Ending the Endless War

President Joseph Robinette Biden continues to exceed my expectations of him (I make no bones about being Team Warren during the primaries), and his decision to pull most of the American and NATO troops out of Afghanistan by September 11 is, I believe, the right thing to do.  The United States has had a military presence in Afghanistan for twenty years now, with little progress to show for it, I believe that it's 'magical thinking' to believe that a continued military presence would somehow start to work after two decades of stagnation and failure.

Personally, I was against a wholesale military invasion of Afghanistan (doubly so against an invasion of Iraq).  I remember at the time saying, "This is a job for a 'James Bond', not for a 'Patton'."  The campaign against Al Qaeda should have been a police action with a small footprint- a handful of CIA spooks backed by a unit of Special Forces should have been deployed against Bin Laden... one doesn't swat mosquitos with a sledgehammer.  As it was, the US military never got Bin Laden in the Afghan theater of war.

There is a role for UN personnel and employees of NGOs in Afghanistan, to carry out much needed development work, but this is not work for the military.   More than 2,300 American soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan, with about 20,000 wounded... it's time to end the seemingly endless war, enough blood has been spilled, American, NATO, and Afghan.