I'm in agreement with those who think we should pull out of Afghanistan, and although Kobuk didn't ask, out of Iraq as well. While it's not quite true that Afghanistan has never been conquered, it has never been conquered and held. The British couldn't do it, the Russians couldn't do it and we can't do it either. Those people are tough. They don't give up.
However, this is a war for Big Oil and the military-industrial complex, and they are going to keep at it for as long as they can. That has nothing to do with victory. There will be no victory. It has to do with profits -- money, and lots of it. War is a profitable business.
There was a time, perhaps even as recently as the early 'seventies, when the people could influence U.S. government officials. Those days are long gone. Global multinational corporations are pulling the strings now, and they tell the elected officials what to do. If those officials disobey, bye-bye campaign finances. The President is not in power and neither is Congress. They have to dance to their contributors' tune. If they don't, those contributors will find a new set of sold-out prostitutes (I prefer a blunter one-syllable synonym beginning with "w") who will.
Our elected officials do not work for the people. They work for Big Banking, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Insurance et al., and the nine or so multinational Mainstream Media outlets play ball with all the rest. It's a shell game, crony corporatism, not "capitalism" as the idiotic ditto-heads, Faux Noise-watchers and Teabaggers seem to believe. Any candidate who doesn't play ball will be made to look like a conspiracy theorist. He might as well give all his speeches in a tinfoil hat.
So, in short, yeah, I think we should pull out of the Middle East, because this is just another Vietnam. So what? It doesn't matter what I think, because I do not have billions of dollars to contribute to the sold-out you-know-whats on both sides of the aisle.
There is no "aisle." There is only one major U.S. party: the Authoritarian Corporatist Party. All other distinctions are meaningless.