quote:

Originally posted by RHINOWSO:

quote:

Originally posted by gearhounds:
Nope. I'm saying the incentive to win should override people making money, or advancing politically. We shouldn't be worrying about peoples feelings, we should win with extreme prejudice or not get mired in the first place.

So how do the defense contractors influence the incentive to not win...?

I’m more suggesting that politicians (who are making money through stock investments they have the ability to tweak and influence) don’t push hard enough to win quickly; defense contractors are just happy beneficiaries of the lack of political wherewithal.

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Originally posted by YooperSigs:
I am not a WaPo fan but this does firm up a belief I have reached about 2 years into this fiasco:
Not one more drop of American blood shed to support, rebuild or stabilize these backward corrupt savages.
Not one more dollar spent on them either.
Either prosecute a scorched earth, no quarter until they are fully destroyed total war or dont get involved at all.
I would use the Curtis LeMay quote about bombing them into the stone age, but they are pretty much there already. I have heard that its better to fight them there rather than here. Ok, fine. Annihilate them and be done with it.

Others here can attest to these comments I've shared frequently. The US needs to back up the planes, load up 'all' military personnel and whatever ordinance makes sense to recover, and leave A-stan right now. But before they leave, they should burn every poppy field in the country. Let's see how these savages continue to exist without that revenue stream.

Oh, and given the level of corruption in Washington today, I'd suggest its fool hearty to think there isn't enormous collusion between politicians in Washington and the large defense contractors to perpetuate warfare. Warfare is great business for everyone except those killed or injured and their families.

The gov't lied and/or twisted the truth? In other news, the sky is blue and grass is green.

Very long article and I'm a bit short on time. Based on the title, there wasn't a war or if there was a war, it wasn't in Afghanistan? Is that the general gist of the article? If not, then it seems like click bait. "U.S. officials" and "war in Afghanistan" encompasses a lot of people especially over an 18 year period of time. It wouldn't shock me that one or two of them didn't tell the whole truth.

Much easier to prove the biden's and clinton's corruption and conspiracies. biden admitted it and hillary isn't as smart as she thinks she is.

"A Bright and Shining Lie".
Change the location and names.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...ght-shining-lie.html

As a Navy guy in an army outfit in Afghanistan for most of 2011, it was disconcerting to hear many senior Army officers focusing on trivial metrics to "prove" we were "winning" in Afghanistan. I didn't make many friends by suggesting their comments boiled down to "the first decade of the war didn't go as well as it could have, but the second decade is off to a much better start!" We've poured a lot of blood and treasure into an effort to stabilize a corrupt government. The senior military officers will probably always push for a continued robust presence there - our civilian leadership needs to end U.S. involvement. Unfortunately, the withdrawal of U.S. forces is not likely to be good for the average Afghan.

I’ve done 7 deployments to Afghanistan including a year embedded with an Afghan attack squadron. Time to GTFO, we don’t have the political balls to kill the number of people we’d need to kill to win. And even if we did, it would gain our nation nothing.

Best course of action for our nations interest- leave immediately. The Taliban will takeover large portions populated mostly by people who want them to take over. Ok, fine by me. If internationally inclined terrorists take up residence, drop PGMs. Its an ugly outcome because we’d like to think we’ve evolved past brutality as the only lever our nation uses, but turns out those folks only understand brutality. And I say that having lived with them. They aren’t like us.

Big deal has the right idea

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Originally posted by arabiancowboy:
Best course of action for our nations interest- leave immediately. The Taliban will takeover large portions populated mostly by people who want them to take over. Ok, fine by me. If internationally inclined terrorists take up residence, drop PGMs.

Yup.

The war in Afghanistan has been an utter waste of lives, resources, and time for at least 15 years.

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Originally posted by RHINOWSO:

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Originally posted by gearhounds:

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Originally posted by 220-9er:
Sounds like they didn't learn some lessons from the 60's.

Didn't they? I'm sure the defense contractors then were making money hand over fist as much then as they do now.

Yes yes, the defense contractors force the US Gov't / DoD to fight a war.

MmmmmKay...

The defense contractors help lubricate the vocal cord of politicians to say yes. Great waste of $$$ and lives to involve american military in these 'wars'..

Has the Government ever told the truth about any war? In World War II the media became an extension of the war effort.They even enlisted Hollywood to make propaganda movies.

This does not surprise me.

Didn't we initially go there to bomb mountains where Binladen resided in a cave ? Also, thinking back, was there not a lesson already learned by the Russians in that shit hole ? Are we trying to show them we have better staying power ? What's to be gained from it ?

Finding Bin Laden should have been our sole objective there. Anything else was a fools errand. For a trillion dollars we've got dead US soldiers. Crippled and disfigured US soldiers. Children who lost their father or mother. Nearly twenty years of fraud, waste, abuse, death and destruction and Afghanistan is still the shit hole it was and always will be.

In addition to the above, look at how much money and effort we’ve pissed away on our “friends” in Pakistan to aid our efforts. More resources down a rat hole.

An unwinnable war in Afghanistan? Really?! Or is the WashPo just a bunch of quitters?

Isn't about time for China to take a turn at making Afghanistan whatever again?

That would be awesome watching them fail too.

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Originally posted by r0gue:
An unwinnable war in Afghanistan? Really?! Or is the WashPo just a bunch of quitters?

I think the WashPost yearns for its so-called glory days like when it published The Pentagon Papers and then (in their minds) brought down a president a few years later.

“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.“ — Winston Churchill

Empire after empire, nation after nation have failed to pacify what is today the modern territory of Afghanistan, giving the region the nickname “Graveyard of Empires, ” even if sometimes those empires won some initial battles and made inroads into the region.

In a area of the world where females are still traded away as commodities and systemic sexual assault by men on boys is considered "normal", it's no surprise that modern things such as "rights", "democracy", and "decency" have no meaning.

Afghanis only understand one thing - raw power. You succeed if you have your knee in their chests and your knife at their throats - but the minute you leave, they're scheming behind your back.

Nothing more to be gained by staying.

NOTHING.

There is no amount of money that could convince me to go fight on the ground there for a year.