re: #362 blueraven

Perhaps if we had kept the pressure on the Taliban in the early days, instead of letting them regroup we wouldn’t have this mess now. But we diverted our attention to Iraq. Then President Bush declared Mission Accomplished in Iraq and claimed we had defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan forever.

It is what it is now, but those who blame this debacle on Obama takes all kind of crazy. We are getting out of Iraq.

I think it’s a mistake to think that we could ever have stabilized Afghanistan, even if we had not diverted forces elsewhere. It reminds me of the “but if we had just done X, Y and Z” arguments regarding Vietnam.

The blame resides with whoever has the ability to begin get the hell out, and fails to, just as much as it does with the idiots who thought it was a good idea in the first place. Obama owns these wars now, and he owns the responsibility of ending them. The longer he fails to do so, the more responsible for the results he becomes.