How Long Should America Spend in Afghanistan?

Here Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, slams the idea of a generation-long fight against extremism in Afghanistan. Children born at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan are three years away from fighting it. Given the exhortation of America’s neocons to continue to the wars in the Middle East, it’s not hard to imagine that those children will get their chance.

Scheuer continues by writing that no foreign army has been able to subdue Afghanistan. The most recent failure, that of the Soviet military in the late 70s, is a perfect example of how difficult it can be to win there. Scheuer writes:

Just when you think that you have heard all of the asinine ideas possible about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, out comes one that is so hideously ridiculous that you must assume the authors are demented and writing from a well-secured asylum.

The quote below comes from an article about the future of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan that was in the USA Today Network on 14 July 2017. The article discusses several U.S. options in Afghanistan, but the one that takes the cake is the brainchild of two champions of the war in Iraq, who — as Tucker Carlson correctly said about Max Boot — can be relied on to propose ideas that will start unnecessary and always losing wars for the republic. The article’s authors are Michael O’Hanlon, an analyst from the Brookings Institution, who was orgasmic over invading Iraq, and the former general/now-felon David Petraeus, who lost the war in Iraq and helped lose the one in Afghanistan The article refers to some recent work by these two brain-dead beauties.

“O’Hanlon also co-authored a piece in the Wall Street Journal with former CIA Director and four-star general David Petraeus that takes aim at most of the opposing views of continuing the war and argues that the U.S. must consider Afghanistan the center of a generation-long fight against extremism with no definition of “victory.” (1)

Mr. Trump, these two men are war-mongering, elitist, money-grubbing idiots. There is no need for the United States to participate in “generation-long fight against extremism” that is centered in Afghanistan; indeed, there is no longer any plausible reason for America to be engaged in any war in Afghanistan. U.S. military forces have been there since October, 2001, and the security situation in the country is far more in favor of the Taleban — and increasingly the Islamic State — than it was 16 years ago, not even Kabul is secure.

In addition, the morons of U.S. foreign policy-making have been involved in only part of what is now the Afghan Islamists’ 40-plus year fight against foreign/infidel occupation, the first stirrings of which began in 1977-78 against the USSR’s puppet communist regime in Kabul. In these 40 years the Afghan Islamists and their various allies — Pakistani mujahedin, al-Qaeda, Arab volunteers, Chinese Uighurs, etc. — have worn out all foreign occupiers, even though they had no air cover and little in the way of artillery or other heavy arms. The Soviets could not win with a 120,ooo-man Red Army force, and U.S. and NATO generals could not win with a force of the same size and air assets far greater than the Soviets employed.