Web Letters: Will Afghanistan Be Obama's Vietnam?

I suspect that Afganistan is to America as it was to the USSR--a war too costly to win. This was Gorbachev's conclusion when told of the resources, 500 thousand troops, needed for "victory."

Staying is a disaster, especially as a foreign army provokes resistance and greater, not less, regional instability, than does leaving.

Frank P. Johnston

Grand Falls, NB

We have to build schools and make sure everyone attends and learns how to read and write and do math.

The children of Afghanistan must grow up with twenty-first-century skill sets, and especially the girls.

Shooting the bad guys and leaving is what we did in 1980, and now here we are almost thirty years later back there again with the same mess on our hands.

We have to build some kind of real economy for them.

They must learn that Islam is a peaceful religion, and they will only learn that if they can read and write for themselves.

I am a progressive, and these are my progressive views.

Gary Amstutz
The Democratic Club of Kern River Valley

Lake Isabella, CA

Katrina, should we withdraw and give a tacit OK to the Taliban, when it comes to questions like splashing battery acid on the eyes and faces of little girls who want to go to school?

To many of us, opposition to such action is the progressive course to follow.

What should America do? Do you care?

If this is not a war justification, what is?

I have asked this repeatedly in other posts, without any answer.

How many such atrocities are you willing to tolerate instead of crushing?

Without an answer to this point, you have no popular credibility, and that is the main reason your movement, which seems to favor acompromise with this type of action, cannot get popular traction. Compromise with barbarism is not progressive!

John D. Froelich

Upper Darby, PA