Afganistan - A New Strategy

Unbelievably, a recent Gallup poll shows that 43% of the people polled think the war in Afghanistan was a mistake.

Chew on that for a second and take yourself back to the last half of 2001. During that time, we were deeply united. We were all brothers and sisters who were attacked by ruthless thugs bastardizing the name of Islam. We flew our flags, we started playing the Star Spangled Banner more often, and at that time, George W. Bush was the right man at the right time. Hell, as someone who voted for him, I was ready to put him on Mt. Rushmore like everybody else.

He stood on the rubble in New York City with emergency workers and vowed to bring whoever did this to us to justice. Which meant to the average American, we were going to spend our hard earned tax dollars on kicking someone's ass.

Eventually, we decided we had everything we needed to show Bin Laden and the Taliban were behind this. With few exceptions, we all wanted our bravest and finest to go to Afghanistan to take those bastards out. All of our allies - with cash and battle-ready troops - were on board. Hell, countries that I thought hated us were with us. The world was united against Bin Laden and the Taliban.

Sure, we had some concerns - after all, Afghanistan is known as "the place where superpowers go to die". But this was different. Nobody ever attacked Afghanistan with the world's resources at their back. We went in and started kicking some ass. Our casualties were low, but the tragedy that is the loss of American life was accepted as a necessary evil. Nobody thinks you can retaliate for an act of war against us with no casualties. In a perfect world, we would hope that no harm would come to us.

But we watched with pride as our sons and daughters went off to war. We knew we were in good hands.

But at the start of 2002, things started taking a hard left turn. While crushing the Taliban and getting Pakistan to act like a good ally, Dubya - in that pea brain of his - decided this would be a great time to take out Saddam Hussein.

Cue the screeching brake music - huh? What did Saddam have to do with 9/11? Well, it was obvious to the Bush administration. Saddam Hussein would take the stockpiles of WMD's he had - in an area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west,south and north - and hand them over tot terrorists who would destroy our cities with mushroom clouds. In other words the trustworthy terrorist theory - Saddam Hussein would hand over power that could destroy his own government/country under the assumption terrorists would travel 10,000 miles away to execute his evil plan. Saddam Hussein could trust the terrorists would not threaten to detonate the WMD in downtown Baghdad unless Saddam gave them money and more power. Or make sure Saddam's fingerprints were all over them, take them 10,000 miles away, detonate them, and watch Iraq get vaporized 20 minutes later. The entire premise is nuts, but it worked. Bush got 70% of Americans to believe there was a link between Saddam and 9/11.

Many of us were left scratching our heads - how does Saddam have stockpiles of WMD when the short shelf life required a lot of production plants? And how come we can't find any production facilities even when using mass spectrometers - able to detect residues on the molecule level?

But those of us opposed to the forthcoming war with Iraq had one thing in common - we knew that taking our eye off Afghanistan and moving our resources to Iraq would not allow us to finish the job in Afghanistan. I'd like to say that many of us were smart enough to figure this out, but face it - a 4 year old could figure this out.

To compound matters, Bush alienated our allies in the process. Every country with money and batlle-ready troops - with the exception of Great Britain - told us to go to hell and bailed.

Iraq went to shit with the end game being a civil war running it's course and concrete barricades separating the people who want to kill each other. And Afghanistan has devolved into a pre-Iraq war mess. Except, we don't help anymore. Bush expended every ounce of the world's good will to pick a fight with a the only Arab country in that area who hasn't exported terrorism with our buddies from Cameroon. Oh, AND POLAND! Forgot to add that.

So now, the war in Afghanistan is no further along then when we started, dozens of American are being killed every week, and most countries think we're a bunch of assholes. Obama is considering a new strategy - which I'm sure is a "surge" that has become the answer to all our military problems. Sorta like when LBJ "surged" another 150,000 troops to the sucking armpit of the world known as Vietnam. If I had to step outside and look inside to what we've done to Iraq - or hell, any other country we've stopped into to enforce our ideology (anti-communism, pro-democracy), they are right.

The damage is irreparable. We can't win. No superpower has ever won in Afghanistan. America is done with nation building. The world is done with nation building. It's time to come home and seal our borders - that is our only achievable defense against Muslim extremism. Make the Muslims fight us here. It would be the shortest war ever with the second amendment as our solution.