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Permalink Reply by Jack/dt on June 2, 2011 at 7:23pm

The thing about polls is, they can be slanted, interpreted, massaged and fingered, so it's best to be dubious, at best.

The war in afghanistan, now that OBL is dead, should be over. We went in THERE specifically because of and to get, OBL. He's gone, so should we.

We should NEVER have gone into iraq, the whole WMD was a red herring. A LOT of money has been made on both wars (think Halliburton, no-bid contracts).

Only one in five Australians thinks the war, including battles in Afghanistan and Iraq, is being won, compared with almost one in three Americans.
That tells me that 80% of Aussies read/watch the news and while 60% of Americans do.
Or, to look at it another way, only 20% of Aussies watch Fox news while 40% of Americans do. (No facts, just my opinion.)

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Permalink Reply by Moose on June 3, 2011 at 8:11am

I agree, once we got OBL we should start pulling out and keeping a vigilant watch for any further terrorist uprising. Now that Afghanistan has its "Army" in place and trained by us, they should be able to handle anything further for now.

Pull our forces out, we made our point and we stood by our threat, but now the job is done, time to bring our people home to their families and focus on our ailing economy again. Let other countries take care of their business for now and get us back on our feet again.

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Permalink Reply by Rob on June 3, 2011 at 3:17pm

It's very hard to judge the success of the war in Afghanistan. The main objectives were to kill Bin Laden, al-Zarqawi (in Iraq)and other terrorists and to destroy their organizations. Those two have been killed but what about the terrorist groups? Most would agree that they still exist in some capacity, but has the War on Terror prevented further attacks against western interests? How do we know that we prevented something that we are not certain was going to happen in the first place?
Other objectives of the war have been to stop the sponsorship and support networks behind the terrorist organizations. If you can eliminate or reduce the underlying conditions that terrorist use and exploit or make it extremely difficult for them to find sanctuary somewhere then I believe you have done something very worthwhile. But again, it's hard to judge its success.
I guess I'm on the fence. There is just so little positive news coming from Afghanistan, but the big 'what if' is very worrying. Still, places like Yemen seem to be more of a threat now, perhaps the focus should turn there.

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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on June 3, 2011 at 8:36pm

There were at least three other goals for fighting in Afghanistan.

Punishing the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden and Al Queda.
Diminishing extremist Muslim oppression of Afghani citizens, especially women.
Supporting an Afghani national government friendly to the U.S and its allies.

Assessing those three things, we've had some success in the first two, but there's still work to be done on them.

The last one is probably a ho;eless cause, given the pandemic tribalism and corruption that collapse anything except for a powerful military-supported government.

The other twist is that in the past few days, the Taliban has been attacking into Pakistan from Afghanistan-the opposite of their recent history. That could be a sign that they're not feeling confident about their ability to beat the coalition military and that their power in Afghanistan is waning.

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Permalink Reply by Andrew on June 7, 2011 at 10:29am

The last one, as you stated, is completely hopeless.

What I truly cannot understand is why we're funneling money into a third world country that (for the majority) doesn't even want us there? Why are we doing this, especially when our OWN country is in debt to the trillions? We have fellow Americans losing homes, losing jobs, and having a diminished quality of life because of such economic strains, yet we stay there.

I'm glad Osama was found, but it took way too long. He wasn't in a cave - he was in a mansion. I think, personally, they took their sweet time when it came to finding Osama, as there was aterior motives for staying in such an area.

This country is backwards these days... I wish I was my age now, but 30 years ago. I heard back then that the people had more of a say than we do now. Oh well.

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