After losing more than 2,400 soldiers and spending more than $900 billion in Afghanistan since 2001, critics say the U.S. risks losing hard-won gains. President Donald Trump on Monday called the nearly 18-year campaign “ridiculous” and said he could win the conflict in a week but “I don’t want to kill 10 million people.”
I agree. 18 years of a micro managed, limited, political war is absurd…it’s beyond absurd and it makes me both mad and disgusted.
Right now, the best we can do is just get heck out, cut our losses and go. Let the Afghans do what they will to each other. If the people of Afghanistan wind up being butchered and terrorized, they should have resisted when they had the chance. And they had 18 years of chances, but they blew it. We owe them nothing!
Getting us into Afghanistan to do nation building was on a level senseless that has no equal in our nation’s history. I’m so sorry that we
allowed George W. Bush to do that, especially when so many of us saw it coming. Well, what’s done is done….and what a terrible and wasteful experience it has been.
Too bad we can’t make Bush wear one of those cone shaped dunce hats whenever he goes out in public..oh, and make the Secret Service agents assigned to him wear tee shirts that say, “I’m with stupid.” Sorry, I shouldn’t make jokes, because this is not funny. Bush will never have to face the consequences of what he set in motion, nor will those that followed him and kept it going. Trump got this one 100% right.
They don’t call it the forever war for nothing. And the people of this country just don’t care. There is no great demand to put an end to the nonsense. The American people are complacent with bankrupting the country with such nonsense. As evidence, what Demorat campaigners are demanding an end to the Afghan War. Gabbard, maybe? As further proof no one cares look at this post getting no comments except mine. And as far as ending this war is concerned, lets face it a lot of people are going to lose huge contracts if that happens. There’s just too much money to be made. Of course you and your kids and their kids have to pay.
Ron Paul is right on the runaway spending, debt and what I call the forever wars.
https://www.whittierdailynews.com/2019/07/29/true-budget-hawks-are-foreign-policy-doves-ron-paul/
“As further proof no one cares look at this post getting no comments except mine”
Joe:
You’re right. I guess some of us put Afghanistan in the same category as Baltimore, or San Francisco, or LA, or so many more of our cities. Nasty, dangerous s…tholes run by power-hungry little people. We try not to think about any of them.
The frustrating part is that we could ditch Afghanistan tomorrow and let them go on slaughtering each other without us. Those other places are more problematic.
“Trump got this one 100% right.”
That he’s got it right now doesn’t mean he had it right back then. I couldn’t find a quote from him prior to the Afghanistan war expressing his opinion on it—all the Google results today are about his bizarre and dangerous statement that he could just nuke the place if he wanted to, but he probably won’t, who knows, he could change his mind—but we do know that he supported the Iraq War and then lied about it during the campaign. It would be a weird position for someone to support war in Iraq and not Afghanistan at that time, but Trump is and always has been a weird guy whose positions make no sense with each other, so maybe he didn’t.
I don’t care who supported what, I just want this war over. I’ve had it with the waste of lives and money on people that won’t help themselves.
How many casualties came from turncoat Afghanistan soldiers, the very ones we were trying to help? Answer – about 15%. Yes, 15% and that is unacceptable. It speaks volumes about the mindset of the people who call themselves good Muslims. The trust is broken – its over.
It speaks volumes about the mindset of the people who call themselves good Muslims.
Uh…no, it doesn’t. To claim that turncoat soldiers in a specific region say anything about members of the world’s third largest religion is the textbook definition of bigotry.
Uh…yes it does. We are talking about the Muslims in Afghanistan, you changed the narrative to the WORLD. When 15% of combat casualties come from Afghan soldiers who think they are defending their faith and their country, we got a big problem. I’m shocked at you taking the side President Bush on this Chris.
It speaks volumes about the mindset of the people who call themselves good Muslims.
This would strike any rational reader as a statement about all “who call themselves good Muslims,” not just the soldiers in Afghanistan. In fact, if it were only about soldiers in Afghanistan, you would have not needed to say it makes any statement about Muslims at all. So if I misunderstood your meaning, that failure lies with you for phrasing your point in a way that did not make sense. Either that or you are retroactively changing your meaning.