This is basically a re-post of an earlier report I did.  It might have been a bit before its time.

It's easy for me to sit at my computer station and judge international policy on warfare.  People like me used to be known as "Arm chair athletes".  Now, I guess you could call us "Home office world leaders".

As most of us know the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were supposedly pushed out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan.   OK, I have already stated how easy it is to make my world policy judgment from home, but even a moron could see that our war in Afghanistan has been an absolute disaster.

Imagine this, we go into a country chasing after the supposed perpetrator of the 9/11 catastrophe.  We track him right to the far corner of this nation and then rather than going in and taking him ourselves, we back off and let his countrymen (who consider him to be the greatest modern day hero) go in to kill him instead.  Somehow he escaped, imagine that!

Now imagine this....   We don't complete this objective, so we make a new objective which is to free the country from Taliban rule.  How do we do it?  We battle, and corral, and push these fighters right to the same corner where we lost track of our original objective.  They then cross the border into Pakistan just like Osama Bin Laden.  What happens next?   After they cross the border, we put undo pressure on an already stressed out Pakistan to kill and/or capture all of the objectives that we could not.

Let me stop right now and explain to you this thing. Afghanistan is the equivalent of the former Soviet Union's Vietnam.  The terrain is completely inhospitable to invasion. The people are quite another story altogether.  How do you fight a war in a country where the policeman, who assisted you yesterday, is now shooting at you with a mask on today?  How do you fight a war where the tribal chieftain, who gave you information yesterday, is hiding the very people you were looking for today?  How do you fight war in a country where the children you watched playing kickball in the street this morning, are wiring the improvised explosive device that has your name on it this afternoon?  How do you fight a war like this?  As fast as you can, that's how.

I have heard politicians say that if it takes us a hundred years we should remain in Afghanistan.  That's nonsense!  In order to win there, we would have annex that country and stay for a thousand years.  In other words there is no winning.  And speaking of poor policy decisions, think about this.  We went into a country where there is no nuclear arsenal and pushed our enemy into the country that has one.  I'd like to know which genius made that decision. Now, we're all concerned that they're going to destabilize the government of the country with the bombs.   I guess hindsight is twenty/twenty.  We need to back out of the mountain border region and let the Pakistani army push the Taliban back into the country which has no nuclear weapons.  They went to Pakistan because they had nowhere else to run.  They're going to fight somebody and they would rather fight the Pakistani army than ours.

Now it seems the Taliban are back and stronger than ever. Problem is, they never really left.   They know how to settle down when they have been overcome.  And they know how to resurge when their enemy backs off.  45,000+ troops does seem like a good idea to sustain our needs right this moment and far be it from me to be able to know better than our battle hardened commanders what is necessary to win that war and control that country.  I will however offer my limited opinion on the subject, because I don't think even twice that number will be able to keep that country stable in the near future.

Here is my assessment.  Since we are in a country where the enemy appears and disappears with greater ease than a magic act, we need to take that into account before we decide to set ourselves up for the hundred year war.

We should have gone into Afghanistan and killed or captured as many targets as possible in a short amount of time, and then we should have left for a while.  When the enemy began with the rhetoric and resurgence, we should have returned and done the same thing.  We lost fewer troops and killed more enemy in the initial confrontation than during the protracted war.  This is how you have to fight in Afghanistan.   We won't change that country by warfare and that is self evident.  And I'm sure we don't have the economic resources to build that country from the ground up.  It's time to take a step back and think about what it will really take to win that war and the hearts of the people.  Then we should decide whether or not we can afford it.