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Not quite: there was one person in the House who voted against the authorization of force in Afghanistan. She is my representative :-) And people continue to
by hyperbovine 17y ago
Not quite: there was one person in the House who voted against the authorization of force in Afghanistan.
She is my representative :-)
And people continue to universally agree that going in there was a good idea? I mean, really? I grant you that nearly everyone was for it in the weeks after 9-11. Even I said something to that effect. But, hey, I was 19 and naive. Were the same thing to happen again tomorrow, I would not be so quick to judge, for what seemed liked a good idea at the time looks a lot more questionable 8 years later. Bin Laden is free, Afghanistan's cost to us in terms of lives and treasure grows by the week, the Taliban still rule large parts of the country, and Al Qaeda is not crippled.
I am not asserting that the invasion was unjustified, but you have got to admit that it's highly debatable whether the benefits outweigh the costs in this, the eighth year of the war.
- alexgartrell 17y agoYeah, I agree that the costs are awful. The guys coming back aren't like they were when they left, for sure. But how can we know the costs of not going? It's really hard to nail it down to any particular influence, but there hasn't been a domestic attack since 9/11, and it'd be foolish to say that the war in Afghanistan hasn't played a role. Regardless, it was a hard choice, and easy to second guess. But that doesn't mean it's time to sit back and say "Yep, never should have went there in the first place." The better thing to wonder is "Where from here?"
- andreyf 17y agoit'd be foolish to say that the war in Afghanistan hasn't played a role A role in what? Attacks on the US? That seems far from obvious. One thing that it certainly played a role in is opium production, which the Taliban prohibited. It certainly played a huge role (to the tune of billions of dollars), and big power shifts in the international drug trade...
- DanHulton 17y agoDoes the phrase "lives and treasure" weird anyone else out a bit? I know this is off-topic, but "treasure"? It sounds like we're losing pirate booty by the bucketful out there. Where did this start?