The futile war

Not for the first time, but for the umpteenth time since 2001, headlines like this are proliferating.

We Must Accept that Afghanistan is Lost

Or, from a newsletter targeted at military and vets:

The proverbial ‘fall of Saigon’ is fast approaching in Afghanistan: Upbeat talk of Afghan forces being “better than we thought they were” may soon be put to the test.

Over ten years ago, I posted this iconic photo of the last U.S. personnel evacuating Saigon in 1975. It seemed appropriate to how our Afghanistan war was going then. Could the most militarily powerful country on the globe really be driven out? Apparently yes, then. It still seems on point. Time to get the hell out of Afghanistan! No good is being served.

Whatever we thought we could do in that faraway country, it is not now and never happening. Once we made the place inhospitable to Osama bin Laden, we never even truly figured out our objectives -- and more Afghans, and allied soldiers, and U.S. troops died -- for what end?

World Beyond War has a new campaign addressed to the governments which can make this stop:

The governments of Albania, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, UK, and US all still have troops in Afghanistan and need to remove them.

These troops range in number from Slovenia’s 6 to the United States’ 2,500. Most countries have fewer that 100. Apart from the United States, only Germany has over 1,000. Only five other countries have more than 300.

Governments that used to have troops in this war but have removed them include New Zealand, France, Jordan, Croatia, North Macedonia, and Ireland.

We plan to deliver a big THANK-YOU to every government that removes all of its troops from Afghanistan, along with the names and comments of every signer of this petition.

We also plan to deliver a demand to remove all troops to every government that has not done so....

If you sign petitions, you probably need to sign this one -- and to get across to the Biden administration that the human cost of blundering on is too great to justify taking a small political hit for losing something we never had.