Perhaps your memory no longer contains this information, so please let me remind you that the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and either the Capitol or the White House by the third group of Islamists originated in Afghanistan, and before that other attacks on U.S. interests originated in the Sudan by UBL. I agree with you about Germany, especially considering that nation’s cowardly gestures of help in Afghanistan. We should have long ago moved those facilities to an ally that deserves our support and would welcome an important logistical base for our efforts—Poland. This would also demonstrate to the Russians, and the Poles, that we value their independence and will not tolerate further Russian expansionism westward.

As to being in Iraq, that not-quite nation has the second largest oil reserves in the world, and if they were to come under the control of Iran or neighboring Arab states, the world and we along with it, would be bleeding money to our enemies at an even more alarming rate.

As to our being in South Korea and Japan, I think we should pull out the remainder of our ground combat troops, but insofar as North Korea has WMD in the form of chemical and biological weapons mounted on short range missiles as well as artillery, we must maintain the threat of a massive counter-attack that would wipe out the North’s capabilities to do anything more than that first strike.

Most of all, we must prevent bad actors such as Iran and North Korea from completing the development of nuclear warheads mountable on missiles that can be detonated over the U.S., causing a catastrophic EMP attack that would throw us back to the late eighteenth century in our ability to control and move around in our environment. A recent Congressional Commission estimated that as a result of starvation, disease such as cholera epidemics, and a total breakdown in society, ninety percent of the U.S. population would be dead within a year. 

http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.pdf

http://bartlett.house.gov/Issues/Issue/?IssueID=2060

DanNV, I think you have it exactly backward. It was only when we recognized that allowing the enemy to control the territory and the population except during our occasional sweeps was a failed strategy that the Surge strategy of bringing the troops into the cities and have them stay in the neighborhoods that the populace began to feel safe and trust the U.S. The same was true of the Anbar Awakening, when the fed-up tribal leaders realized that the U.S. forces were staying instead of mere moving on thru that they switched sides, for they could then see that ours was beginning to be the winning side.

If we leave the Afghans to their own fate, you can be sure that the Taliban/Al Qaeda will be in control in a fortnight, for we have neglected those people for too many years. With such a victory, Pakistan, with its nuclear arsenal would become easy pickings for Bin Laden, and where would we be then?

Bob in WV, Vietnam turned out the way it did for a few reasons, none of which had to do with American soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors. We started out with a lousy general, Westmoreland, who like most generals fights the previous war, and an even lousier Secretary of Defense who warned his President that the war, given the American propensity for quick victories and very limited casualties, could not be won the way it was proposed by the Chiefs of Staff, but neither McNamara nor Johnson paid attention to their own warnings and allowed Westmoreland to drag us down into the big muddy.

Despite that, we had a resounding victory as a result of the battles of Hue, essentially destroying the Viet Cong and more than decimating the North Vietnamese Army. However, the “most trusted man in America” decided the war for us, in conjunction with the new left anarcho-pacifists terrified of what might happen if they served their nation in the military (the protests dwindled to almost nothing as soon as Nixon ended the draft—as he predicted). 

General Creighton Abrams succeeded Westmoreland and built a counter-insurgency strategy that, in conjunction with training and supplying the South Korean Army, as the Soviets had been doing for many years in the North, changed the face of the war in our favor. However, by this time sentiment in the U.S. became so negative that I am reminded by the Democratic Congressional leaders just two years ago who were proclaiming the Surge a disaster and the war lost, even before the Surge began.

Unfortunately, the Paris Peace Accords ending the war did not prevent the North, from within a year of their signing to invade the South in great strength, including large armored forces provided by the Soviets. In the U.S. the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, elected in the wake of Watergate, revoked the solemn promise we had made to the South Vietnamese to supply them with the equipment and supplies necessary to keep their defense effective, and refused to vote any money for supplies to the South Vietnamese. As a result their forces were outnumbered and poorly supplied and quickly fell to a fierce North Vietnamese invasion.

These are the lessons we should have learned from Vietnam. Instead, we had generals who vowed never to fight that kind of war again and they disposed of all of the counter-insurgency manuals and institutional knowledge and history contained within their ranks. Among them was Colin Powell, whose doctrine of overwhelming force and an exit strategy presumes, as is almost never the case, that the U.S. can control exactly when, where and under what conditions we will fight a war. All one needs is a cursory glance at history to see that this is fantasy. But it was a fantasy that the quick-and-low-cost solution to a military threat that the short-attention-span American public demands—the fruits of immediate gratification dragged into adulthood and public life—that made this obvious stupidity into strategic doctrine. When, if ever, are we going to grow up?