Can afghan war be won?

I dont think so. Its roots go back too far, and while our country is making a difference over there, in the end they’ve got to come to terms with the corruptions of their nation and want to change. It starts with them, we can help but thats all we can do. Its not our war.

the war there wioll never be completely won, but thats because terrorists will never cease to fight, just as we will not. we can however bring some peace to that country and pass the control of terror control to their new government, once we have decimated the resitance. so in turn, it will be a victory for the colition forces I.e. usa, uk, but afghanistan government and army will continue fighting the war, once we have left. so in short, yes we can win, but terrorists, will keep doing terrible things no matter what.

Is the conflict in Afganistan a war? Congress never declared war. Now that we toss the word war around it doesn’t mean much. We have had wars on poverty and drugs as well as terrorism. How well has the wars on poverty and drugs been going lately?

A lot depends on how you define victory as well. In war the usual standard is an unconditional surrender by your enemy. That obviously will never happen here. If we define victory as installing a puppet government than it is possible but every time we have done this in the past it has ended badly. If we define victory as not allowing terrorists to use Afganistan as a base of operation this is possible but very difficult and expensive to do long term.

Like fillet said, it depends on what is meant by “win”. I don’t think it is possible to win unless we attack the root cause, which is Islamic extremism, and it would require actions we are not willing to take to do that.

No-one is even talking about secular propaganda campaigns, secular education programs in Afghanistan, paying off/rounding up Imams, leveling mosques and holy sites, or creating “heretical” sects of Islam to undermine it from the inside. The immediate reaction would of course be more violence, but within a generation it would diffuse the radicals, just like destruction of the Jewish temple and the rise of Christianity undermined Jewish extremism 2000 years ago and led to a rapid end of it.

If we aren’t willing to do everything necessary to end Islamic extremism for good, we might as well pack up and come home.