Everything in Its Own Time

For quite some time now I knew that the Obama Administration and our military were not on the same page when it comes to the war in Afghanistan, but I didn’t think that was literally the case.

Despite the fact that I regularly do book reviews, honestly I rarely attempt to tell people directly what to read. However, in this case I have to say all of the above are reading about the wrong war. Comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam on any level is bluntly a mistake. Other than the fact that there have been varying levels of public disapproval of both wars, they have absolutely nothing in common.

Regardless of U.S. involvement before the war in Vietnam, the conflict was a foregone conclusion. It would have happened with or without our intervention, and at worst, we exacerbated the situation for our own financial benefit – referring to the creation of jobs to arm and supply our soldiers on this one.

Some could call me a “truther” in a very loose manner because of this one, but Afghanistan is purely our own fault. If we hadn’t stepped in to help fight the Soviets, it could be argued that not only would we not be in a war there now, but also, there wouldn’t have been a 9/11. Conversely, if we hadn’t cut and run after the Soviets were defeated, and helped rebuild the country, we could have prevented the situation we’re in now. I’m not suggesting conspiracy theories or anything else like that – just plain old-fashioned mistakes in foreign policy that came back to haunt us.

That said, instead of reading books on Vietnam, perhaps the White House should be having special screenings of “Charlie Wilson’s War.” Honestly, they’d only need to watch about 15 minutes of the entire movie to get the point, as long as they watch the parts about Charlie Wilson trying to get cash to rebuild Afghanistan, and failing miserably. We left a power vacuum in Afghanistan all those years ago, and the Taliban filled the gap. Now we need to finish the job that we didn’t finish then. Argue all you like that the terrorists aren’t concentrated in Afghanistan anymore, so we don’t need to be there, or rationalize it any other way you like – you’re wrong.

Here’s the mantra – “We made the mess in Afghanistan long before 9/11. We need to clean it up before it comes back to bite us yet again.”

Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.