Who wants to see U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan?

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Who wants to see United States troops stay in Afghanistan?
Not the Afghans.
Afghans kill each other with casual relish. They have done so for millennia. The area is not a nation in the sense of being a functioning state. Rather, it is a mish-mash of tribal territories run by warlords.
So the screeching about the deaths of more than a dozen Afghans at the hands of an American soldier is hypocritical in the extreme, coming as it does from people who cut off the noses of women suspected of infidelity, who accept "honor killings" of women whose "offense" was to have been the victim of rape, who strap bombs to their bellies and eagerly blow up themselves and any bystanders, old men, young children, doesn't matter who.
Why fight, bleed and die for these hypocrites? Why try to give them nationhood when, taken as a whole, they don't want it?
Afghanistan's offense against the United States was to have been complicit in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist bombings staged, not by the ruling Taliban, but by the Al Qaeda terrorists given sanctuary by the Taliban.
We killed hundreds of thousands of people in retaliation. We sent the ruling Taliban scuttling into exile, forcing them into dreary Stone Age existence in mountainside caves, an Alley Oop lifestyle that meshes well with their primitive Seventh Century ultrafanatical interpretation of Islam.
All that remains is to kill Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban in 2001, and he isn't even inside Afghanistan at the moment.
Once that is done, we ought to pull our troops, with a blunt warning: If we are forced to return by a repetition of the run-up to Sept. 11, 2001, Kandahar and Kabul will be left flat, green and glowing in pulsating post-nuclear atomization.
That would be awful, true. But if the Taliban seeks Islamic Paradise, we are equipped to send them there if they abet the killing of our noncombatants again.
As for nation-building, we have spent more than a decade in showing them how it should be done. If they are so stupid as to have not absorbed the lessons by now, further instruction is hopeless.
Bring the troops home now, in 2012, not in 2014.
- Denny Bonavita