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I wonder why Captain Hoh left the Marines. This is his second rsignation from service to the nation.
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"To fight them over there instead of here????"

I have read two opinion pieces (sorry don´t have them readily available) and Hoh even mentioned it in one interview, that the concern of the Taliban is only that we are on their land. They have no intention of fighting outside their country. (Obviously al-Qaeda is different, but reports are saying they are not there)

In our arrogance and need to create profits for the military industrial complex , we think that know better than the locals what government they should have , and somehow feel that we have the right to try to force our ideas upon them .

think small group of peopl related by location, clannish, history of making all the decisions, having access to money through corruption and not needing too work , while having people postrating themselves.why would these people whether in America or Afghanistan wish to introduce democracy?

Yichel mentioned it above "Corruption." In another post on this site someone compared a list of most corrupt countries with the countries that the US has contributed much money to and found a correlation. Here in Colombia, many Colombians state that the US aid just keeps the drugs going because the government makes money both on the drugs and the corruption with the US money that is suppose to fight it. Not to mention that one investigation even revealed how the US gave over $400,000 for social purposes to a company knowingly owned by a drug lord and used for laundering money. Anyway, here is an article this morning stating that tens of millions of dollars to ensure a fair election in afghanistan are unaccounted for. view link

The Taliban are not some romantic group of freedom fighters. This group deposed the government and took over in order to impose THEIR particular brand of government on the Afghan people. There were already Afghan people who were trying to defeat the Taliban before we ever got there.

The Taliban holds a particularly extremist view of their religion, Islam. They routinely killed women who were considered to have violated some restriction that the Taliban had put in place. If they did not kill the women, they were routinely raped, beaten and physically mutilated. Girls were not permitted to learn to read and women were not allowed to seek employment. In the cases of widows with children, that forced them into abject poverty, with no way to support their families. Even the most menial of tasks that they could perform for money was forbidden to them. The Afghani people would rather not have the Taliban. The problem is that there are enough Taliban in the country to make life difficult for any Afghani found doing anything that might work against the Taliban. Murders are routine.

The Taliban provided a safe haven for the Al Quaida network, welcoming them and providing them with sanctuary from international retribution for their crimes. If we walk away now, the Taliban will engage in wholesale slaughter of the people who resisted them, and they will welcome Bin Laden back into the country, along with all of his fanatical followers.

The problem is not that we went into Afghanistan, but that we put Afghanistan on the back burner so that George Bush could play war with Saddam Hussein, crushing him like a bug. How many people died so that our former President could avenge the dishonor that he felt that Hussein had done to his father? By devoting so much of our resources to a war that should never have been fought, we dropped the ball in Afghanistan.

Our goal in Afghanistan is, or should be, to oversee the installation of a stable government that can control the activities that take place within its own borders. This is particularly difficult in Afghanistan, because it is not much more than a collection of clans and tribes, with shifting loyalties. There is a need for a strong central government with a reliable judiciary and enough law enforcement to give the populace a feeling of security. If the Afghan people can be made to believe that we are not there to take over, but to facilitate their own growth as a country, they will likely cooperate with our efforts to help them. Until they believe that we are not going to desert them for a second time, they are not likely to trust our efforts.

Why are we still over there? Public opinion!
42% against
36% for

Because there is not a clear majority of Americans against, is why we are still there. Couple that with a political party ( Republicans ) ready to pounce on any decision creates a quandry for this administration, and the ruling party. If the number against being in Afghanistan was a resounding 80% plus, we would have been out of there yesterday.

You are right, collieflower. After only a couple months in Afghanistan, Bush decided it wasn’t fun anymore and decided to invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. Rather, the focus should have been entirely on the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. We will never know whether a focused effort would have rid that country of those groups entirely. Maybe not. But I do think we would have been well out of there by now anyway. But thanks to Bush and the neocons in charge then, we are not.

The military suppliers don't make money if we win , they only make money when we keep fighting , thus we keep on fighting .