...winning always struck me as an attractive option. There are too few people with the guts to publicly face down - and correct - ill informed public opinion.

We shouldn't bloody withdraw. We should stop buggering things up and start doing things right - starting with resourcing the McChrystal review and shifting the whole mission to an OMLT model - which field men have been saying for years. Tactics 101: don't send a battalion to conduct a Divisional operation and moan about casualties afterwords!

Or am I in some parallel universe of force ratios and proper prior preparation preventing p*** poor performance...?