Saturday, July 13, 2019

How indeed?


Something is desperately wrong here. From The Pentagon Run-Down with Jeff Schogol:

Gen. Mark Milley warns against withdrawing from Afghanistan after only 18 years
You know what they say: If at first you don’t succeed, keep plodding on for two decades with no hope for victory.

That’s the story about the Afghanistan war in a nutshell.

Despite the fact that recruits will soon enter boot camp to train to fight in a war that began before they were born, Army Gen. Mark Milley said it is too soon to pull out of Afghanistan.

... Your friend and humble narrator may be bad at math, but it seems strange to call any withdrawal of U.S. troops from nearly 18 years premature. (Especially when a poll by the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of veterans surveyed said the Afghanistan war has not been worth the sacrifice.)

Schogol offers a clear, short timeline of the U.S. Afghanistan war in case you've forgotten or never knew. Two more U.S. soldiers died as recently as in the last week of June.

As the young John Kerry, recently returned from fighting in Vietnam in 1971, once asked Congress, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

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