From the Wall Street Journal:
Insurgents staged a series of attacks across Kabul on Tuesday, with rocket-propelled grenades, gunfire and suicide bombers targeting the U.S. Embassy, in one of the most brazen Taliban assaults on the Afghan capital.
A spokesman for Kabul police said the Taliban first struck the U.S. and other embassies, then launched assaults at several other targets in the city, including suicide-bomber attacks on a traffic-control office and on a high school. A school bus also was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, wounding several young children. Police rushed to the scene to unload bloodied children from the damaged bus…
Savages to the end – and the reason why, no matter how long and hard the fight is, we can’t withdraw…not until at least a semblance of stability is built in to the Afghan regime. We can’t set a time limit on this – though we can, as time goes on, likely use ever fewer US troops as the Afghan forces become more capable.
Trust me on this, I’m tired of it, too – and I bet the troops are even more tired of it. But to quit is to turn the people of Afghanistan over to beasts in human skin. We can’t, with honor, do that.
Blogs For Victory 
Until we are ready to defeat them the way we did imperial japan and nazi germany things will not change. Thier whole system of beliefs were were utterly defeated and humiliated on the battlefield resulting in unconditional surrendur. Until it is made clear that the imams, mullahs, and ayatollahs preaching violent jihad in the madrassas and mosques is unacceptable this is an unwinnable war.
We are dealing with the symtoms not the disease.
GMB,
And as long as we’ve got a Left with their grubby mitts on the reins of power who believe it’s not only acceptable but desirable to sacrifice our soldiers’ lives in order to minimize civilian casualties, it’s not only unwinable but unending.
Spook
The opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq comes mainly from the left not from the right. Of course if everyone got on the same page in opposition and a withdrawal occurred that would be best.
bardolf,
Yeah, it would be best if all those Afghans who choose to fight along side us were betrayed by us and then slaughtered by the Taliban. Nothing like another cut-and-run operation by the United States to make the world a better place…tell me, would you hold a memorial service for those who would be murdered after we left, or since they are foreigners and far away, would you not care, at all?
Mark
If after 10 years of US sacrifice the Taliban is so strong compared to Afghan fighters then we can never leave Afghanistan. Characterizing leaving after 10 years as “cut and run” is just your love of empire. The problem of not just going in, killing the bad guys who harmed the US and leaving has generated a dependency that you rail against liberals for creating on domestic issues.
I don’t want anyone to be killed anywhere on the planet. Not abortion in the US, not genocide in Africa, … But the GOP doesn’t care about most of those innocent deaths in the world so it really is false to declare concern for the Afghan fighters. You don’t care. You don’t care. You, Mark, don’t care. It’s just a talking point.
At some point the Afghan people implicitly decide they don’t mind the Taliban if it can become as strong as their “army” despite the world’s lone superpower suffering 10 years of casualties on their behalf. The Afghan people decide they don’t mind the Taliban way of life. The same is true in Mexico. The Mexican people don’t really despise the drug cartels that much or they would take up opposition.
When people from the North decided that slavery was an abomination that could no longer be tolerated they paid the price in the blood hundreds of thousands of lives. 300,000+ dead from the North alone, when the overall population was in the tens of millions.
Bardolf,
164,000 men are currently in the Afghan national army, more than 8,000 Afghan soldiers have been killed – and that doesn’t count Afghan civilians deliberately butchered by the terrorists over the years. Our dead are a terrible loss, but they are not even 1/4th the Afghan losses, military alone. More than half the coalition dead come from two southern provinces of Afghanistan, fifteen provinces have had 25 or less coalition deaths. There are plenty of Afghans who are clearly not on the enemy side (or deaths would be high throughout the country) and there are plenty of Afghans willing to fight for a non-Taliban future. I will never, ever agree to abandon them. Honor forbids it.
I will never, ever agree to abandon them. Honor forbids it.- Mark
Can honor set to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is
honour? a word. What is in that word honor? what
is that honor? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it?
He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no.
Doth he hear it? no. ‘Tis insensible, then. Yea,
to the dead. But will it not live with the living?
no. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore
I’ll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon
GMB,
Iran is the ultimate target…which is why we can, at best, only hope for a reasonably stable Afghan regime not overtly allied with our enemies…but once Obama is out of office, things can change.
I disagree Mark. The ultimate target is the imams, mullahs, and ayatollahs preaching violent jihad. You can occupy all the territory you want but it will not effect the end game.
It would be like killing hitler but allowing the nazis to carry on.
GMB,
We’re pretty much on the same page…but I just identify a clear, “know where it is” target.
Let me ask you a question Bardolf. You and I are on the same page with a lot of our views. However this is not one ofthem. The question is, if we withdrew totally today from astan would that end the war?
