Didn't think of that but with Biden squashing the Keystone pipeline but approving Russia's pipeline, you may be right. And Russia depends on its energy exports to fuel its economy because they don't have anything else.

Makes me wonder if Biden is getting kickbacks from Russia AND Ukraine...

I think you missed the REAL DRIVER.
Getting a pipeline through Syria.

I truly feel this was all, in the end, about big energy competing with Russia to sell energy to Europe.

And personally, I cannot blame Russia for protecting Assad. We would do the same thing if it were us. When you see Syria on the map, you realize it's the one nation that stands between Big Energy controlling Europe. And whoever controls the energy, can usually win. (Actually, they don't have to fight. Just raise the prices, like Russia does to keep Europe and Germany in line!)

Every decision is ultimately a cost-benefit analysis. I think that the United States government made the decision to go into Afghanistan based on several premises:
1) The United States as a moral purveyor of good has a duty to fight against a moral purveyor of evil/socialism. One such opportunity exists in Afghanistan.
2) The people in Afghanistan are fighting against the Soviet Union to maintain their country and their liberties.
3) The Afghan people will embrace the United States and its way of life because we assisted with their resistance to the Soviet Union.
4) An alliance in Afghanistan gives us a territorial position of advantage analogous to Cuba for the Soviet Union.

While the first is purely a matter of opinion, clearly the second - and critical assumption - turned out to be only partially true. The third one was romanticized and categorically false. (We should have learned from it before attempting to "colonize" Iraq.) The fourth one is true, but gets us to the real cost-benefit analysis question: what is the cost of obtaining and maintaining this strategic position in the world?

Now I join with you in concluding that though there may have been a moral sanction for intervening, the economic costs should have been subject to more explicit public oversight. Has that regional position been worth the billions of dollars - and human lives - which it cost? That's a pretty tough argument to make successfully. But the precipitous pullout from the region has also forced us to confront those very costs of leaving - which are now going to be measured in not only Afghani lives but American lives and a generalized decrease in American moral authority around the globe. How does one put a price on that?

It's also very easy to play armchair quarterback about decisions made decades ago, but the fact remains that once a decision has been made, subsequent decisions have to be made on future considerations rather than the sunk costs of past considerations. That's the part where sometimes such absolute pronouncements tend to appear a little extreme.

Read some very interesting things about Thomas Jefferson. While he certainly championed some individualistic notions, he was conversely authoritarian on others. He was clearly a brilliant man and some have estimated his IQ to be above 200.

I think it is dangerous to attempt to lionize any particular past president. They were all human. All made mistakes just trying to do the best they could (speaking of presidents pre-Civil War).

I miss Jefferson.

I agree with your points, and that the interest did not justify the idiocy of the activity. Letting the Soviets waste their resources in Afghanistan was one of the best actions the US made in the Cold War. That made it clear to anyone with a functioning brain that entering Afghanistan was foolish if the goal was to protect the American people. So there is an interest in protecting the American people, but going into Afghanistan was doing the opposite. So if there was in reality an interest in Afghanistan it was an interest in an anti-American goal.

There was an American interest: that the Soviet Union was next door. Whether or not it justified us being there was another matter, but it did give us strategically something we now lack: a base of operations for central Asia. Now we can certainly have that discussion about being the world's police, but I would offer that the problem the US has is in not actually taking that role seriously; if we're going to take it we should go all the way.

I was listening to one retired colonel and he was saying that we might have just ceded the entirety of the Asian continent to China - including India.

BTW - China is now rattling sabers regarding Taiwan and telling them that Taiwan shouldn't rely on US defense help. Unfortunately, they may be very accurate there as we know that Joe is only a paid shill of China and has been for decades. Coupled with the degraded morale of our military right now, I would hesitate to say that China is probably right.

Silver lining? The left won't complain about the CO2 emissions.

Worse, we are going to hand it over to CHINA to take advantage of. Pepper some money into the Taliban hands, and extract whatever they want...

I watched the clip and was proud of this person for speaking up.

I think of friends who said "We are happy Trump is gone, we just want someone NORMAL".

Do you miss Trump Yet?

I sure as Fxxx do!

Appears to be the case

China has their new digital currency backed by gold. The world's bankers must be truly desperate for gold for their own currencies just to keep up with China. Our new Fedcoin is backed by nothing, How many average Americans understand the monetary chaos we are in for when the dollar loses its reserve status to China's digital currency. At least one vet has buyer's remorse, and more will soon follow as we spiral down to 3rd world status.

Believed by whom? Experts like Fauci? Corrupt insiders like Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney? The evidence was in the same file that had the proof of Iraqi WMDs?
That was as much a fraud as the sinking of the Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin. Those sources have no credibility and have been caught in self-serving lies repeatedly.

Perhaps the current activities of central bank authorities are more like a bank robbery:
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities...
How desperate are banksters for gold?

So instead of letting American entrepreneurs use their own $3 trillion to advance mining asteroids (that contain riches of a thousand Afghanistans) and all the technology advancements that would result, the corrupt murderers and child rapers in DC throw American lives away for political power and steal $3 trillion for themselves.

Perhaps this is why were there after the Soviet Union withdrew:

In 2010, a report by US military experts and geologists estimated that Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest countries, was sitting on nearly $1 trillion (€850 billion) in mineral wealth, thanks to huge iron, copper, lithium, cobalt and rare-earth deposits

It was widely believed at the time that the Afghan government (i.e., the Taliban) harbored Al-Qaeda training camps. That would justify deposing the Taliban and doing a cave-to-cave search for Bin Laden (which wouldn't have found him). Once that was done, we should have been out the door.

The Afghans had nothing to do with the 911 attack.
No American interests.

so 3,000 murdered on 9/11 is "No American interests"???

NEVER should have been there at all.
No American interests whatsoever.
Those troops should have been on the southern US-Mexico border doing real defense of the American people.
The "refugees" are NOT MY PROBLEM. If the hair sniffing loon brings them to the US, then put them in the one place that matches their home country, DC.
DC is a $h|7hole worse than any third world banana republic.
Secession is the only peaceful choice for liberty. Otherwise the scum in DC will be constantly interfering and stealing from the people. $%^& them all.