Sir;... The mission failure the U.S. needs to avoid in Afghanistan it accepted when it went there to stay...Two enemies no armies have ever beat are popular sentiment and geography... Sooner or later every empire goes too far to kill the very people it must have trade with to have wealth...Who bears the cost of empire??? It is always the Imperial poor, and the alienate poor of the dominated lands... Armies, transport, ill will and wide spread poverty, with a nod to general immorality -always accompany empire...So what is our goal there, in Afghanistan??? We have driven their neighbor nations to panic, and to radicalism... Does anyone want nuclear war??? It is possible that Persia now knows that the refinement of radioactive material means the filthing up of everything else???.Nothing, and no body can touch the stuff without becoming radioactive... The waste is waste forever while the material must be highly dangerous to be effective...And what value does it have to a country for defense except to scorch the earth, and make the whole place uninhabitable??? You may kill an invading army at the cost of your own... So; we now have the object of making the Persians give up their last, worst option at the very moment that we have by our foreign policy and predation forced that course upon them.... The Afghans have no choice but to fight... We are as foreign in that land as a fly in soup...They have time, and geography, and history, and God all on their side...If we could ever have corrupted just so many and killed the rest, we could have hung on... As it is, we have our generals saying defeat is imminent... Unless more troops are delivered -is added as cover...All the ifs and buts can never answer the whys of our failure... Even in color the place has all the old west of a black and white television on it...And it is remarkable that so many there from every vantage point cannot see their way out...Troops trip through that land seeing nothing but scenery until the unseen enmity of the people rises up and strikes them down....And it has happened again before...The fuse of a political people for the idiotic -or plain wrong is short and furious...That is one good argument for consensus, and for never fighting war without necessity... If a war cannot be won, it should not be fought...Driving a tyrant or town drunk out of town takes nothing... Waiting for him to come back with his kin and friends is nerve racking...Then, if it's high noon, and your best friends are telling you to git; you better git... We should have skitted to begin with... We should have went in announcing that when we were done we were going to high tail it, and then, when our immediate goal was denied to us, we should have taken the hint and split...Having left, we could have said: mess with us some more when you are done cleaning up that rubble, and we will come and give you some more of your lives to pick up... They do not want anything from us, and the lesson we are learning is to not want anything from them...Yet, everyone should understand that our military has been misused terribly, and disasterously... It is never a good thing to ask of a man to do the impossible on a lark...It is far worse to ask the impossible of an army... We could have left -and gone back, and saved the time and money spent picking up the pieces they will only tear down...We could have saved the money we wasted only to fund rebellion...We could have been a credible threat to them in the future...How many years would it take us now -to go back for another bloody nose???.Most of the people of America are slow pokes...They do not rashly jump to conclusions...We are inclined to go around the planet to kick some butts, but most of us are smart enough to not cross a street for a butt wooping...If we go some where it should be for victory...If we feel we have to hang on and fight rather than win; then the whole people should know it going in, and accept the fact, and universally get behind the idea, and share the sacrifice... The power of democracy is in consensus, and consensus is found in defense... The weakness of plutoligarchy is the inclination to do without firm popular support...They order rather than ask, and suffer democracy as much as the people suffer them...All the chicken hawks in this would should remember that it was not our military which was defeated in Korea, and in Vietnam...It will not be our parties or political leaders who will suffer defeat in Afghanistan... It is this whole people which is defeated, and was defeated before the fact by the ability of our Generals and Politicians, and our Rich to take us where gains would be slight, and loses intolerable...Democracy and consensus are the cure to stupidity....How many people want to swallow that pill???....Thanks...Sweeney

Afganistan, "the Graveyard of Empires". Need more be said? It is true that the Taliban are Pashtun, and Pashtun are over half of the Afgany population. If the situation is untenable now, just think how it will be if we pour more gasoline on the fire. Then there is the economy to think about. The U.S. Government has, against the wishes of a majority of the population, more than doubled its spending through bailouts and stimulus. All of this money is borrowed and will have to be paid back. The problem now facing our country, is that every family in the U.S. now ows more than $100,000. So, payback looks like it will not ever happen. When foriegn countries stop buying U.S. Government debt, the party is over. The printing presses at the treasury will go into overdrive and destroy the value of the dollar, like its not happening already. So sure, lets make the Afgan War an even bigger one by going even deeper into hawk. I give it somewhere between 2 to 3 years and then the dollar crashes and chaos follows. Thank both the Fed and the Politicians when that happens.
-Steve

On this one, you're a welcome voice in the conservative wilderness. When will the American people get a say in war making? It looks like the Washington bandwagon is beating the drums for more war and larger deficits. I think Al Qaeda is succeeding in their mission to bleed the superpower into bankruptcy.

Pat Buchanan is completely correct that the US polices of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are leading to eventual defeat and falure even with sending more troops .There is also a big possibiliity that the US is pushed by Israel to wage wars on Iran or Syria , Lebanon & Palestine and the certiainly these wars will also harvest falure and defeat for both Israel and USA. The US cheated the area in waging war on Iraq which is still going on and has achieved nothing but more hate for USA in the M.E. and all around the world .

As you say, Mr. B., "he killers of 9-11 were over here because we were over there." Partly true, but the main reason they succeeded was because the police agencies who were supposed to be watching for that kind of thing were asleep at the switch and more interested in one upping each other than protecting the public. The ultimate irony is that we never needed to fight a war in the first place. All we needed was for those agencies to do their job.