1)
The United States (along with other European countries including Russia and other non Islamic countries like India) is a terror target irrespective of what it does in Afghanistan. If you are an American, you are (in the abstract) a terror target already and have been for a long long time. The odds of you specifically dying in a terrorist attack are (and always were) very slim. Absolutely no disagreement from me. But we have to decide to either passively be the victim, or at least try and do something. Pulling out and sticking a target on our foreheads is the plan of naive and ignorant idiots with a deathwish.
2) No amount of destruction in Afghanistan will change that. Americans will die in future terror attacks whether you pull out of Afghanistan or not
Absolutely no disagreement again. But we have to decide to be active or passive participants in our own fate. After a long time of a rather passive policy towards Islamists, we've chosen to be active participants. Now that we're down that road we can take a number of different strategems:
a) we can take the ultra-right approach and kill every man, woman and child in Afghanistan through systematic carpet bombing and turn Afghanistan into a nuclear glass making factory, the "get 'er done" method. I think most reasonable people see this as the last bastion of morons on cowards.
b) we can carpet bomb Afghanistan with leaflets and letters asking them nicely to please stop thinking about killing us through a systematic campaign of nightclub bombings and airplane suicide pilots as part of an effort to bring forth a particular kind of global Caliphate. If you're old enough to remember events post 1980, you'll probably understand that this is hopelessly, childishly naive, suicidal and stupid (which mystifies me why this appears to be the majority course of action here on HN considering the average intelligence people here normally display).
c) we can try some other, middle, path that involves defusing the threat by improving conditions for the average "Mohammed" via a policy of specific nation building (as much as one can do in Afghanistan) and eliminating imminent threats from people that want to do us harm.
I think c is the right path, I think c is what we're trying to do. You'll get no argument from me that c is not always the path we've followed, particularly under the prior administration (and as the data shows). The problem I think is that we were trying to do c as run by people who thought a. I'm hoping that that situation is reversing itself under a hopefully non-moronic new leadership.
But you are simply, factually incorrect in thinking that the policy or actions is or ever was to pound Afghanistan back into the stone-age.
3) And no you don't have to have a "solution" before you say "This is not working".
Yes you do in this kind of case. In fact I'd say in most cases you can't do that in any capacity in life. "This is not working" can't be followed with "everybody stop whatever it is your doing!", is must be followed with "we should do this instead". Standing still is the same as going backwards because events outside your control will always overcome and move past you.
I hope that the new strategy is in fact a new strategy and not simply a doubling down on the past 9 years of incompetently run failure. We'll find out.
4) By that logic civilians could never decide to end a war. That is hardly democracy. There was no "solution" to Vietnam when America quit. That happened because American civilians made a decision they didn't want to keep paying in blood and treasure to "win" a faraway quagmire of a war.
When I grew up, my "uncle" was a South Vietnamese General ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguy%E1%BB%85n_Ng%E1%BB%8Dc_Loa... )who fled after the fall of Saigon and spent most of his remaining years trying to secure passage into the U.S. for his friends and family. I grew up steeped in tales of the end of that conflict. The Vietnam conflict solved itself, the U.S. (and the South Vietnamese) lost, full-stop.
More importantly, the two conflicts are not comparable in the way you are attempting to compare them. You may as well be comparing the Battle of Hastings to the Seige of Stalingrad. The Vietnamese Communists were not sending suicide bombers outside of Vietnam to your city to blow up a strategic civilian target as part of an effort to terrorize people into converting by the sword and establish a global Caliphate.
5) "Pull out" is just as valid a suggestion as "stay on". You'd still be fighting in Vietnam if "stay and fight till victory" were the only choice to end a foolish war. A suggestion has to be opposed with reason, not rhetoric like "But ... But .. that will make us terror targets" and "Our generals surely know what they are doing (if American history is any indication this is a very dubious claim)" or "You aren't a general How would you know?"
In what way would a passive response to the threat of global terrorism not be the same as sticking a target on our foreheads? If I came to your house, burned it down and started killing your family unless you converted to some particular brand of religion I happen to have chosen, you think the correct response is a shrug of the shoulders and/or do what I say? Is your brilliant stratagem to simply ignore me as I do this and hope I go away and get pushed around in the meanwhile?
I'm sorry but my and your respective worldviews are not even in the same room. I can never be convinced that the appropriate response to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda should be "meh".
6) "The 9/11 attackers were Saudi but you guys went to war with Iraq. The present day epicentre of Islamic terror is Pakistan/Saudi Arabia but you guys are fighting in Afghanistan, all the while funding the Pakistanis who fund the Taliban. Wtf? A war in which you fund the people trying to kill your soldiers, and your ally's intelligence services train and provide safe havens for your enemies is not winnable."
Agreed on all points. The U.S. response to the threat of terrorism was unfortunately crafted by ignorant, moronic, incompetent assholes who will probably never have to answer for the badness they spread across the planet. The good news is that I hope that if any good comes from the wikileaks leak is that it demonstrates conclusively how bungled and mismanaged the whole affair was quantitatively. My hope is that the new leadership is hopefully more competent to formulate a response that doesn't involve throwing a dart at a map of the world.
7) The next Islamic terrorist attack could come from Somalia or Yemen or the United Kingdom or the Balkans or Saudi Arabia, or Iran or Indonesia or Turkey or Egypt. Are you going to war with all of them (and stay a few decades in every ungoverned badland on the planet)?
None of these countries are the other. Yemen is not Somalia, Egypt is not the U.K., etc. Each place deserves it's own response. If it's the U.K. we'll probably sit down and have a chat about improving investigative responses. If it's Somalia we'll probably adopt a more "kinetic" approach. Afghanistan, in 2001, was not a place we could go and sit down and have a productive negotiation, "please stop harboring terror groups that conduct suicide operations outside your borders that kill thousands of civilians" was not a viable course of action.
8) If not why do you want to stay in Afghanistan? What is the plan for "victory"? And how is "victory" defined anyway?
I don't want to stay, it's a waste of time, lives and resources. There is no plan for victory. That is the definition of quagmire, one that we are all unfortunately in. Last I checked, the U.S. was not the only target of an Islamist terror campaign.
If I arbitrarily single you out and start beating you with my fists, do you try and make me stop? Or do you, randomly, stop being defensive and let me beat on your a little more? What's your definition of victory in a situation like that? My beating of you is arbitrary and random (in so much as you in particular are the target), there's no reasoning or convincing me that I shouldn't do that. If you want me to stop, you have to stop me. And even if you do, I might come back in a day or two and do it again. What's your strategy? You cannot talk me out of it, you cannot prevent it, you have to be where you have to be, and I have chosen you as the person to strike. You seem terribly sure that there's a way out of this type of situation that doesn't involve you fighting back.
9) I (personally) want America to win (I am in general very pro American and I take some flak for it locally) but "stay on till the Taliban is no threat" is an impossible goal for victory. You don't have enough money (trillions more), or the time it would take (many decades) or the fortitude to absorb the required casualties (tens ofthousands ), to have even a low chance of success.
Again, surprisingly, I don't disagree with you. Any sort of conclusion to this will not be a military one, but a soft one. Going back to the previous analogy, you have to figure out how to make me stop arbitrarily beating you, and once you do that, you have to implement that plan, and then see if it works, and all the while I'm beating you about the head and shoulders, so you have to defend yourself while you get your soft plan in place. We simply can't roll into Afghanistan, bomb a few caves, hold elections and wipe our hands. All that does is establish an environment that will devolve into exactly what we had before.