As A Veteran, Here’s How I Feel Watching Continued Fighting In Afghanistan

In 2007, it felt like we were "winning". Sure, we had HIG and the Taliban in the KG Pass...certainly, we never slept easy...sadly, we lost brothers; some from the ANA/ANP.

When I left in 2008, if felt like we were slowly, but surely widening the gap between "hearts and minds", and heading for the "two decade war" everyone had expected, but hoped wasn't a reality. Too many promises, not enough results...politicizing what was really a pretty straight forward goal at first until it became a quagmire of duplicity.

I used to think, "We owe it to these folks to stick it out"...now, I think that whether Sunni or Shia, Pashtun on Hazara, our best bet is to build better fences...not more bridges.

COL Mikel J. Burroughs One statement stands out to me..."I didn’t know if I could handle seeing what I’d spent four years doing be shown on live TV as having been for nothing."
As a veteran of Vietnam,i can understand this thought,he can handle it many of us have.

We don't hear a lot (or really anything) on our strategy in Afghanistan. What are our goals, how will we accomplish them and how will we know when we are done etc. The last 7 years the president has scarcely talked about any of that. We keep sending forces there mostly because it is low casualty type operations. If we were losing 100 troops a week I suspect there would be more being said. That seems to be the unfortunate reality.

I am too old to have been to Afghanistan. My oldest son did go there as a Marine and was in Helmand Province and in/around Marja a lot. You can probably equate this to how Vietnam veterans must have felt watching the entire country (city after city) fall to the North Vietnamese/Vietcong. To think of the lives lost, the youth spent, the blood shed so politicians could fail to deliver the goal they said was worth the sacrifice. In a word, disgusting.