Ken,
I made no judgement over who "owns" the chaos of Afghanistan. I was just trying to show that Obama made a good faith effort to put both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars "on the books" from an accounting perspective, as well as to enliven the discussion with some actual facts.
But since you brought up the Russians....they rapidly decamped from Afghanistan and left a power vacuum that was filled by Islamic extremists. Said fundamentalists were recruited by the CIA to fight the Russians (read Chalmers Johnson's "Blowback" or take the easy way out and watch "Charlie Wilson's War"--this really isn't conspiracy theory claptrap). Fast forward 9-10 yrs later and we have the Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and a few years later 9/11, brought to you by terrorists trained in....you got it, Afghanistan. So fast forward again to 2008 to the mess that Obama inherited, do you think another rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan, with a legion of wackadoo extremists sitting across the boarder in the Pakistani tribal areas was a good idea? I'm not saying I agree w/ all of the policy decisions of this administrations, or support specific aspects of their foreign policy, but a fair accounting of the choices they make shows that their actions really can't be summed up with inflammatory sound bites. The law of unintended consequences reigns throughout life, and is particularly robust in American foreign policy decisions. Probably nobody can foresee what our interventions in the middle east will cost us down the line, but I'm sure that folks on both sides of the aisle will spin them for political gain.
OOPS, I mentioned islamic extremists. I guess the NSA picked that up and is all up in every poster's hard drive, right Eyebolter?
