Quote Originally Posted by TheCurmudgeon View Post
It is not that we abandon Afghanistan. It is that we helped to create a power vacuum and then did nothing to help fill it with a government that would be friendly to us.
I would assert that while friendly governments are great they are not necessary for our security. It seems sufficient to me that a government not pose a realistically assessed threat to us. U.S. foreign policy discourse has the habit of taking hostile rhetoric and ideological opposition as prima facie evidence of threat. Through the years our leaders have made the Cuban and Iranian revolutions out to be threats to domestic, international, and natural order. But do we need more than two hands’ worth of fingers to count the instances in which either government has done anything more serious to our country than made a station chief get all butthurt?