FOCUS ON THE EXIT STRATEGY

The mission was already screwed long before President Obama took office. Afghanistan was where the real war should have been waged. Afghanistan was where our real enemies existed. George W. Bush and President Cheney (this is not a typo) never were serious about Afghanistan or bin Laden. They always wanted Iraq. Not because of Sadam, or weapons of mass destruction, or creating democracy in the Middle East. We may never know the real reason. But, we all think it was because of the oil.

However, nine years later, and our best intelligence says there may only be about 100 al Qaeda members left in Afghanistan. They were allowed to slip into Pakistan and now reside in country that actually has a nuclear weapon. Why would they want to return to Afghanistan? Since Pakistan isn’t exactly active in clearing them out, it seems they are quite content to wait out their exile until they can pounce on a real live nuke. Our real options are very limited.

We need to focus on an exit strategy from Afghanistan. It doesn’t matter whether it’s no new troops, or 100,000 troops. The real goal needs to be to leave. We have hundreds of years of world history to tell us this is not going to end well. If the Afghan’s want to save their country…they’ll have to be the ones to save it. The same goes for Iraq. If the Iraqi’s don’t take responsibility for their destiny they’ll return to another ruthless dictator.

I hate this because of what is likely to happen if the Taliban returns and what they’ll do, particularly to women. But, the Afghan’s have a history of being intense fighters and in the end they will have to fight for their destiny too.
All we’ll do is risk even more 18 to 30 year old men and women. I’m sick of reading the list of troops killed in action day after day. Twenty year old after twenty year old. This needs to end now!

I trust the President with this decision…but, unless he focuses on the exit strategy the outcome will be the same as Vietnam. These enemies are patient. They will wait forever. They are poor and they have no reason to be in a hurry. If there was a chance for us to succeed in affecting their future we missed it when we didn’t supply humanitarian effort and relief after the Afghan’s had defeated the Russians. Had we build schools, hospitals, municipal services, and assisted in creating small businesses we might have had a chance. That day is long past.

Commit one troop or 500,000…just focus on exiting this country as soon as possible.