Obama says he will finish the job in Afghaniistan

The job was a fool's errand to begin with. To wit: to declare total war on a country that ,at worst, housed Osama Bin Laden, much in the way this country housed Tim McVeigh or Britain housed the ShoeBomber. The Bush/Cheney team used the sledgehammer instead of the scalpel to deal with the problem. 8 years later we still soldier on.

Our latest scheme: buy an army to oppose Taliban. Sounds like another hare-brained US Military strategy that we keep on trying in our so-called counter-insurgency plans. Pit one tribe against the other-- Taliban vs. Soviets, Sunnis vs. Shia, Pashtun vs. Tajiks, Ho Chi Minh's Buddhists vs. CIA's Roman Catholics. All of these half-baked plans, sooner or later, come back to haunt us.

Sending in the 40,000 troops that General McChrystal wants, and train more Afghanistan troops and establish a brigade to fight the Taliban is another dead-end. The Afghanis think we’re infidels and occupiers and, as a result, don’t trust us. And isn’t it equally clear that as a result of the Ft. Hood massacre, American troops simply don’t trust the Afghanis? How are we then going to partner with them and train more troops?

The Taliban are the government we overthrew. Basically they represent the largest tribal group in Afghanistan , the Pashtuns at 42% of the population. Fighting these folks will take a long, long time, plus, according to many experts, they are interested in Afghanistan, not in blowing up buildings in the US. Moreover, Al Qaeda, at less than 100 members, are a spent force.

Then there’s the cost issue. Rule of thumb--each thousand troops sent abroad costs $1 billion. So, 40,000 troops , 40 billion per year. Add this to the troops and contractors already in Afghanistan. Comes to over 100 billion a year. This money is to be paid by adding additional debt to our huge deficit, then having the Treasury department print the money and then having the Chinese loan us the money.

Our taxes do pay for the annual $1 trillion military budget (army, navy, air force, coast guard , 1000 overseas military bases, CIA black box operations, Veterans Affairs hospitals, etc.) It all adds up.

And what we get for all our investment in Afghanistan is a lot of deaths, heartaches and corrupt puppet rulers. Pulling out would be a big plus for us--we might lose our influence over the gas and oil pipelines in the region--but we'd be a richer nation for it.