BREAKING NEWS: Osama Bin Laden is dead!

[Pressing-On]

Originally Posted by tstew

All I can go by are the speeches and statements I remember he himself making. I know that is archaic and unsophisticated in these sorts of political conversations...
I remember him using the word terrorist plenty whenever appropriate and discussing the war on terror. Either way, the larger point was about the strategy of focusing on that region...which I happen to agree with. That is all I was saying.

We have always had a base in Afghanistan, implemented by the Bush Administration.

That base helped us to:

1. Establish a presence in Afghanistan to hold Osama at bay
2. Limit the enemy's movements by Drone strikes
3. Flush Osama out of Afghanistan by conventional forces
4. Gather intelligence information by rounding up enemies and sending them to Gitmo
5. Launch the SEAL Team Six - which came later, after intelligence was confirmed

Obama's job will now be to not abandon Afghanistan and weaken our national security. Bush never abandoned Afghanistan. As a matter of fact, that was exactly what Condi Rice advised, "If you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan," she said.

Rice: I was very much inside the government at that time, and I can say it’s simply not true. We spent enormous amounts of time on both Afghanistan and Iraq. ... It was a deliberate decision in the early years to have a light footprint in Afghanistan, to have most of the fighting done by Afghans. When things went bad [on the border of] Pakistan that had become a safe haven for terrorists, then the strategy had to change. Afghanistan was always going to be hard ... but it’s now a place where there is a constitution, girls are going to school, women aren’t executed in a soccer stadium as they were under the Taliban. I think we undervalue the contribution of the NATO alliance, and Canada in particular, which made great sacrifices in the war to move Afghanistan forward. It doesn’t mean democracy has arrived, but it’s a better place than it was in 2001.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/...37;28page%29/2

IMO, it's hard to want to support a leadership there that dote on "dancing boys" as part of their culture.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/dancingboys/