It's been 18 years. Eighteen years. What have we accomplished?
We have lost 14,000 more US lives. That says nothing about the 250,000 civilians dead who were unlucky enough to have been born in Afghanistan or Iraq.
We have spent 2 trillion dollars.
We have installed a malleable government who will become the regions largest dealer of US arms in exchange for power when we leave. These arms will end up in the hands of our enemies.
Those enemies, by the way, are the exact same Taliban who we went over there to eradicate eighteen years ago. Some are the exact same people.
So I ask, how is all this war stuff working out for us? We could have left 17 years ago, we could leave today, or we could make eternal Mideast war part of the US Constitution, and the Mideast will forever be a den of heathens and terrorists who want to kill us. The only question is how much more blood of our countrymen are we willing to spend in some insane attempt to make ourselves feel like we aren't the same losers, for the same reasons, we were in Vietnam. Bombs don't change minds. Bombs defeat armies.