides in the ancient intra-Muslim feud between Shiite and Sunni. Yes, that sounds like something brilliant doesn't it? No unintended consequences could come from diving into that briar patch.
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Virginia News Source likewise condemns the continuation of the debacle and correctly notes that we have fallen int the very trap that the Soviets did which cost ten years of wasted funding and lives. While the piece is wrong in some of its other reasoning, its dead on in terms of the fact that Bush/Cheney were fools to take the country into an unwinnable contest. The question now is when willl Obama admit that the game's up and we need to get out NOW. Here are some highlights:
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Osama bin Laden, our former ally who fought the communists in Afghanistan, turned on us in 1991 after we built a base in his home nation of Saudi Arabia, something that is highly offensive in many Muslim cultures as it is seen as an act of occupation.
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Flash forward almost 20 years and we’re fighting almost the same exact fight the communists were losing in the 80’s. Osama bin Laden must be a happy man to see us in this quagmire he once put the communists in. Furthermore, do we even have a goal in Afghanistan?
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It started out justly, as a war to apprehend bin Laden and other top Al-Qaeda henchmen for their vicious attack on 9/11, but then it spiraled out of control into a nation-building affair. . . . we have all seen what Bush’s presidency turned into and the presidency of Obama has been similar. While running, Obama promised to be out of Iraq within 15 months of being elected, and yet we still have troops there and furthermore the War on Terror has expanded.
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Young Americans continue to die and billions and billions of dollars better spent in the USA itself are thrown down a rat hole. And those who got us into the disaster escape all accountability. No wonder many youth are disillusioned with where the country is headed.