Why are we there again?
Six U.S. service members died in separate attacks in Afghanistan on Saturday, another round of killings in what is shaping up to be the most violent summer of the nearly nine-year war.
How violent?
2010 coalition KIA (US in parenthesis)
January: 43 (30)
February: 53 (32)
March: 39 (26)
April: 34 (20)
May: 51 (34)
June: 102 (60)
July: 34 (22)
In the last nine years, that's 1,924 coalition forces killed, 1,171 of them American. And the trend is looking increasingly grim:
Obama promised to begin pulling out of Afghanistan on July 2011. Afghanistan is already lost. There will be no difference between pulling out now or pulling out in a year, except to the several hundred Americans and coalition forces who will die needlessly as a result of that delay.
Update: Americans want out.
Most Americans continue to say things are going badly for the U.S. in Afghanistan, and those assessments are more pessimistic now than they were just two months ago, a new CBS News poll shows.
Most Americans also want a timetable for withdrawal from the country.
Today, the poll finds, 62 percent of Americans say the war is going badly, up from 49 percent in May. Just 31 percent say the war in Afghanistan is going well.
Nine years into the war, 33 percent of Americans say they do not want large numbers of U.S. troops in Afghanistan for another year. Twenty-three percent of Americans say they are willing to have troops stay there for one or two more years.
Just 35 percent are willing to have troops stay longer than two years.