The head of U.S. Central Command said Sunday that Al Qaeda is no longer operating in Afghanistan, with its senior leadership having moved to the western region of Pakistan.
Gen. David Petraeus said affiliated groups have "enclaves and sanctuaries" in Afghanistan and that "tentacles of Al Qaeda" have touched countries throughout the Middle East and northern Africa. But he said the terrorist group has suffered" very significant losses" in recent months, and agreed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai's recent assessment that there is no Al Qaeda based in his country. ~Faux News May 10, 2009
I would like to lay out my reasons for why we should never have invaded Afghanistan, and why we should fight as hard, or harder, for the end of the Afghan war as most of us fight against the Iraq War.
For fun, I checked out what wikipedia had to say about the Afghan war:
The aim of the invasion was to find the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and other high-ranking al-Qaeda members and put them on trial, to destroy the whole organization of al-Qaeda, and to remove the Taliban regime which supported and gave safe harbor to al-Qaeda. The United States' Bush Doctrine stated that, as policy, it would not distinguish between al-Qaeda and nations that harbor them.
Am I truly the only American that sees the appalling logic of invading a country because a criminal resides within its borders? One argument is that the Taliban refused to hand over OBL, arrest Al Qaeda, and hand them over to the U.S. government.
This is something that 7 years of warfare, using the mightiest armed forces the world has ever seen, could not achieve.
Fact: The Taliban did not attack the United States. No Afghan was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
Yet we launched a full-scale invasion against Afghanistan:
A 2002 analysis by The Guardian estimated that as many as 20,000 Afghans died in 2001 as an indirect result of the initial U.S. airstrikes and ground invasion.
As many as 20,000. Think about that for a second. Neither the dead nor their government had anything to do with 9/11.
There are strategic national interests for staying in Afghanistan. There is natural gas and oil in the Caspian Sea for example. However, this is not the argument the government presents to us. They claim that Afghanistan is the central front in the fight against terrorism.
How can this be true when Gen. David Petraeus admits Al Qaeda in no longer in Afghanistan?
That the leadership may or may not be on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan is not an argument for having over 100,000 troops in the country.
At least the Bush administration bothered to make their lies semi-believable. This current administration claims with a straight face that we have to send all these troops to fight terrorists.
If they argued we needed to prop up the Karzai government we'd have a logical reason, albeit an insufficient one. This administration does not laud democracy as an end as Bush did. We talk about protecting America and this is a false reason of why we're there.
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The moral costs are heavy, the military/economic costs are heavy...what is the reward? Al Qaeda is not there so why are we?