I thought the point was to in there and take out Al Queda as the Taliban-run government had failed to police within its borders.  Now we have a war against Al Queda and the Taliban, mostly Taliban as far as who actually reside in Afghanistan.  Most people now view the Taliban and Al Queda as one and the same.

This should have been over in 2003.  Take out Al Queda leaders and leave governance of Afghanistan in the hands of whoever the Afghan people decide, ballots or bullets.  The important thing was to leave whoever leads  the country with no doubt that the US would be back should they faile again to police within their borders.

Rumsfeld was right. There are no targets in Afghanistan. That doesn't mean that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. It means that even Rummy could see the challenges of waging war in a country as vast and inaccessible as Afghanistan.

Dems have doubled-down on Bush's bad bets. The risks are enormous. I opposed the surge and was proven wrong. The increased number of US troops dispatched to Iraq did bring greater order, peace, and stability. The US may very well have to remain in Iraq for many years to come to act as peacekeepers. The chances of conflict are great and no other nation seems willing to step-up and share the burden, at least now.

The UK papers are filled every single week with full-color stories of dead soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Support for the troops remains high. Support for the war is crumbling.

on the plus side, when the taliban were in power, they nearly totally cut off the growing of poppies, the source of heroin. granted, they used crude methods (summary execution), but it did get the job done.

i'd think the republicans would be all for a return of the taliban to power, they're kind of brothers under the skin anyway.

as i've noted before, unless they plan on sending 500k troops over there (and i'm guessing not), it's a waste of scarce, allocable resources, putting good men & women in harm's way, for no good reason.

There are many billions of dollars to be squandered, lives to be lost, life altering wounds to be suffered before it finally dawns on the serious people that we're in a civil conflict of our own making and that any chance for success, the original reason for engaging, was lost by incompetant serious people at Tora Bora in the first months of the conflict so many years before.

And here's three former station chiefs who served in Afghanistan and Pakistan who explain why our large scale military occupation in Afghan is dead wrong.

Milton Bearden was station chief in Islamabad during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.  The final paragraph of his article "Obama's War" in Foreign Affairs reads:

Every foreign power to enter Afghanistan in the last 2,500 years has faced these challenges in one form or another. All failed to overcome them. The likelihood of the United States breaking this pattern is slight. It is becoming clear, however, that the Obama administration at least understands the odds it faces.

Given the bleak picture for our troops which he paints in the article, I take that last sentence to mean the same thing as, The Titanic has struck the iceberg, and the captain is informed of the situation.

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Robert Grenier is another former CIA station chief in Islamabad.  He's also famously the Director of the Counterterrorism Center who was fired by the Bush government for not going along with rendition and torture.  In a videoed interview he did for Rethink Afghanistan Part 6, he says:

I don't think that a major conventional military force - which, whatever it's strategic intent, is going to look to a local people like a colonizing occupation army - is going to succeed in the long run in Afghanistan. [transcript by me]

If you're even slightly interested in Afghanistan, you will definitely want to click the above link for Rethink Afghanistan and watch these vids, if you haven't seen them yet.

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Graham Fuller is a former CIA station chief in Kabul and a former vice-chair of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. He contributed an article titled "Obama's Policies Making Situation Worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan" at Huffington Post, which concludes:

Al-Qaida's threat no longer emanates from the caves of the borderlands, but from its symbolism that has long since metastasized to other activists of the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the Pashtuns will fight on for a major national voice in Afghanistan. But few Pashtuns on either side of the border will long maintain a radical and international jihadi perspective once the incitement of the U.S. presence is gone. Nobody on either side of the border really wants it.

What can be done must be consonant with the political culture. Let non-military and neutral international organizations, free of geopolitical taint, take over the binding of Afghan wounds and the building of state structures.

If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for U.S. policies could be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a U.S. recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate. [emphasis added by me.  Graham Fuller is also interviewed in the Rethink Afghanistan video.]