President Obama Considering Faster Pullout of Afghanistan W/No Troops Left Behind

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7. that seems unrealistic

How long do you believe our men and women in uniform should be expected to serve as the buffer between those who identify themselves as Taliban and the rest of the Afghan people?

I've never never been convinced that our forces, collectively, do more good than harm in their defense of Kabul. We began the Obama term with an unprecedented escalation of forces far above Bush's deployment with the aim of pushing the Taliban out of regions like Kandahar. That mission was an abject failure; both on the stated aims to make that mission a model for the rest of the deployment; and, in the blowback which claimed thousands of Afghan lives and hundreds of American lives - far above the Bush total of casualties.

The result of all of that was a retreat to defend Kabul (like in Iraq in the wan of the Bush occupation when he pulled back to encircle Baghdad) and a flailing out with airstrikes and drone attacks. The defeat of al-Qaeda, which was at the center of the Obama strategy, is now a matter of semantics as he scrambles to get out without it looking like the sad rout that it inevitably has become.

We can't keep telling ourselves that we can keep Afghans from killing each other with this exhaustive occupation of force; the price has proven too high; the results and successes, using our own logic for remaining, have been few and far between; and our forces have always been counterproductive there; both in their activity and their presence.

The U.S.-led NATO operation should have been completely shut down, yesterday.