[oh-4-fucks-sake]

The band-aid had to be pulled off sometime.

US occupancy of the ME initiates a feedback loop where our military presence creates cause for (often violent) anti-American sentiment. Wouldn't you be at least tempted to avenge the death of your father (or the rest of your immediate family) if they died a brutal death at the hands of a foreign superpower? The reactionary response is to bed down those anti-US sentiments with more military action, only fueling their (often rightful) discontent. This creates a paradox where the more we attack the symptoms of the problem, the worse the problem becomes.

The only way to stop a feedback loop is to break one of the steps in the loop. The end of military occupation might have short- and medium-term negative effects, but if the goal is to make US-ME war a historical occurrence instead of an ongoing (present) one, you have to stop at some point. Time ~heals~ lessens ~all~ most wounds and we have to accept that a fresh, repeatedly-injured wound is going to sting for awhile.

There's no good (or even sub-par) reason(s) to remain in the ME any more. Total US fossil fuel consumption is continuing to fall. US fossil fuel production has risen. We already nabbed the (ostensible) main culprit of 9/11 and have toppled the regimes of some bad authoritarians. None of these were noble (or even profitable) reasons to invade the ME in the first place. The wars still stand on the same shaky foundations on which they began and it's time to focus our resources into far better endeavors.

Imagine if we had instead spent all that war money on clean energy and grid storage. Even in 2003 prices, we'd be far ahead of where we are now from a total resources and national wealth perspective. Sure, building an expensive missile is ~technically~ GDP, but what good is a product's GDP contribution if we literally explode it and it does nothing for our collective quality of life?

[vladTheInhaler]

> There's no good (or even sub-par) reason(s) to remain in the ME any more.

The United States never should have involved itself in Afghanistan. But we did. As far as I am concerned, we created a moral obligation to the people of Afghanistan. I'm not a military strategist, so I don't know what steps, if any, would be necessary to let the Afghan government be independent. But abandoning them after spending two decades promising democracy, equal rights for women, etc. is a complete betrayal.

[jfengel]

The United States never should have involved itself in Afghanistan.

That's debatable. Unlike Iraq, where the case for the invasion was dubious at best, the Afghan government really did host preparations for an attack on the US, and refused to turn over those who planned it. There's good reason to think that there would have been more attacks like 9/11.

That doesn't in itself justify war. Perhaps there were other means to prevent it. But war was not an unreasonable response, and it was largely supported by the rest of the world at the time. (Unlike the case in Iraq, which was widely opposed.)

As you say, having done so, we seem to have incurred a never-ending obligation to the residents for destroying their government. We didn't entirely wipe out the Taliban, and it will return to threaten both them and us. It's fairly clear by this point that we can't.

What we should do at this point isn't at all clear. The world is full of terrible things and we don't involve ourselves in all of them. Two decades of intense support could reasonably be said to discharge ourselves of the burden we picked up by invading. We suffer a moral loss, but having protected ourselves from more physical loss may be the best we can do under the circumstances.