End the Afghanistan War

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38405052/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/

I've been beating this drum for a long time, shortly after 9/11. This linked article leads with the headlines that the leaks regarding the Afganistan War put soldiers at risk -- our leaders have put soldiers at risk, unnecessarily, in a region which is fighting against our help, even after tens of billions in aid, and hundreds of billions in war costs -- but, money can be replaced, lives can't.

I'm not a bleeding-heart dove, not when it comes to self-defense, but this war is a political excercse which needlessly causes deaths of young men and women and wastes needed resources. The apologists for Bush and Obama, the intellectuals who've sold their souls to the State, need to wake up from this State-induced, patriotic trance, or, in the case of Democrats, this horrible dream of nation-building.

As the adminstration is puffing out its chest by raising Petraeus to Super-Warrior status and swipes aside charges of weakness by declaring the deadline as just a timeline to transition and analyze strategy, the war devolves into a miasma of disloyalty and active resistance by our "allies". Pakistan is actively training Taliban to kill Americans, after receiving billions in aids -- the drones, as I suspected, are problematic, to say the least -- too many people are dying because our government is practicing politics.

We can no longer allow this to go on.

Update on Monday, July 26, 2010 at 07:47AM by M. Farmer

One more thing -- in relation to my recent posts in which I wrote about about the difference between acting on principles and acting on utilitarian pragmatism and politics -- this is what happens. The administration and the congress have acted through political means, shifting to polls, pragmatically manipulating situations, rather than rely on a center core of principles.

What we need more than ever are integrity and principles -- it appears government is bereft of both.