If we leave Afghanistan without a stable, allied government in place, we're very likely to find that the region reverts back to a staging and launching ground for attacks against us.
How do you plan to install a stable government in Afghanistan? Who has last succeeded in doing such a thing in the last, oh, two millenia?
How much will your plan cost, in dollars and soldiers' lives, as well as innocent Afghani lives? Is it worth it?
There are legitimate questions. Asking them doesn't make me a commie-pinko-liberal.
This war didn't start with our entry into Afghanistan, and it won't end with our exit from Afghanistan.
Here's the problem. I quoted it from your post.
There have always been terrorists - Muslim, Communist, Anarchist - attacking innocent civilians in America and allied countries. Pancho Villa burned down an entire town.
This is in the same way as there have always been murderers. It is not to say that murder is not wrong - but we know that there is a certain level of crime and murder that we are have in Western society, and we don't claim there's a state of national emergency over it. We know that street criminals do not pose a threat to Western Civilization.
The Soviet Union posed, on the other hand, a threat to Western Civilization. It had science, and industry, and nuclear weapons, and its troops were training day and night for an offensive nuclear war against America and her allies. So the world - not just America, but her allies by and large, accepted a great amount of military spending, and involvement in various countries (America's allies helped fight Vietnam, for instance), and a variety of stuff they wouldn't have otherwise put up with - like Operation Gladio, and the bombings of Laos - to hold off having to fight waves of Soviet tanks in Germany.
But does the terrorist threat constitute a threat level comparable to the Soviets? If the threat level posed to us (the West) by semi-literate, 9th-century 'tards such as to justify the sort of expenses in money, and freedom, and political capital that were once spent on fighting the cold war?
Which brings me to the following point:
Eventually one of the attacks will be wildly successful, killing an "unignorably" large number of our citizens, and we'll start all over again.
The world is always going to be a dangerous place to some extent.
There's always going to be some terrorism, and some murders, and some dangers to us. Inevitably -
inevitably - there's going to be a new McVeigh, or a new 9/11. Someone is going to hijack a plane, or blow up a bus, or shoot up a school. Maybe they'll even be shouting JIHAD FOR ALLAH while doing it. But the level of such events does not approach the level of a true emergency where you need to review everything and so forth.
I respect, absolutely, the actions of veterans who fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, and countless other countries. You know full well that I am not an anti-war 'tard of any kind. I do not hate America.
And I ask again:
Since 2001, America alone paid 1,022 billion dollars to fight global terrorism. Three-quarters of this sum were not spent in Afghanistan, which trained the 9/11 hijackers and provided Bin Ladin with shelter, but in Iraq. This is half the cost of WW2. This could fund you ten Apollo programs. Added to that were spending increases that were made in non-defense areas of the budget to persuade various Democrat congressmen to get aboard the war-funding bandwagon.
Additionally, conservative political capital was spent. Wars cost political capital. Especially wars that are, or were, unpopular. This means that political time and capital that could have spent on continuing Reagan's and Gingrich's reforms, and making everybody freer and better off, were used elsewhere.
In your contemplation of that, note that Congress can only work that many hours in a session. Every day, every session you spend not working to shrink government, it grows. You and I both agree that governemnt - in America, and, of course, throughout the West - had grown far beyond any reasonable size limits. Every hour you spent debating war funding is an hour not spent shrinking and reforming government.
Was it worth it?
