Bikewer
Penultimate Amazing
After some eight years of involvement, we seem to have accomplished little in our adventuring in Afghanistan, and you will be hard pressed to find a pundit of any stripe with much positive to say about the situation there.
In fact, all the various authorities I've listened to lately seem to have nothing much but gloom and doom to report.
There are far too few troops present to accomplish the security of the place, and apparently little interest on the part of the NATO types to supply more.
The Taliban have a safe haven in neighboring Pakistan, despite recent efforts by the Pakistani military to suppress them.
Corruption appears to be the order of the day, the central government is essentially powerless, and the economy, such as it is, is fueled by the drug trade.
Obama campaigned on the basis that Afghanistan is "the war we should have fought", but arguably that war is over and now it's something different entirely.
Various powers have come to grief in the place, and it doesn't appear we're doing much better.
At what point do we call the thing off, or should we make the large and difficult-to-swallow idea of large-scale nation building with all that would entail?
In fact, all the various authorities I've listened to lately seem to have nothing much but gloom and doom to report.
There are far too few troops present to accomplish the security of the place, and apparently little interest on the part of the NATO types to supply more.
The Taliban have a safe haven in neighboring Pakistan, despite recent efforts by the Pakistani military to suppress them.
Corruption appears to be the order of the day, the central government is essentially powerless, and the economy, such as it is, is fueled by the drug trade.
Obama campaigned on the basis that Afghanistan is "the war we should have fought", but arguably that war is over and now it's something different entirely.
Various powers have come to grief in the place, and it doesn't appear we're doing much better.
At what point do we call the thing off, or should we make the large and difficult-to-swallow idea of large-scale nation building with all that would entail?
