War in Afghanistan can’t be won

I can not believe that anyone can promote the asinine idea put forth by Jay Ambrose in his Aug. 24 column (“Trump’s Afghanistan strategy: Win the war”), that the United States can wage war and impose our will in a country on the other side of the world, where the populous does not support our troops.

We were thoroughly educated in the folly of this notion in Vietnam, where we had half a million soldiers fighting an extremely hot war and were soundly defeated.

There, too, we invaded the neighboring countries, on the premise they were harboring the “enemy,” again with catastrophic results.

If you want to know if a no-holds-barred approach to conducting war in Afghanistan works, ask Russia, which is a neighbor.

The purpose of our armed forces is to defend the United States, not to pompously inflate our ego internationally.