Obama campaigned against the war in Iraq and for the 'just war' in Afghanistan.
The idea that Al Queda will just leave us alone, if we leave them alone is just naive! These are crazy right wing religious fanatics who are obsessed with causing trouble in the West and who would love to get their hands on the Pakistani nuclear weapons to show us just how crazy they can really be! Hell, the crazy right wing religious fanatics here in this country won't leave Obama alone and he hasn't even been in office a year yet!
Afghanistan is so poor that its poorer than every nation in sub-Saharan Africa except one. Now that's poor!!!! But its population is still rapidly growing which increases its poverty and ignorance. Its a place full of illiterate tribal lords financed by a narco-economy the kills tens of thousands of Westerners annually and helps to finance international terrorism.
We need to solve this problem once and for all!
1. we need to pull all of our troops out of that expensive adventure in Iraq and focus on Afghanistan.
2. we need to pay Afghan military soldiers more than what the Taliban is paying its soldiers. That's right! The Taliban is frequently paying its troops more than were paying Afghan army troops to fight! They're only getting $120 a month in wages on average which is frequently less than what the Taliban is paying their soldiers. And this is something Afghan soldiers frequently complain about.
If you doubled the wages of the 80,000 Afghan troops that would cost us an extra $115 million dollars annually which is tiny compared to the total cost of the Afghan war which currently cost is now over $60 billion a year. Iraq, of course, cost over $100 billion a year. Tripling or quadrupling Afghan troop numbers over the next decade should do the job for a fraction of the cost of having US troops there-- if we finally start paying the Afghan army personal decently. But just being nice to right wing religious fanatics-- even here at home-- really doesn't work!
I should note that 849 Americans have died in Afghanistan with only 659 killed by hostile action since the Afghan war began 8 years ago. This is astonishingly low! The Vietnam War cost more than 58,000 lives (nearly 100 times the death rate in Afghanistan) during our 8 years there. Accidental deaths frequently cost more than 2000 lives annually in the US military when there's no war going on at all!
Marcel F. Williams