While one can and does agree with most of what you say Alon! Walking away or abandoning innocent women and children to a fate worse than death, is never ever going to be an option!

We need different strategies and another surge and another and another, all timed to coincide with the spring time surges of increasing costly, Taliban cross border adventures.

The continuing use of drones could be trebled to harry and pursue/collect intell. Some of which will locate the poppy crops that almost alone finance the Taliban's military cross border adventures, then with that intel in our pocket.

Use that remotely collected intel, to decimate these border hopping, bloodthirsty maniacs and destroy their means of finance! The pre-harvest poppy crops.

We just need to make the price not worth the prize! Even if that means, peacefully where possible? Occupying Afghanistan for another fifty years.

Fifty years from now, Afghanistan could be very different place.

Particularly if some of our money was invested in life and amenity improving infrastructure, some of which like water, electricity, radio and television could be used to win hearts and minds!

A must do, before we abandon these folk to their fate! When virtually indestructible self repairing robots, could be tasked with closing porous borders and with that done and dusted? Ending this stone age, man made madness, forever!
Alan B.

yep only Israel in the middle east is a demonstration of a civilised society. A pity so many haters of the GOd of Israel want it destroyed.

This from an astute American,
"In early October 2001, the Bush administration unleashed its air power on Afghanistan, a campaign that, in a sense, would never end but simply spread across the Greater Middle East. (By now, the U.S. has launched repeated air strikes in at least seven countries in the region.) At that moment, someone emailed me an article by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan who had been in the U.S. for years but had continued to follow events in his country of birth. His piece, which appeared at the website Counterpunch, would prove prescient indeed, especially since it had been written in mid-September, just days after 9/11.  At that moment, as Ansary noted, Americans were already threatening -- in a phrase adopted from the Vietnam War era -- to bomb Afghanistan “back to the Stone Age.”  What purpose, he wondered, could possibly be served by such a bombing campaign since, as he put it, “new bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs”?  As he pointed out, Afghanistan, then largely ruled by the grim Taliban, had essentially been turned into rubble years before in the proxy war the Soviets and Americans fought there until the Red Army limped home in defeat in 1989.  The rubble that was already Afghanistan would only increase in the brutal civil war that followed. And in the years before 2001, little had been rebuilt.  So, as Ansary made clear, the U.S. was about to launch its air power for the first time in the twenty-first century against a country with nothing, a country of ruins and in ruins.
From such an act he predicted disaster. And so it would be. At the time, something about that image of air strikes on rubble stunned me, in part because it felt both horrifying and true, in part because it seemed such an ominous signal of what might lie in our future, and in part because nothing like it could then be found in the mainstream news or in any kind of debate about how to respond to 9/11 (of which there was essentially none).
TBC

So the first word to fully catch my attention and set me in motion in the post-9/11 era was “rubble.”  It’s sad that, almost 16 years later, Americans are still obsessively afraid for themselves, a fear that has helped fund and build a national security state of staggering dimensions.  On the other hand, remarkably few of us have any sense of the endless 9/11-style experiences our military has so imprecisely delivered to the world. The bombs may be smart, but the acts couldn’t be dumber."

Cheers
Geoff

Talking of dumber Runner, where did you get the fanciful notion Israel is a "civilised society". If you truly believe that you are a deluded individual

And where did you get the idea that Israel is a democracy?

One of the three major requirements in any democracy is that ALL citizens are equal before the Law.

That is definitely NOT the case in Israel.

Yeah!.....and Israel has all three.......just not to the same person at any one time!

While the author's reasons for exiting Afghanistan are rather convoluted and self-serving, nonetheless I'd agree its time to get out.

The reasons for going into Afghanistan were entirely legitimate and valid. But staying was a strategic error. Remember that at that time there was still the after-glow of the hope that the defeat of the Soviet empire might allow for a new world order to be established where co-operating great powers enforced human rights universally. So the US decided to hang around and help the Afghans establish their democracy. It was an error born of false hope and failed to understand that these people are so mired in their moribund anti-humanism that democracy or even basic decency are unattainable.

A better policy would have been to go in, flatten anything that the Soviets had missed, scatter and remove whatever government persisted replacing it with something that stood some chance of success, and then piss off - with the warning that the sheer hint that terrorists were being offered protection would result in regular visitations by the odd couple of hundred cruise missiles.

We (the west) don't leave now because we don't want to admit that lives were sacrificed to a losing proposition. So we hang around hoping the justify those lost lives.

The US can make its own arrangements but Australia, if led by someone who could see past the next poll, could simply advise that we we've had enough and leave, vowing to, as best we can, insulate ourselves from the Afghan plague by cutting all ties with that God-forsaken race.

You've gotta laugh however that the solution offered by the author is to just give a few warlords a few hundred million to carry on the fight. Struth, Bush was naive but that idea beats all.

But what could go wrong? After all, who ever heard of corruption among the Afghan hierarchy? No chance at all that a large part will be siphoned off to purchase the best of the Bacha Bai boys for our loyal warlords. No chance that the Swiss accounts will be working overtime. Wow.