Political Crossfire Forums

During the VP debate the topic of whether or not to announce a firm withdrawal date came up for debate again. Paul Ryan's argument is that it's unwise to announce the withdrawal dates because it tells the terrorist when to lay low and when to attack. But if what he said is true, wouldn't it be great for America?

The whole time the terrorists are laying low, you can aggressively build infrastructures and interact with civilians. You can train national soldiers. And because the terrorists are laying low they do not have a lot of their propaganda tools from successful attacks. So even if we know that they're going to step up their attacks after a certain date, we would be way more prepared for that day than if we were to engage in continuous conflict the whole time.

ryan and romney are just parroting neocon chicken hawk BS. no withdraw date means we get to stay there forever and keep funneling tax dollars to the military industrial complex which lines their pockets.

even if obama manages to get us out of afghanistan completely (or even 95%), a romney presidency ensures he'll find at least one or two other countries to invade

sanity no longer prevails in the republican party as it exists today

perhaps someday it will again, but it is difficult to see the possibility

I dont know about sanity, but using thy noggin seems to be a rare event if you have a D or an R next to your name.

It's a red herring. No sane person would propose we just pull out spontaneously without advance announcement to the Afghans. So either way, there eventually has to be a pullout date. Might as well be 2014. As was pointed out in the VP debate thread, this is just Romney and Ryan trying to build a flimsy wall between their foreign policy and Obama's, trying to create a divergence in policy where none exists, because to admit they agree with the administration on ANYthing would completely undermine their doomsday narrative that the very fate of the nation depends on their victory next month. Read between the lines, their basic foreign policy message is, "We would have done everything exactly the same as Obama, except, you know, earlier and better!"

Besides, the "terrorists" in question here are a native political organization whose influence will never be completely removed from the region, no matter how much we may have successfully beaten them to the fringes for the time being. We're just delaying the inevitable civil war, and only an arrogant madman would suggest that we could do anything to effectively stop it. Moving timelines or foregoing them altogether is a pretty pointless exercise.