We heard it a million times during the 2008 (never-ending) election cycle. “Get out of Iraq, refocus on Afghanistan.” As the President and advisers are having more frequent discussions on the future of the our efforts there, some are arguing it might be time we get out of that war too. BraveNewFilm’s “Rethinking Afghanistan” documentary makes the argument in a nutshell.
What say you?
Looks good. It’s astounding to me that anyone would be so willing to send other people off to fight an ideological and geo-political war, especially now.
We only have to look at the former Soviet Union to see how this is going to turn out. They were next door neighbors and couldn’t get it done in ten years, and it bankrupted them. Here we are, on the other side of the planet, bankrupt, and are going to make the same mistake? I don’t get it.
Our window has closed in Afghanistan. In 2002 we sent 20,000 troops + 2-4,000 Special Forces to deal with “the most dangerous regime on the planet”. In contrast, for the 2004 National Republican Convention in NYC, New York, we had a security force of over 60,000 police + another 10-15,000 in private security forces. The numbers for the 2008 Dem/Rep Conventions are comparable. I think these numbers show what the priority of Afghanistan/Taliban has been.
And now, eight years later, we think a surge will solve the situation? Not likely. Just more money and U.S. lives spent. To them we are just another occupying force. No different than the Soviets. I’m sure they still remember the Daisy Cutters.
Since when did (anyone expect) NeoCons subscribe to logic and reason ?
I got a chance to watch this today:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/obamaswar/?utm_campaign=ObamasWar&utm_medium=NewsSiteTarget&utm_source=image
Kind of looking forward to seeing the rest of it. Damn, I feel sorry for our troops over there. Talk about mission impossible. With or without 40-50,000 more troops. In my mind, Obama has two choices: give them everything (200,000 troops, 10,000 translators and 10,000 social workers with PHDs still couldn’t get it done), or pull out now. A conversation between the locals and a Marine at about 20:10-21:39 kind of summed things up for me.