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AS DIANA WEST AND JOHN BERNARD HAVE EXPLAINED OVER AND OVER AGAIN…WE LOST THE WAR BECAUSE WE NEVER NAMED THE ENEMY AND OUR RULES OF ENGAGEMENT WERE SUCH THAT SOLDIERS WERE DELIBERATELY
PUT IN HARM’S WAY TO AVOID INSULTING THE LOCAL SAVAGES AND THEIR BARBARIC MORES…..RSK
“We lost Afghanistan because we forgot that we never had it. We lost the war because we forgot that it was a war and decided that it was a humanitarian mission. We lost because we had come to believe that no war was moral unless it ended in the moral redemption of the foe. We lost the war because we could no longer justify a war to ourselves in the interests of our own defense, only in the interests of saving another people and another society from themselves. We lost Afghanistan because we still knew how to fight, but we no longer remember why we fought.”
Regardless of who wins this election in a few years the final planes carrying the last soldiers will shake off Afghanistan’s dust and take to the sky. They will leave behind a limited number of advisers, ex-military civilian contractors and a whole bunch of diplomats running out the clock in Kabul. A few years later when Islamist mobs are roaming the streets and rocket attacks on the US embassy have become routine, the helicopters on the roof will be back and the surviving diplomats will be on their way to new assignments in more peaceful parts of the world like Baghdad and Cairo.
The war in Afghanistan is lost and that loss is mostly unspoken. Had Obama never been elected then the left, in coordination with their Democratic big brothers, might have elevated the defeat to the level of another Vietnam. But that dream, nurtured in the early years of the Bush Administration, is a done deal after the Son of Jimmy Carter who ran on a platform of beating the Taliban. Instead of another Vietnam, the long war will be an unremarked defeat.
Neither side wants to talk about it and the American people just want to leave. The ending is written the cemeteries are full and all that’s left is to shake off the dust and go home.
Defeats however have to be learned from and no one intends to learn the lessons of Afghanistan. The people responsible for 1,500 deaths in implementing a directive to beat the Taliban without breaking a single fingernail on an Afghan civilian, even if he’s a Taliban gunman hiding behind a Burqa, will not pay the price for this. They will go on to lucrative gigs as lobbyists or leadership trainers, herding corporate executives around golf courses and trading on anecdotes about the time they almost came under fire.