So President Trump has decided that he wasn’t right during the campaign when he said Afghanistan wasn’t winnable and we should get out. We sort of knew that he would listen to the Deep State once he was in office and the Deep State has reasons for being in Afghanistan that don’t involve winning. It’s in their institutional interest for us to remain mired in a war that nobody can win.
But, hey, we’ll go surging in there like a bore tide and it will seem to work for a while as the body counts on all sides rise and we did the country a little deeper into the $21 trillion in the hole, a little closer to the reality of national bankruptcy.
Let’s be clear about this. President Bush 2 had a reason for going into Afghanistan. They were harboring the terrorists that attacked the country on 911. There is no shame in hitting back when someone kills 3000 non-combatants. We should have gone in, crippled Al-Qaeda and left, regardless if the Taliban were still in control or might have come back. Afghanistan was not our concern and their internal terror was not something we could fix. President Obama had a chance to get us out and instead, he did “the surge” and just dug us in deeper, showed the tick a better vein to suck our national lifeblood. And now it is President Trump’s turn. None of three of them is any better or worse than the others. They all doubled down on stupid.
And, no, Hillary Clinton would not have made it one wit better. She SUCKS at diplomacy. Go study the four wars she started as Secretary of State and we’re still in three of them. She never owned up to tearing Yemen or Syria apart and she bragged about how she made Libya happen. Based on everything I’ve studied about her, If she’d been elected president, we’d already be in World War 3 and she’d be proud of starting it.
None of these people should be in charge of anyone’s lives, least of all the lives of American soldiers who will be put in the line of fire. Worse than that, every time we aggress against a foreign country, we risk having them hit back against us. They may not have the means to conduct a stand-up war against us, but they definitely have the means to majorly disrupt our way of life here. Just go through the airport and let a TSA agent feel you up and you’ll understand what I mean.
We’ve lost a good deal of our freedom of movement and privacy because of interfering in the internal workings of other countries. I’m far more afraid of our government’s spying on its own people than I am of whatever is going on in Afghanistan. If we withdraw our troops, it won’t matter to us anymore. But the government being able to store all of our emails and phone recordings and go through them to build computer dossiers on everyone — yeah, that’s not a good thing.
Going to war in Afghanistan and then staying at war in Afghanistan is what got us to this point. “Winning” in Afghanistan may be a good excuse for completing the authoritarian shift. Hopefully Congress will say “no”, as they did with Obama over Syria, but even then … you know that didn’t stop Obama from advancing an illegal, unconstitutional war in Syria. We have to assume it won’t stop Trump … or stop the Deep State operatives who are whispering in his ear.
Just stop squabbling over who is in office for a moment. STOP! Think about this. We’ve been on this trajectory for three presidents and it wouldn’t have mattered if Clinton had become president instead of Trump. What does that tell you about the Office of the Presidency? It’s got nothing to do with political party. The trajectory may vary slightly from Republican to Democrat to whatever Trump is, but it heads in the same general direction. Why? Maybe because the person in the Oval Office is a puppet for the Deep State, the career bureaucrats who stay “in office” for decades while the president and his staff change every 4-8 years.
Get rid of the current president and nothing changes. No matter what he or she promises on the campaign trail, they will change their mind once in office.
Or have their minds changed for them.
#afghanistan, #trump, #commonsense, #nonpartisan, #surge
aurorawatcherak 
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