You and I have been down that road before, SK, and to do so again would again prove fruitless. I have come to respect and value your opinion over the years. Of course, I do not think you are short sighted, either; but I do think your vision is not wide enough to see other alternatives before that last resort. I say this, though your knowledge of history has been proven here time and again.

It’s a curious thing. What is not curious is how you have taken this thread and made it a very personal matter. It’s understandable, given your closeness to the subject at hand (to put it mildly). I think, maybe, that same closeness may prevent you from seeing alternatives, in the cases of both Afghanistan and Vietnam.

And still I wonder: at what point does the human cost in Afghanistan become unacceptably high? And you still have not addressed the civilian toll among Afghans (or the Vietnamese, for that matter), instead focusing solely on American casualties. At a minimum, 13,000 Afghan civilians have died since the Amercian invasion and occupation — people who may be or have been sympathetic to the Taliban, but are otherwise just average, ordinary human beings trying to survive. How can we as Americans justify that?