With No Parades And Little Ceremony, America's Longest War Draws To A Close

PFC (Join to see) I put those in the category of sunk costs. Nothing can bring them back, but we can certainly lose more. The only real question now is the future.

SPC Kevin Ford I agree, all we can do is look to the future and hope for regional stability

Taliban will be taking back over and that is the will of the Afghan people. We have spent blood and billions of dollars trying to help them achieve a country we feel they would want and they did little to show they were interested in what we had to offer. Some cultures seem to prefer and do better with dictators. The other side of the coin is Islam is roughly six hundred years younger than Christianity and if you look at Christian cultures six hundred years ago, monarchs were the theme in Europe. Look how Sunni and Shia kill each other and what were Catholics and Protestants doing six hundred years ago? Maybe in a few more hundred years Afghanistan will be ready to be free but today and in my lifetime I do not believe they are there.

MAJ Byron Oyler All I can say is they better not expect us to return after loosing so many and spending billions or trillions to aid them over the last 20 years almost. I don't understand why they prefer dictatorships over freedom and dormancy. Maybe they just wanted free security from us? Who knows.

We're not going to be able to force them to live a way they don't want to live. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast."

We should not try to force anyone to live the way we do. I think we live pretty good, gave them a taste, and they pushed the meal away. I am ok with that.