The latest news for the troop withdrawal and the end of America’s direct involvement in Afghanistan is slated for the end of 2014, a time that is rapidly approaching. It’s hard to believe that we have already had soldiers there engaging enemy combatants for 13 years. A lot of kids these days have only known America as it is during a war and haven’t experienced peace time. They haven’t known a period of time where friends or relatives weren’t being sent to war, and seeing news stories about another battle in which our soldiers are dying. Well that is about to come to an end at the end of this year, and thanks to the ‘informed’ public and the all the new forms of information sharing and media, we want to know when. So, the government tells us. By the end of 2014 the US military will be withdrawn from Afghanistan and we will no longer be conducting combat operations there.

I personally think it’s a good thing that we are finally bringing our troops home from Afghanistan, and I’ll further state I think it should have happened some time ago. Now I may not have the credentials of a brilliant military strategist, I haven’t attended the US Army War College, but it seems to me that announcing our intentions to effectively end the war in Afghanistan might not be the best way to handle the situation. This is not a conventional war, and we are fighting a conventional enemy. The Taliban and Al Quada do not operate by conventional means and they do not follow the rules of conventional war. They are not fighting for a piece of land and they are not fighting for a specific government or some other tangible cause. They are fanatics that are fighting for an idea. Even if we spent a hundred years in that area fighting this enemy, you simply can’t kill an idea, so as soon as the fighting slows down or stops, that idea will start to make a comeback.

This whole ordeal was started on September 11, 2001 with an unprovoked attack on the United States. After thirteen years of fighting and a lot of death and destruction, we’ve now spelled out for the enemy our strategy for ending the conflict and pulling all of our troops and much of our resources out of the area. This is a perfect scenario for the terrorists, given their mission in life. For whatever reason you want to give, we are all the sworn enemies of the Taliban and Al Quada, and they’ve stated that their mission in life is to kill Americans simply because we exist and that offends them. They’ve shown repeatedly that their hatred of us is so extensive that they are willing to kill themselves as well as innocent children in an attempt to kill Americans. If they were smart, which I think they are, they would listen to the news, which they do, and draw up a new strategy given the fact that we’ve already made our plans known to the world.

I think it’s stupid that we announce our military strategy to the world, and what I think is even more stupid is that once we do pull out we’re going to hear about all the triumphant success that the war in Afghanistan was. Yes we killed a lot of really bad guys, and yes we killed the person most responsible for the attack on America but what has that gotten us? More fighting and more killing because with the death of Osama bin Laden came affirmation to the extremists that we are the real evil in the world. When we do finally pull out of Afghanistan it’s going to be chaos, just like it was in Iraq. There will be a power vacuum with a lot of different groups fighting to take over and the violence will be worse than when we went there.