Sheridan: Our troops must leave Afghanistan

Greg Sheridan, Our troops must leave Afghanistan

AUSTRALIA should cut off its military training program with Pakistan and during the next six to 12 months we should withdraw our troops from Afghanistan. Both these recommendations emerge from one simple piece of analysis. We cannot win in Afghanistan while Pakistan gives covert support to the Taliban.

... we are no longer conducting any useful military strategy in Afghanistan. It is wrong to sacrifice soldiers' lives in a militarily futile strategy...

There are countless academic studies, field interviews, military memoranda and the rest that demonstrate the intimate involvement of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence with the Taliban ...

... If a new Afghan government ever set up al-Qa'ida training bases again, the Americans would have every right and ability to attack them from the air...

The response of the federal parliament to the deaths of the Australian soldiers was pathetic on both sides. Here we are at war, with young men dying, and no one in parliament even thinks it's worth having a discussion on our overall strategy...

Never has our political culture revealed itself as so provincial, incurious and in a sense irresponsible as in the autopilot with which both sides of politics have avoided any serious discussion, or indeed thinking, about Afghanistan or Pakistan...

And even if Pakistan behaved itself, you're still fighting against impossible odds when trying to tame Islam. As Geert Wilders said today:

As I have argued many times, Islam is chiefly an ideology. An ideology of hatred, of destruction, of conquest.

File under: just come back home.