Subject: Re: Remember Afghanstan!
I'm not going to say the withdrawal was done well by either man.

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It's possible the last "withdrawal" from a military battle that looked like the loser walked away with any dignity might have been the red coats at Yorktown. Seriously... Can you name any example in the history of the last 200 years where the loser in a war walked away gracefully with head held high?

And THAT is the problem with the American "widthdrawal" from Afghanistan. No military or political figure is willing to state the reality of what actually transpired there. The United States reacted to a terrorist event by launching a conventional war in a land-locked desert country and conducted a twenty year "war." During that war, we changed leaders three times, changed miilitary strategies probably ten times and changed public rationales at least four times (get bin Laden, provide education to Afghani girls, help establish democracy amid the corruption of Karzai, prevent ISIS from using the state as al Qeda did). We might have eventually shrunk ISIS down to a manageable threat, partly by pushing it into Syria, but the United States UTTERLY FAILED in every other aspect of its stated goals for twenty years and the trillions of dollars spent.

Show me any leader capable of pulling off a withdrawal from that circumstance while making it look like MacArther wading ashore re-capturing the Phillipines and I'll show you a country that is completely deluded. There is no way to CHOREOGRAPH a withdrawal from such a war and make it appear "honorable." The only act that can provide any semblance of honor is to decide to abandon such efforts as soon as possible and avoid adding more names to future monuments and adding more veterans to our medical rolls for PTSD.


WTH