Thomas Riggins
“Looking ahead to 2018, as President Ghani said, he believes we have turned the corner and I agree,” Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr. told Pentagon reporters on Nov. 28, referring to Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani. “The momentum is now with the Afghan Security Forces.” [Their momentum is in advancing to the rear.]
"Turning the corner" is better, I suppose, than "seeing the light at the end of the tunnel" -- which our incompetent generals kept seeing in Vietnam. It's probably true that we have turned the corner -- the wrong way into a one way street.
It only took four or five to win WW2 so if we are are still peering around corners in Afghanistan after 14 or 15 it means 1) we have an incompetent military that doesn't know how to fight these kinds of wars and we are just wasting our money giving it to the toy soldiers running the Pentagon -- if we are going to puts troops in the field they deserve an officer corps that knows what it is doing.
It only took four or five to win WW2 so if we are are still peering around corners in Afghanistan after 14 or 15 it means 1) we have an incompetent military that doesn't know how to fight these kinds of wars and we are just wasting our money giving it to the toy soldiers running the Pentagon -- if we are going to puts troops in the field they deserve an officer corps that knows what it is doing.
Of course 2) it's possible they don't want to win -- war is big business and makes billions of dollars in profits for those businesses and organizations that deal in war supplies, weapons, and collateral services to the military and we may need this and other conflicts we support to keep our economy functioning.
The way the government treats the veterans and risks the lives of the troops, especially since the Republicans have had control, but also under the Democrats, indicates it doesn't much care about the troops, which means the war to them is just another use of working people to generate profits for their business supporters and manipulate those dumb enough to fall for their cynical faux patriotism. As Trump says, "Make American Great Again" (i.e., easier for the rich to make money).
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