You mean people who have studied the matter for decades and disagree with you? Than makes one "fact free"?

We are talking a philosophy of intervention verse non-intervention. Would you like me to list all the countries we have fucked up in my lifetime? It is easy enough to do, I had to do fact checking for an antiwar group for a while.

What do you want to know? And show me that I have "attacked" you more than your and yours have "attacked" me.

You are aware that NATO is paying huge protection money essentially to the Taliban, via the contractors who truck in supplies via Pakistan?

Reparations won't work - they will simply accrue to the warlords whom the US must protect the rest of Afghanistan from.

Regarding responsibility in Afghanistan - we know that long before the Soviets invaded, the Pakistani government was creating the Rabbanis and Hekmatyars. Later, various secular Afghans appealed to the US not to arm the fundamentalists, but they were not heeded. This is where the US responsibility for Afghanistan begins.

From the Indian point of view, after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the US failed to stomp on Pakistan that would not let Afghans reach a settlement amongst themselves, but kept seeking a government that would be subservient to Pakistani interests. Here again, only the US could have stomped on them hard enough to stop that; and the US failed.

As a CIA telegram (declassified on gwu.edu) derisively put it, the Pakistanis are famous for never winning a war and their proteges in Afghanistan were just as bad. Then the Taliban came along, and Pakistan ditched its former allies and went with the Taliban.

The Taliban "legal government of Afghanistan" was recognized by all of three nations (the Islamic conference has of the order of 55 countries in it or so, but even fellow Muslims were averse to the Taliban) - Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the UAE.

From my point of view, the main culprit in the spread of the infection that finally hit the US on 9/11 is Saudi Arabia, closely followed by Pakistan. The US is at fault here for simply letting things slide, with these two "allies". The problem is that American corporations are too much in love with Saudi money. I have no idea why the American establishment is so much in love with Pakistan. Maybe it is a holdover from Chuck Yeager days.

There is no need to go over the fatal loss of attention in turning to Iraq.

The US needs to raise not just a national Afghan army, but a national police force that provides security to the common folks, and then withdraw. It needs to provide on a prolonged basis, developmental aid. And it needs for many years to come, to keep Afghanistan's neighbors from destabilizing it.

This is the least the US must do.

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The premise of you-know-who is that 9/11 was an inside job, and so going to Afghanistan is utterly unjustified; and their remedy for past US sins in Afghanistan is to lower taxes on Americans and huddle within Fortress America.

Like you have not done it yourself, and in resent threads. I think that is called hypocrisy.

Maybe, we must always consider that when we deal with others over such a medium as this.

However, it seems that the difference in using the military, CIA, and other governmental agencies to force our will violently on people in the middle east and leaving them alone is a stark difference.

I am against intervention by force or threat of force in foreign policy in all matters except to defend when invaded. You?

Arabs, prior to the discovery of oil were Bedouins roaming the desert and their aptitude for math or logical reasoning was almost non-existent. Perhaps I was a poor instructor, but the effort failed hugely.

Maybe the particular people you dealt with were bad at math. You know where the words algebra, sine, algorithm come from, I hope, and know e.g., whom the crater on the moon, Albategnius, is named after, and so on.

Start with food, health, and jobs.

Don't care, they'll be grateful that we are gone and not dropping bombs on their houses anymore. Wouldn't you be? Did you not see the video RMP linked yesterday?

http://rethinkafghanistan.com/?utm_source=rgemail#video

If China bombed the hell out of California and worse-than-occupied it for nearly a decade, after all that time wouldn't you be happy if they just went away and never came back? Or would you want them to stick around for an open-ended number of years after making promises of providing you with "food, health, and jobs"? What if you're living in a refugee camp and see Chinese bombs as the only reason you are not at home, like those folks in the camp? Would you be happy in occupied California if the Chinese were making these promises while increasing troop levels and building a megabase like the Green Zone in Death Valley?

Would you want more of China's "help" after all of that? Wouldn't you just want them out? Would your really give a shit about what civilians in China want to do for you or would you just want them gone? You know you would want them OUT, ASAP, so you should stop taking for granted the fact that you were born in the US and have the luxury of opining about such choices. What is so hard for you and your friends to understand about that?

And the foreign policy you subscribe to has been in the driver's seat for over 50 years, even Ronald Reagan loved Foreign Intervention, just like you do. Its record completely sucks BTW, and we really are the world's Gorilla, a big stupid emotional ape that gets in everyone's business and then pretends it never happened. We have over 700 military bases in 130+ countries, spend more on defense than every other nation combined, enable Israel, torture, overthrow Government and support dictators, and people still can't figure out why the US is perceived the way it is while hinting that those that believe nations should be in control of their own destiny are racists. Unbelievable.

It has nothing to do with facts and logistics, and everything to do with the intellectually bankrupt principle that Americans always need to be out in front "doing something" and championing this and that, behavior which itself linked to American Exceptionalism. It's a principle and I will not bend on it, not even when you throw all your facts at me. Of course, as we have learned today, principles just get in the way of the one thing we all truly crave, say it with me: "compromise". And of course that principle is probably completely unlearned and fact free and I just made it up out of thin air and haven't studied it at all and shit.