Now that polls show the majority of Americans think that the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting, and US troops are having to bear more and more of the actual combat, and with the elections coming up, is it pointless to try to defeat the Taliban?
The American people have two realistic choices. They can seriously commit to long-term occupancy of Afghanistan and all that this entails, or they can allow the administration to withdraw. Within months if not weeks of withdrawal, the Taliban will be back in Kabul and Al Qaida will have their training camps and command and control centers up and running again. With that, the Pakistani military will fall even more under the Taliban spell. If the US and NATO abandon Afghanistan, Pakistan will become a failed state, abet one with nuclear weapons. I seriously doubt India will accept that state of affairs, and therefore you can see the problem for the entire world. Both India and Pakistan share a border with the PRC, and India’s economy is becoming interwoven with the US economy closely resembling that of the US/China relationship.
Naturally as a neocon, my choice would be to garrison Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. Yes, it will be expensive, but compared to the alternative, it could be a bargain.

First step is to destroy all their Poppie fields- They harvest drugs and we walk right by those fields doing nothing. Its this very money that pays for these fighters. Burn them to the ground and make them grow other crops-Like food.

We’ll have to increase the fighting force to at least 200,000 to keep pressure on the. This is a long term war- Like the Russians we could be withdrawing with our tail between our legs. Not because they beat us, but because we now tried of throwing money into a big black hole. Of course that does not fix our terrorist Training camp situation, but hopefully taking away their drug money might help the cause.

This whole idea was never a win situation.

The only choice is occupation. Question is by whom.

When our soldiers are dying for their so called elections, the supposed recognized government are legalizing rape. The question I have is, what is the difference between the 'insurgents' and the government?

What will be will be and we'll know soon enough.

Personally, involvement in a discussion in ATS the other day convinced me I've been opposing the US instead of supporting it as far as 'war' Iraq and Afghanistan are concerned.

Ever since 9/11, I've been an idiot I see now, in opposing the US push into Muslim strongholds. That's a lot of years of being an idiot.

But now, I support the US and anyone else 100% in their crushing and smashing of Islamic fundamentalist hell-holes.

So much do I loathe fundamentalist Islamic rule and its barbaric, Stone Age mentality, not to mention its continual invasion of Western culture, that I wouldn't raise any objection if the US, Israel, Zionism or whatever bombed the heart out of those places and covered the lot in concrete and McDonalds.

This is my first coming-out as a supporter of what I used to call 'US oppression' of 'those poor innocent victims in Afghanistan and Iraq'.

Surely nuclear bombs would be faster and cheaper (and would save a lot of US, UK and other nations' troops) ?