“He said some Republicans will say that Obama ‘made it impossible for us to win, so why should we throw good money after bad, why should any more lives be lost in a hopeless cause because Obama screwed up?'”
Other than the focus on Obama and the identification of this sentiment with Republicans, that sounds reasonable to me. Afghanistan is an unwinnable conflict because it has been framed wrongly, understood wrongly, and pursued wrongly. There has been no understanding of the jihad or the Sharia imperative in Washington either under Bush or Obama. Sharia is already enshrined in the Afghan Constitution as the highest law of the land, so what are we fighting for? We went in to fight the Taliban, but it was the Taliban’s commitment to Islam that led them to support the attack on America in the first place. American officials could not and would not admit that connection, so they allowed Sharia to be made paramount in the new Constitution, thus ensuring that nothing would be done to challenge the beliefs, attitudes and assumptions that led us into Afghanistan in the first place. Thus our presence in Afghanistan is the very definition of a futile and self-defeating effort.
There has been no clear objective, no clear goal, and the military has been reduced to a group of social workers with guns, engaged in a foredoomed effort to win hearts and minds.
So it is impossible to win, and why exactly should we throw good money after bad and lose more lives in a hopeless cause?
“Graham: GOP critics may unravel Afghan war effort,” by Alexander Bolton at The Hill, August 1 (thanks to Weasel Zippers):
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned that conservative critics could undermine the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan.
Graham cited recent comments by Republican Party chairman Michael Steels, who called the Afghanistan conflict “a war of Obama’s choosing.”
Steele said the war was “not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in” and alluded to Afghanistan’s reputation as the graveyard of empires.
Graham warned that liberal and conservative war critics could form “an unholy alliance,” during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Graham predicted that some Republicans would argue the U.S. can’t win because President Obama has set a goal of July 2011 to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
He said some Republicans will say that Obama “made it impossible for us to win, so why should we throw good money after bad, why should any more lives be lost in a hopeless cause because Obama screwed up?”…
And how exactly would Lindsey Graham refute those assertions?