There has been a war of some sort going on in Afghanistan since the dark ages. Before George W. Bush decided that Afghanistan was the cause of 9/11 (despite the terrorists all being Saudis) the Russians had spent their time in hell trying to win over the “hearts and minds” of a people who have no use for our Western ways or political beliefs.
After spending trillions of our tax dollars to “rebuild” a country that was never built in the first place, we find our country falling apart at the seams. Cities going into bankruptcy, tens of millions of under-employed or unemployed Americans, and a middle class that is suffering the most in 70 years. Bin Laden is dead, and we still have more people die every year in domestic gun violence and because of drunk driving than died on 9/11, but haven’t waged a multi-trillion-dollar war on gun nuts gone bad or booze hounds behind the wheel.
Watch this touching video of a man on a mission in Texas, trying to paint a portrait of every Texan who has died in our wars of choice.
Let’s put our country back to work, and put painter Ken “the dauber” Pridgeon and his Portrait of a Warrior Memorial Art Gallery out of the hero painting business.
2000 dead American soldiers is too many. There is no reason to continue occupying Afghanistan. Bring our troops home now.
Before George W. Bush decided that Afghanistan was the cause of 9/11 (despite the terrorists all being Saudi’s)
I don’t have substantively different views on the Afganistan war than you do; it’s a disaster across the board. But this aside is highly misleading. The de facto government of most of Afganistan at the time was providing fairly crucial assistance to Al Queda and vice versa; the national origin of the terrorists themselves is a fairly irrelevant aside.
Again, the war is an ongoing disaster. That doesn’t retroactively change the jus ad bellum case for the war in 2001. It’s important to point out that some wars can be a) terrible, terrible ideas and b) jus ad bellum just. That’s an important lesson, and pretending the justification for war was more bogus than it was is both inaccurate and unwise; it obscures an important lesson we really should try to learn.
@DJW- shutting down the training sites in Afghanistan didn’t require a wholesale invasion. Using a sledgehammer to push a tack into a corkboard is overkill.
And to say that Afghanistan has ever had a functioning government is a joke. Never happened, never will.