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Originally Posted by jolinar of malkshor
i guess "you people" is pretty general hey. I mean the people that hate the fact that our military is in Afghanistan or US in Iraq.
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Hate is a pretty strong word. And people have a lot of different reasons for not agreeing with our military presence in Afghanistan.
For my part, I don't see the purpose. No foreign power in history has managed to stabilize that part of the world, nor is there any reason to think that we will be able to. There is a reason the Al Queda insurgents are able to continue to attack a better armed, better financed opponent time and time again. They have local support. They will continue to have local support. There are a lot of people who want to continue to see the region unstable - religious fanatic, drug lords, warlords. Are the people on the ground going to suddenly embrace some mythical "Western way is the best way!" ideals? Despite the fact it calls for things that you and I take for granted, yet run totally contrary to the cutsoms of the region? Like equal rights for women, human rights against torture, religious freedom etc? It runs totally contrary to their beliefs.
Have you ever tried to convince a hard core Catholic that the bible might not actually be the words of god? Well try persuading some goat farmer with a grade 3 education that his 14 year old wife should have the same voting rights as he does. Good luck.
I agree there are a lot of bad people in the world - dictators, genocidal maniacs, abusers of human rights. Yet we are in Afghanistan, and not any of these other places. Kim Jong Il is s--t house rat crazy, and has nukes. Yet we aren't going in there.
It is not our job to impress our beliefs on foreign peoples. You will never succeed in bringing democracy to a people with the end of a gun. Afghanistan demanded a response after 9/11. Fair enough. The U.S. ousted the government, and ran off the Taliban. They have now lost interest, and an increasing amount of the job is falling to us.
We aren't suited to nation building.