I voted for you, but now I want to express my disappointment in your decision to send more US troops into Afghanistan. We're hearing the same empty rhetoric “hearts and minds” from the military that we heard 45 years ago. As a 19 year old Marine serving in Vietnam during 1968-69, I acquired the following knowledge.

We can’t win a war in a country that has thousands of years of cultural infrastructure and centuries of tribal conflict. Introduce fanatical religious in-fighting into the mix and it's more convoluted than Vietnam. We can send 2 million troops and it won’t make a difference. We’ll eventually leave and it will start again.

Please bring the troops home now before you get to this point:
“With America's sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office–the Presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” Lyndon Baines Johnson 1968

Semper Fi.

Ted Quackenbush

What would such a strategy look like? Well, at the very least it requires some moderation of the strategic competition between India and Pakistan. Without attention to this aspect of the problem, we really are only playing around at the edges of the conflict.

For more, there's a good piece here: http://bit.ly/3vYHPk