Thanks, BartCop

Why are we still in Afghanistan? by Gene Lyons
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Excerpt One of the enduring oddities of the American foreign policy debate is that asking the most obvious questions is all but forbidden. For example, how does Afghanistan pose a threat to the United States?
Certainly not in any military sense. The impoverished, largely illiterate Afghans have no army, no air force, no navy, no offensive military capacity whatsoever.
From the U.S. perspective, Afghanistan is the absolute end of the earth. Indeed, it's not a nation at all. The idea that well-intentioned Westerners can create an efficient central government on, say, the Swiss model, where none has ever existed, much less one acceptable to Afghanistan's many warring tribes, sects and ethnic factions, is almost certainly a delusion.