We went into Afghanistan for Osama bin Laden, not the Taliban. They just refused to give him up.
We stayed long enough. Too long. At least they've had 20 years of knowing what it would be like under a more modernized democracy (if heavily corrupt), and a whole generation educated from birth to adulthood.
It's their fight now. We shouldn't have let the mission creep into nationbuilding in the first place. We should have used Osama bin Laden's death as justification for total withdrawal.
They clearly are struggling in "their fight." It's simply morally unconscionable to abandon the Afghan people to this fate, especially since they have now experienced democracy. Quite frankly a lot of the debate over the Afghanistan withdrawal especially among the American left is quite selfish in the fact that they seem to not really care that life for many Afghanis, especially women and those of minority ethnic groups, will get worse under the Taliban, and just seem to excuse that with some version of "war bad."
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld should suffer horribly forever for blowing a generation of wealth and the blood of innocent civilians for this ridiculous charade. Obama doesn't come out smelling much better for refusing to end it, like LBJ.
Is life under the Taliban worse than the US Chair Force "accidentally" blowing up a hospital and murdering your sick child or pregnant wife?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike
This war and Iraq were the defining American mistakes of my lifetime. We will never get back the opportunities we lost and the guilt we bear for it.
Yes, I am pretty sure that the Taliban has killed more than 42 people. Let's not forget that the made pretty liberal (god, I hate that word in this context, but it works) use of the death penalty. They punished things like owning western media with death, not to mention absurd rules like banning women from leaving the house without a male guardian, requiring men to grow beards, banning women's education, and violating much of this was also punishable by death. It seems that people misunderstand fundamentally who the Taliban are, there's a reason that they sheltered terrorists, because their ideology is just as extreme as the terrorists.
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