re: #290 austin_blue

At some point, that got to be weaned off our economic teat. Trying to make tribes act like a country is damn hard.
Tangential story:

When they first built the Fightin’ Texas Aggies campus, they didn’t put in any sidewalks. Soon enough, paths showed that showed where people *actually* waked as opposed to where the designers *thought* they might walk. Then they put in the sidewalks.

The point is that we can’t force a different ethos amongst a people who are so very unlike us socially and culturally. We’ve got to let them find their path to modernity, which may be very different from ours. And I certainly see no reason to continue to throw our young men and women into that meatgrinder in the name of “nation building”. We got the bad guy who masterminded the 9-11 attacks.

How much longer should we stay?

I think killing OBL shows how effective a presence in the area is. He isn’t the only one. We’ve gotten many. How much of a presence, I don’t know. There’s no way we can let the Taliban/ALQ regroup to the point of pulling off these mass killings again, even if we can’t completely control or get rid of them.