The link is here.
I quote directly from the beginning of the article:
Yes, Afghanistan is deteriorating fast and in need of urgent attention. But figuring out what to do in Central Asia is simple: Leave. Now.
Its true, I'm very biased on the Afghanistan issue. But regardless, its not difficult to agree that the U.S. can't waltz merrily about the world, tearing delicate societies apart, blasting infrastructure to pieces, rendering over a third of a country's arable land unlivable, destabilizing governments, creating near-unprecedented refugee crises, and bail immediately once the domestic political situation makes it advisable.
That's the Dwight Eisenhower/John Kennedy/Ronald Reagan/George Bush approach. That's the "oh goody I went to Harvard and I'm a major decision maker, so I get to play with people like chess pieces!" approach. That's the approach that made the U.S.'s moral-high-ground argument against the Soviet Union laughable. Much of sub-Saharan Africa is a destabilized mess because of the CIA's meddling in the region. Egypt, Poland, Libya, and the entire South American continent, the Carribbean, and Central America are still struggling to recover from the body blows that the U.S. dealt them.
If you broke it, you buy it.
Or rather, if you break something, and you don't buy it but put it quietly back on the shelf, you are a scumbag.
Afghanistan is not something that can be put back on the shelf quietly. Not anymore.
The U.S. singlehandedly saved Afghanistan from the Soviets. Without U.S. assistance, the Russians would either have been beaten to a bloody defeat, or the country would have gone down in flames. Either way, the provision of stinger missiles, black ops training, food, and various munitions made the (7th!) Afghan war against foreign incursion much less costly than it should have been.
Immediately after, the U.S. left Afghanistan to rot. That rot came back and bit it firmly, in various militant attacks against both civilian and military installations.
The U.S. decided to come back. Initially, it utterly broke the country down, from the bottom up, and set up a forgivably shaky framework for governance. Subsequently, due largely to Bush's idiocy, the country's heart was broken again.
In effect, the U.S. military burnt down a family's house, threw up a tarp to keep out the rain, then ran off to beat up a kid for his lunch money instead of finishing the construction. Now, Terence Samuel proposes that the U.S. look at the miserable family inside and say, "Sorry, I gotta go home now. Good luck!"
Are you serious?
Afghanistan is not Iraq, it will only become Vietnam if the public ignorantly turns on it with the same remarkable insanity that they showed in electing Bush twice, and militaries worldwide need to finish what they start.
