Boom_70 said:
Stoney said:
We leave now and the terrorists have won. Except this time that won't just be a dumb overused cliche.
Which terrorists? What have they won? As FHB asked is this worth sacrificing more American lives?
Who are we fighting? Al Queada? The Taliban? Pakistan?
I'm not necessarily saying I disagree with you. I'm not nearly smart enough to have any idea how to handle this.
But I do know if we leave right now it will be viewed by the world as monumental defeat for the U.S., probably surpassing Vietnam as the single most humiliating moment in American foreign policy history. And it will be viewed as a huge victory to muslim extremists all over the world. It'll be taken as proof that we can't beat them.
According to that NYT piece, the Taliban is now the strongest it has ever been since 2001, how long do you think it will take them to re-take Afghanistan if our troops are no longer there to stop it?
And, if you think Afghanistan was haven for terrorists before, wait til you see what it becomes now. The greatest military power the world has ever known just wasted a decade, hundreds of billions of dollars, and thousands of young lives trying to remove them and, in the end, failed? NOBODY'S ever gonna want to go in there again (especially considering that the same damn sort of thing happened when the British and Soviet empires invaded the same territory).
In short, EVERY one of our war goals when we initially invaded Afghanistan will ultimately end up being unfulfilled: we never caught Bin Laden, the Taliban will end up re-taking Afghanistan, and the region will become every bit or more of a safe haven terrorists than it was before the war.
