Don’t punish the troops for political failure
October 19, 2009
Afghanistan has been a failed state for my entire lifetime. They have no history of democracy and their current leadership was installed by our government. From all accounts the most recent election was evidently a massive failure – fraught with fraud and malfeasance. Obama and his team are using the failure to put any military decision on hold until the government has legitimacy. All the while Obama’s generals are begging for more troops. The generals have told Obama that he can’t wait to decide. If we do the war will be lost. My opinion is that we should substantially reduce our troops strength and focus on a ’skynet’ approach. The worst option is no decision at all. Leaving our troops in theater without the support they need is unconscionable. Despite that fact, Rahm Emanuel explained that any troop decision would have to wait until the Afghans could be an effective partner. Either give them the tools to win or let them get out – don’t defer the decision until the Afghans get their sh*t together. They never will.
On a side note, my eight year old was listening to NPR with me last week during a report on the war in Afghanistan and suggested that the war would be over when the Taliban runs out of IEDs. Out of the mouths of babes. The sad part is that he is right, but what he couldn’t understand was that they will never run out of IEDs. I tried to explain that they would not run out because they could always buy more; Ethan didn’t why people would sell them explosives if they knew they were going to use them to kill people.
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