"Our mission in Afghanistan should have been to punish and leave."
Punish who? The people we can't find? The bin Ladens and Omars?
Or should we seek to punish the sources of funding for terrorist groups? I wonder if the Saudis would keep selling us oil while we're bombing them.
I think ER's right. Perhaps the only point of all this now is to show our enemies that if they take a swipe at us, they can expect us to return the favor. But I just don't know about the effectiveness of a deterrent applied to those who will not be deterred. I sometimes wonder if they're the ones playing chess, and we're the ones playing checkers.