Washington Post: "End the Afghan mission" now by Eugene Robinson

[Better Believe It]

End the Afghan mission now
By Eugene Robinson
Opinion Writer
March 12, 2012

It was clear before Sunday’s horrific massacre of civilians that it’s past time for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan to end. Now the only question should be how quickly we can get our troops onto transport planes to fly them home.

What are we accomplishing, aside from enraging the Afghan population we’re allegedly trying to protect? How are we supposed to convince them that a civilian massacre carried out by a U.S. soldier is somehow preferable to a civilian massacre carried out by the Taliban? How does it make any of us safer to have the United States military known for burning Korans and killing innocent Muslim children in their beds?

This is supposed to be a period of transition from U.S. occupation to Afghan government control. But what do we expect to accomplish between now and 2014, when our troops are supposed to come home? We can be confident that the Afghan government will still be feckless and corrupt. We can anticipate that the Afghan military will still lack personnel, equipment and training. We can be absolutely certain that the Taliban insurgents will still constitute a threat, because — and this is what gung-ho advocates of the war fail to grasp — they live there. To them, Afghanistan is not a battlefield but a home.

It’s their country, not ours. In increasingly clear language, Afghans are telling us to leave. We should listen and oblige.

Read the full opinion piece at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bring-home-the-troops-now-from-afghanistan/2012/03/12/gIQAkVqs7R_story.html

[zipplewrath]

1. 3 ways this turns out

I don't care how long we stay, how many we kill, and what we build or train, there are 3 ways this ends

1) We create a marginally stable democracy that is in a constant state of conflict with many of its neighbors and struggles to maintain itself against an internal armed insurgency.

2) It collapses into a despotic system, with a continuous armed insurgency, which drives both sides to seek external actors which influences the border countries and tends to destabilize them, especially Pakistan.

3) Total chaos. It splits into various regions, armed against each other, spilling over into neighboring countries, and leveraging an opium trade to finance the whole operation.


Which one of those is worth continuing to kill people for, to send soldiers to kill people, to send them to die, and to spend the money for all that killing?