Roliing Stone’s Michael Hastings has an insightful point in his follow up to the who General McChrystal mess. It is the epitome of the senselessness of war.
Here is the narrative we’re about to be sold: Things will be tough in Afghanistan. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. But eventually, with good old American perseverance, violence will drop (fingers crossed). When that happens, U.S. soldiers will stop dying in large numbers — and Americans will stop paying attention in large numbers.
It’s a comforting narrative, but it’s likely to prove to be a false one. Even if counterinsurgency works here in Afghanistan as it did in Iraq, the best we can hope for is to turn defeat into a face-saving draw. We will have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to pursue a strategy that, in the end, probably won’t make us any safer from terrorists.
Read the whole column as I just did. After reading a lot about this mess I think if I were President I’d just fold up the tent and tell all the troops to come home. The way to win this war is not on the ground but through intelligence. You guys figure this thing out, we’re bringing them home and hope to win the fight a different way because this plan has no chance of success.
Today let us pray for peace and for justice. That God indeed will protect us from all evil, foreign and domestic, and that we might be able to protect not merely our country, but the world from terrorism.