It’s time to get out of Afghanistan
Sending more troops to Afghanistan is a major mistake. Going after the Taliban was a good decision after 9/11. But it’s time to bring our troops back home and stop the spending. There is no way to win a war in a country that is spread out over 250,000 square miles. The Russians invaded this country in the 1980s and went back to Russia a defeated nation.
Brown University’s Watson Institute says the United States has spent $101 billion in 15 years trying to win a winless war in Afghanistan. The Taliban has taken back the little territory we took from it after 9/11. We should give the war lords who fight the Taliban as many weapons as they need, but let’s not have one drop of American blood ever spilled there again.
Have our politicians not learned one lesson from Vietnam? Iraq? Send our troops home now, and get out while we can.
Pat Clark
Columbia
This story was originally published September 2, 2017 at 8:30 AM with the headline "It’s time to get out of Afghanistan."