But our humanitarian fantasy of replacing the Taliban with a tolerant Afghani democracy cannot be achieved by killing people and breaking things. It cannot be achieved at all, in my opinion, and certainly not by military power, because it's not a military problem.
Afghanistan isn't critical to Al Qaeda anymore. Pakistan is, Yemen is, Somalia is, Afghanistan isn't. So why do we have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and only tiny groups of covert soldiers and the odd drone in the others?
Because we're caught up in a humanitarian fantasy. We're going to make America safer by making Afghanistan better. But we're trying to do it with the military, under the lunatic delusion that we can somehow kill only the right people and break only their things.
We can't. We won't. We'll lose. And when we lose, we'll lose nothing. Other than the lives we've thrown away. In Afghanistan, we fight in vain.
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