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Afghanistan: 630, 117, 155 -- and the count continues to add up. I'll detail those horrible numbers in more detail in a moment.
I hesitate to upset my Democratic friends. I'm as pleased as any of us that we're seeing such wonderful change in Washington. The next two and three weeks leading up to the Inauguration, and then the afterglow of the beginning of a new Administration, is an exciting time for all of us who have worked long and hard in many different ways for "change."
But I'm worried that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton have been pushed into a corner concerning Afghanistan, not unlike the way President John Kennedy was pushed into Vietnam. During the past few years, many elected and prospectively elected Democrats had to come across as willing to "fight the war on terrorism," so our rhetoric since 2003 or so has been that Iraq was a war we had to end, but Afghanistan was a war we are willing to wage. After all, that's where the Taliban are.
The Taliban? None of the 19 terrorists who were on the planes attacking the World Trade Center or the Pentagon on September 11th were Taliban. We decided to attack the Taliban. We invaded Afghanistan. We were looking for Osama bin Laden, who somehow hasn't been in the news in recent weeks. He was once the object of our anger and mind set. We don't even know he's in Afghanistan, but we're stuck there, as we got stuck in Vietnam looking for communists. So much for learning History 101.
Vice President-Elect Joe Biden has been touring Afghanistan this past week, being fed the usual military dribble that American leaders from Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to Tom McIntyre and George Romney had been told during the Vietnam War.
