neon_duke
This is why I tend to stay out of some threads, like ///M-spec's Israel vs. Palestine thread. I have opinions, but they are not articluated enough or supported clearly enough to let me feel comfortable posting there yet.
Yeah, but I didn't want anyone to think I'm automatically supporting one side or the other because I've been raised in a Jewish household, let alone have a Yiddish nickname...but I'm getting off-topic here.
Actually, I'm quite impressed with what we did in such a short span of time in Afganistan. Considering the US went from 9/11 to a fairly-well-thought-out onslaught of Al-Qaeda and Taliban supporters in less than a month, it's impressive indeed that we were able to create a state that supports democracy and the nation can hopefully rebulid itself. Although we didn't catch Osama bin Laden, we were looking to do the next best thing, and that was to remove the support and "clemency" he was receiving from the Taliban.
Now, people have choices for who they want for thier leader. There's going to be a goverment that has representatives of all types of people. And like our own nation, there's several choices to pick from (well, sort of)...even a woman was seriously running for the highest office in Afganistan, something absolutely unheard-of three years ago. Afghanistan was regarded as a nation with one of the lowest per-capita ability to have running water, electricity, phone lines, and access to the Internet. I think it's mainly because the Taliban financially destroyed the infrastructure to pay for weapons and spread loads of fundamentalist propaganda to the masses.
I think it was a rather cheap shot by John Kerry to blame Bush for "exporting the job of catching Osama", by allowing coalition forces to aid us in wiping out the Taliban/Al-Qaeda. We probably wouldn't have known the difficult, mountainous territory as well as the natives might have known it, so we couldn't have even had a chance at all to catch him.
