According to Time, 2,356 Americans lost their lives fighting in Afghanistan during the period of our “official” war there. Beginning yesterday, we are now in the unofficial phase. More troops will be more or less permanently stationed in Afghanistan than were stationed there in 2002 and 2003.
I don’t really know if Kabul will stagger along for a few years before falling again to the Taliban, but I don’t wish a new Saigon on the Afghan people, nor would I like to see our sacrifice come to nothing.
The Afghan people have suffered enough.
But we have suffered, too. If the edifice we have erected in Kabul is too weak to hold out, the answers must lie in Pakistan where the Taliban gathers its strength, and in Saudi Arabia where it gets much of its financial support and its ideological rocket fuel.
If the Taliban can be starved of its foreign sources of succor, it can be defeated in Afghanistan. Our troops should not die on the ground there any more.