Quote:Now, as an example, Vietnam. Major clusterfuck, we lost tons of people, they lost tons of people, and in the end the same result happened if we hadn't even tried at all. So, yeah, you could say it was all a waste.
Can you seriously look at Afghanistan and think that the ultimate outcome is going to be any different than Vietnam.
Yes, I know that the leaders were in Afghanistan. So what? If a bank robber runs into a school will the cops burn the school down just to get him? Okay - bad example. These days they might. Ultimately we got bin Laden with a small group - not an army. We had an administration which thought that any problem could be solved by dropping bombs on it. They conned themselves into thinking that we'd be greeted as "liberators." As a result we have taken a further 20,000 casualties on top of the original 3,000 and that's not including Iraq which was an even bigger clusterfuck than Afghanistan. And, for what? To prop up sleazy bastards like Karzai and Maliki?
We cannot police the whole world.
I certainly understand why any soldier would not want to think too deeply about the sacrifices they made.
I'm not so sure about the veterans idea though. As the saying goes "old soldiers never die because young soldiers do all the fighting."
