… you’ve already lost the war:
After months of deadly and often demoralizing fighting alongside mediocre Afghan forces in one of the Taliban’s most intractable strongholds outside Kandahar city, the Americans in this Army company are asking themselves if it had been worth it.
“I’m ready to get out of here,” said Sgt. Joshua Middlebrook, 25, of Sanford, N.C., as the patrol made its way back to base after coming up dry in the search. “I’m tired of picking up body parts.”
American forces have been dying in record numbers this summer. The death toll in June was the highest in nearly nine years of war — until July, when U.S. deaths in Afghanistan reached a new monthly record of 66.
Many of the killings occurred here in Kandahar province, where President Barack Obama is gambling that an unfolding military campaign can dislodge Taliban fighters from their spiritual homeland and allow the U.S.-led military coalition to gain the upper hand. […]
Though American military strategists said they are making slow headway, some U.S. soldiers aren’t confident it will be good enough to assuage skeptical Americans back home and to convince wary Afghans to back the anemic Kabul government led by President Hamid Karzai.
“Some days I feel like we’ve made a difference,” Middlebrook said. “Other days, not so much. Maybe it won’t last and the Taliban will move back in. I don’t know.”
We will leave Afghanistan. It’s only a question of when. People will die when we leave, but they are dying now, and we are the ones killing many of them. There is no magic bullet that will win the war in a way that will achieve our goals of an American friendly government that does whatever we ask when we ask it to do something and that is just as true a statement if Karzai somehow manages to retain power.
The only intelligent thing to do is to leave now, but we will not do so. Why? Not because of the situation in Afghanistan. Not because of Al Qaeda. Not because of an untrustworthy and unreliable Pakistani Intelligence Service with ties to religious fundamentalists in the region out the wazoo. Because our presence there has not changed any of those facts on the ground and we could stay for 50 years and none of them would change.
No we won’t leave because no President and no political party wants to be tagged as having lost Afghanistan. Just like no one wanted in the late 40’s and 50’s to be blamed for having “lost China.”
Just as there are those who still believe we could have won the Vietnam war, there will always be those who feel that, for whatever reason, Afghanistan is “winnable” (whatever that means). They will never accept the truth that it was a mistake to occupy Afghanistan and expect a different outcome than what the Soviets experienced in the 80’s. They will always believe the slogans and the propaganda and the simplistic idea that this war is being fought to preserve our freedoms or save the Afghan women or defeat the terrorists or whatever excuse makes the most sense to them.
So for reasons that have nothing to do with what is right for our troops, our national security, our economy, the Afghan people, etc. we will stay “over there.” The US government, including the Obama administration which adopted a plan of escalation, willing sent our troops into that quagmire, and now that we are stuck there we are resisting the only logical answer to our dilemma: throw a rope to our troops and pull them out. All to preserve the egos of the Generals, and foreign policy experts, and last but not least the politicians who fear being blamed for a policy that was flawed from the very beginning, as any historian could have told them.
