Mr. Art of the Deal called off so-called secret peace talks with the Taliban, then he fired his National Security Adviser over policy differences. Bolton obviously had a lot of policy differences with Mr. AotD, but the timing tells me that proposed troop withdrawals from Afghanistan marked a turning point and it was bye bye Bolton.
Most reporting on the aborted peace talks has remarked on the fact that three presidents have now struggled with finding a way out of Afghanistan. And the answer seems to be as elusive as ever.
I have a surefire way of getting U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.
Pack the bags and get on planes, trains, automobiles, buses, boats, bikes … and get yourself home this instant.
If the soldier who was killed in the Taliban attack had been at home, he wouldn’t have been killed. But Sgt. Ortiz wasn’t in North Carolina, he was in Afghanistan. And doing what, exactly?
Avoiding “losing” apparently. That strikes me as a rather pathetic reason to have 14,000 troops occupying someone else’s country. And that foreign occupation is the reason there is a Taliban insurgency.
The Soviets tried occupying Afghanistan. They were there for ten years, and, like the U.S., could not prevail against an indigenous insurgency. They packed their bags and went home. Smart move.
Planes, trains, automobiles, buses, boats, bikes …
But see Andrew Bacevich’s article on http://www.commondreams.org (on the righthand side in commentaries) about the ethics of withdrawing troops from countries without attempting to ensure that the people in the country, particularly those who worked with us, have some protection. He uses Vietnam, and less so Iraq, as cases in point. I find his articles very thoughtful, and this one especially so.