The Briefing Room
General Category => Military/Defense News => Topic started by: rangerrebew on May 09, 2021, 12:19:57 pm
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Leaving Afghanistan Will Make America Less Safe
Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware
May 5, 2021
America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan should be cause for rejoicing. But conditions in the country today, and the historical record of past U.S. withdrawals from similar conflicts, suggest that it will only create more problems. By leaving, Washington is vindicating an aphorism attributed to a captured Taliban fighter over a decade ago: “You have the watches. We have the time.”
Proving the Taliban wrong is not a politically unaffordable extravagance. It merely requires retaining a couple of thousand elite special operations, intelligence, and support personnel in Afghanistan. Otherwise, the risk is that this will be the fourth time in as many decades that a U.S. military withdrawal encourages terrorists by showing the weakness of U.S. resolve. When America left Beirut in 1983, Mogadishu a decade later, and Iraq in 2011, the result was more terrorism, not less.
Indeed, no one understood the significance of America’s past retreats better than Osama bin Laden. In a 1997 interview, he recalled how the deaths of 241 U.S. marines in the Beirut barracks bombing had compelled President Ronald Reagan to order a withdrawal from Lebanon within five months. This led to the collapse of the multinational force in Lebanon — of which the Marines were the lynchpin — and plunged Lebanon into further chaos. The main beneficiary was Hizballah, the shadowy terrorist group responsible for the attack. In the decades since, Hizballah’s success influenced other terrorist leaders and groups, including bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
https://warontherocks.com/2021/05/leaving-afghanistan-will-make-america-less-safe/
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These two jokers need to get with the program. Foreign terrorists aren't our most imminent threat - domestic white nationalists are.
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Has being there for 20 years made us more safe?