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Originally Posted by 9th Engineer
How am I spouting right wing rhetoric? I am completely opposed to any and all intervention in the region, none of the stabilization bullcrap that gets thrown around as an excuse.
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Afghanistan was a war we were obligated to fight, that literally the entire world was willing to join us in fighting, and that means we are obligated to fix the country we broke. IOW America should have been doing nation building in Afghanistan.
Talk of attacks and beating the shit out of them solves nothing - especially when our objective should have been, "we broke it; now we fix it." In Afghanistan, I am at a complete loss for soutions. We have so screwed up a solvable problem that literally most of the country is in Taliban hands. Outside of cities, it appears most of the people are either indifferent to or support the Taliban. We did nothing for so long as to make ourselves undesirable. That makes it almost impossible to fix Afghanistan. We only had that first year to earn respect. We did nothing in 2002 and 2003. That is when Afghanistan was being lost.
I don't see anything practical that can fix this - another war where America will end up defeated. And unlike Iraq, this was the war we must and we could have won. Beating the shit out of anyone will not solve anything. Violence as a solution is the Curtis LeMay and MaggieL solution. But I admit with woeful despondance - we have lost a war that we were obligated to win.
Short of another massive hundreds of thousand man deployment, we cannot win this war a second time. We don’t have the local support we had then. We now have an enemy that is too smart this time to fight in the open. And to win the war, it must be completely accomplished in but months. Any longer will only mean the local population turns even more strongly against Americans.
My despondance is because are military is too threadbare to support a 250,000 or 500,000 deployment. And yet a massive deployment of that size to execute and complete a mission quickly is the only way that the Taliban can be stopped. A large part of that deployment would be to do the mission in months that we should have been doing in 2002 and 2003 (ie restore the water system in Kabul). George Jr will do only as he has done in Iraq – too few troops, no strategic objective, no exit strategy, a love of 'shock and awe' (that accomplishes nothing), a fear of nation building, and no grasp of this Afghanistan situation. Despondance because without a major policy change at the presidential level, then we have already been defeated in Afghanistan. No Curtis LeMay solution will change that. We lost because we did not plan for the peace.