Now that we're going to be out of Iraq by year-end, how do we continue in Afghanistan?

As a perspective, the cost of continuing the war in Afghanistan will cost the U.S. $107 billion in 2011 in direct costs (not including military pensions, benefits and treatment for wounded, replacement costs for weapons, etc.) That's roughly $2 billion per week in taxpayer expense to pay the soldiers, buy the ammunition and fund the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

What are we fighting for? The Pentagon and our generals in the theatre believe we should continue and even escalate our personnel and expenditures to re-build Afghanistan. They say it could take a decade or more, but they believe we could make a difference there.

However the government in power in Afghanistan is considerably less enthusiastic about our presence. Back in 2004 our government hand-picked Hamid Karzai to be President of the country. He was later re-elected in an election widely believed to be widely influenced by his supporters. Few are satisfied that it was anything close to a democratic election.

The Karzai administration, almost from the beginning, is known to be subject to operate with widespread corruption. Beyond that, Karzai is really only "president" of that portion of the country where the capital, Kabul, is located. The rest of the country is controlled and governed by Taliban tribes.

A number of months ago, Karzai announced that he was negotiating an agreement to co-govern the country with Taliban tribes, the very same people that the U.S. hand-picked him to replace. It's the Taliban tribes that we're fighting there and who are killing our troops.

Now Karzai has escalated the situation a step further. In a nationally-televised address in Afganistan last weekend, Karzai told his country that he "would back Pakistan if it went to war with the United States".

http://nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-n...ts-America-WSJ

OK, so we are facing yet another question of what our strategy should be in another Middle Eastern country.

• Should we continue our efforts to re-build Afgahnistan under the Karzai regime?

• Should we actually increase our investment in manpower and expenditures in the country as suggested by the Pentagon?

• Or should we withdraw from Afghanistan completely, permitting the Taliban to probably regain control of the country as Russia did a couple decades ago when they had a similar lack of success? (A parallel strategy might be to begin to escalate our financial and military support for India, who may finally tire of "peaceful" co-existence with an unstable Pakistan on it's northern border and escalate the situation militarily.)

What do you think?