TF_Grungir
Veteran XV
The correct answer is: get the fuck out of Afghanistan, so that neither scenario is possible.
Seriously, can anyone define what victory in Afghanistan entails? A stable democratic society?We'd be lucky to establish a brutal strongman that could rule in our absence within the next decade. The country and its people inherently unsuited to central government, due to thousands of years of tribal society. The Taliban couldn't even keep order and they'd literally cut off the head of anyone who looked at them the wrong way. Even Alexander the Great wanted no part of these people:
The British fought two wars against them and achieved nothing. The Soviets spent a decade massacring them to no effect. They don't give a fuck. Their favorite sport is playing full-contact polo with the corpse a decapitated goat. They live in shacks and caves. Half of them can't even read. When we kill them, we're just doing them a favor. They'll fight us just because we're there. And they'll do it for as long as we're there. They've been doing it for over two thousand years.
Alternately, we could kill every last man, woman and child in the country. Then we'd have ourselves a real pearl of a prize: a vast wasteland covered alternately in barren desert and inhospitable mountains. Although in that case we could certainly more easily extract the trillions of dollars of mineral wealth and get to work building the Caspian oil pipeline across the country. All that, for the small price of genocide!
Hey, if it's Us vs. Them, why not? At least that would provide an achievable objective. As opposed to what we're doing now, which is nothing more than sending Marines to run around the mountains with their thumbs up their asses to get shot and blown up, dropping bombs on villages from UAVs remotely piloted by spineless dickwads in Arizona and paying off everyone from the President of Afghanistan down to the local "tribal elder", whose brother-in-law runs a Taliban militia and receives training from Pakistani intelligence and bribe money from U.S. contractors.
Oh, and we're spending a few billion a month on this shit.
Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires.
just a FYI: the military does not decide where or why we fight... and in most cases does not even set policy for ROEs
