re: #407 iossarian

…but my educated guess based on observation of past history is that we decided that having a military presence in Afghanistan would provide us with an alternative means of securing an energy supply from
central Asia

There is a pipeline being built, that’s true. But tell me - what kind of economy do you think it would be possible to have in Afghanistan otherwise? They’re going to need some form of revenue in order to create a stable society.

That’s not to say that we aren’t making lemonade out of lemons there in regards to energy access. But we didn’t ask for the lemons; they were thrown at us.

re: #407 iossarian

Land wars are always about resources. If you think about how much the Afghanistan conflict has cost, I think you’ll find that the same money invested in counter-intelligence would have been much more effective in preventing further terrorist attacks.

I don’t think that Al Qaeda attacked us over resources. I don’t think that the Taliban refused to extradite Al Qaeda because of resources. And I don’t think that we responded as we did because of resources.

I’d agree that counter-intelligence measures are more effective than military conflict when dealing with international terrorism. But in this case, they really, really asked for it. I can’t imagine how awful things would be right now if we had allowed Al Qaeda to destroy the WTC and then declined to respond militarily to that level of provocation.