Of corse it would not. Not only would astan fall back into the taliban fold, it is highly probable that a lot of the enemy would seek ways to follow our troops home. That would be something not to look forward to. You fight the enemy on thier home turf not your own.
Yes I want this war ended and I want my brothers and sisters to come home. I want them to come home winners with no doubt about it. To not do so will invite a never ending war which the ruling class seem to want.
GMB
It would end the war for the US. I don’t buy all the hype. We left Vietnam and the enemy didn’t follow our troops home. I don’t see attacks on Russia from the Taliban after they left. These are just needless sacrifices.
The US is already the winner in the war no doubt about it. That you have doubts that we won in Afghanistan means you are using the metric from a fight with advanced economic countries from WW2. You can’t expect the same unconditional surrender in a country of provinces that you would get from a united country like Germany or Japan. It would be like the US breaking up into states and China taking control of DC. That wouldn’t mean anything in Iowa.
The mentality for the war in Afghanistan is like the war on drugs.
Big difference with Vietnam war is we don’t have institutions preaching that it is okay to strap on a bomb and detonate it in a pizzia parlor or library. Yet.
You are not taking into account the muslims who are preaching violent jihad right here in the United States. They are here. They have thier disciples. Nidal was just the first step.
You can’t hide in a hole forever.
GMB
I don’t buy the hype. The mideast would just be a lot of sand lost to history if there wasn’t oil under the sand.
The Japanese institutionalized suicide for their citizens in case of invasion. Nothing much happened after WW2 with their suicide trained people. You say Muslims are different because but I don’t see the huge difference. I don’t buy the hype.
Thats maybe because we humiliated Imperial Japan. We beat them to the point of unconditional surrender. The circle is now complete!
Until islam is made to account , nothing will change. You as an academic are another target. All your freedoms disappear under islam.
Happy day.
GMB
I as an academic am not afraid of Islam taking over the US any time soon. I think it’s a bunch of hype. Certainly, my academic freedom is not so valuable that you or any other man should die for such a small thing.
In the day my freedoms are in danger from Islam or another religion I will not let another man make a sacrifice on my behalf. My life isn’t that valuable and I have my reward.
Mr. Bardolf, I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m a generally left-of-center friend of Mark’s who used to post here regularly before the content of the discussions deteriorated. I suspect that you and I would probably agree on many if not most issues. That said, you,sir, are utterly inhuman.
The Afghan people don’t mind the Taliban? The Mexican people don’t mind the cartels? Tell me, Mr. Bardolf, have you ever met a young Afghan woman with a wild and desperate scheme to re-purpose her country’s economy into providing India with medicinal painkillers, so that it could have the revenue to support a government capable of maintaining order? Have you ever seen the fear and concern in a Mexican refugee’s eyes as she tells you of how several decapitated corpses were found not far from her mother’s home in Ciudad Juarez? It’s all well and good for you to say that you would march stoically into the blades, but when the time actually comes to throw away your life, and the lives of those who depend on you for sustenance, you might not find yourself so foolhardy.
“It would end the war for the US”? Yes, I suppose that’s true, until the next time we get sick from living too close to the rotting corpse of a deceased nation. Abandoning Afghanistan worked fine for us in the 90’s, after all, at least until the 2000’s rolled along. But In Afghanistan a million people perished in the resulting civil war. And I hate to break it to you, but those were real people, with real lives and real ambitions, just like you and I. You are the essence of American hubris, that believes that existence stops once you leave our shores, and that ten thousand American dead is an unspeakable tragedy, whereas a million dead foreigners is just part of the landscape.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that you are necessarily a bad person. But you need to broaden your horizons a bit. You are living in a bubble, and your ignorance is affecting the political process and potentially costing lives.
During the debate, there was an Afghani woman that asked what would happen to the women in Afghanistan if we pulled out, and what responsibility those candidates felt they have. I didn’t like any of their responses as the correct answer would be that the Afghanistan men need to be responsible for the Afghanistan women. And I use the term “Afghanistan men” lightly, as most of them are backwoods barbarians.
baldork
after w left Viet Nam the commies murdered close to 2-3 million people.
Neoconehead
How many Americans have murdered how many Americans since Roe v. Wade? Yet I don’t see the GOP calling for soldiers or any one else to sacrifice to end the practice. We are told to just wait for the right time legislatively.
Bardolf, the anti-abortion advocate? I do believe that is the first time I have seen you say anything about abortion at all. I may have missed it.
BTW. You are exactly right. Wait until the right time. Tommorrow will be the right time.
GMB
Scroll through the archives. You missed it dozens of times. I like to remind Neoconehead on occasion that it was a GOP packed supreme court that was responsible for Roe v. Wade.
Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. You are sounding more and more like one of us wacky wingnuts all the time.
Is it tommorrow yet?