- What’s the dumbest aspect of contemporary U.S. foreign and defense policy? There’s no shortage of worthy candidates: the fruitless pursuit of strategic missile defense, which has cost more than $200 billion since the 1980s but still can’t provide convincing protection against even a nuclear pipsqueak like North Korea; President Donald Trump’s foolish flirtation with a global trade war, and especially his transparently comical claim that imports from Canada — Canada? — constitute some sort of national security threat; or even the blank check the United States has given its various Middle East allies to interfere in places such as Yemen, mostly unsuccessfully. And don’t get me started on Trump’s handling of North Korea or Iran.
These are all valid contenders — and there are no doubt others — but for my money (and yours), the single most indefensible and brain-dead aspect of U.S. foreign policy today remains the fruitless but never-ending effort to defeat the Taliban and achieve some sort of meaningful victory in Afghanistan. The United States has been trying to do this for so long that the arrival of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Kabul on Monday, on the heels of the country’s latest broken ceasefire, went unnoticed by most Americans. Many have probably forgotten (or never knew) how America’s involvement in Afghanistan even started — including some of the troops now being sent there.
Do you know who're the sole forces seeing combat in Afghanistan right now? It's only SOF. Special operations forces fucking LOVE war. No complaints will be coming from soldiers on this one. No one cares how the war started, as long as they get their share. Mandatory service or the draft would drastically change our nations awareness, but in what situation would either of those happen? We're within months of the day when kids born after 9/11 can serve in the military. We could have (maybe-of for shit's sake I can't get the formatting to work properly, google Jim Gants One tribe at a time) won this at one point. Instead we repeat the same mistakes day after day. Let it become a radical safehaven(to a point). It's the endstate no matter what and it's better to cut our ties and stop bleeding ourselves dryMany have probably forgotten (or never knew) how America’s involvement in Afghanistan even started — including some of the troops now being sent there.