Meet the Press roundtable was pretty good this morning, especially Sebastian Junger, Wes Moore and Tom Hick's comments. Junger has a new movie and a new book out. I wish the conversation could've been longer.
As humans, we shouldn't be in Afghanistan at all. War damages every human spirit. Soldiers get the full physical, mental and spiritual impact of war. The most ignorant thing we do is send soldiers off to war, break their spirits and then expect them to return to normalcy when they come home.
No war is ever "won." You can't win a war because if it costs one single life, then it can never be a win. The McChrystal debacle, in my mind, illustrates the idiocy of war.
But there are real world realities. Human beings do really dumb things. There are terrorists out there.
One of our nation's biggest blunders is invading Iraq and letting Afghanistan languish. We've helped to create a disaster in which there are no good solutions. Afghanistan's own leader, the loathsome Hamid Karzai, stands in the way of progress. Hicks says Karzai's government is the biggest problem in Afghanistan. But he says the biggest mistake would be to leave Afghanistan. Nothing is right in Afghanistan. It almost seems hopeless there.
A couple of good reads and two opposing opinions on Afghanistan today, one by Andrew Bacevich here and another by Tom Ricks here.
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