There is much debate over the campaign in Afghanistan. For those who haven't studied war, let me clarify, Afghanistan's not a separate war but a campaign within a larger global war that began on 11 September 2001 when a loosely affiliated group of Jihadists who call themselves Al Qaeda attacked the United States of America.  They have subsequently committed less dramatic attacks in places like England, Spain, Italy, The Philippines and Indonesia.  They continue to pose a threat to the safety of the men women and children who don't believe, think, do and say as they would want them to.
 
Perhaps the country has forgotten the following facts.
1.  On 11 September 2001 the US was attacked by people who killed innocent civilians.
2.  The men who perpetrated the attack were part of a group that is referred to as Al Qaeda.
3.  The members of the attack came were trained by and ably financed by a part of the organization that was operating out of Afghanistan.
4.  The Taliban government chose not just to harbor Al Qaeda but to ally itself with and give sanctuary to Al Qaeda members from the US.
5.  In order to try to eliminate future threats by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan we were forced to also make war upon the Taliban who supported Al Qaeda with force of arms.

Al Qaeda isn't a nation it isn't even a very cohesive group.  I have seen first hand the way that it operates in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I have seen children who were 'knee capped' in front of their fathers and worse, seen the site of mass beheadings of village leaders who didn't want to give full cooperation to Al Qaeda's representatives.  I have seen other things I will not describe because of the nightmares they evoke, but no horror writer to date can match what they have done in reality.  These are the people the Taliban have allied themselves with.  The Taliban for its part isn't all that wonderful.  To this day women in Afghanistan are the bound chattels of men especially in Taliban controlled areas.  In these areas, women can still be stoned to death, a very brutal, slow and painful torture that ends in a horrible death.  Women are executed in areas outside of Taliban control (women aren't educated in areas under their control)  for simply going to school or God forbid! (literally to the Taliban) exercising the right to vote or to speak freely for education or domestic rights.  Rights American women take for granted, like being able to go out shopping without a male escort.

Al Qaeda is a hydra, a many headed monster that grows two new heads when one is lopped off.  It can only exist because governments or the leaders of an area or nation allow them to exist within their borders.  We cannot fight Al Qaeda by lopping off its many parts.  We can however defeat it by eliminating the environments that harbor and protect it.  Places like Afghanistan, Somalia, The Horn of Africa, parts of the trans-Siberian countries and others that succor these monsters and shelter them from those who wish to stop people who will talk a young man or woman into strapping a bomb to themselves or driving one in hopes of a better life in the name of Allah while the leaders profit from what those poor benighted souls are persuaded or coerced into doing. 

We aren't fighting to build a nation of Afghanistan.  We aren't fighting for oil or for 'multi-national' corporations.  We are fighting to give people a choice and to elminate the threat of another 11 September 2001.  A threat that is real and ever increasing as the US is perceived to have lost the 'stomach' for destroying Al Qaeda. 

I disagree with Mr. Obama from the very base of my core.  I too was raised in Hawaii, my wife taught at Punahou where he attended school.  I dealt with his grandmother. So I know that he is a self-aggrandizing, narcissistic no-account who has struggled with his abandonment by not one but two fathers and a mother who was a rebel with too many causes and too little time for her children.
But I do not disagree with his former position as Candidate Obama that we cannot lose in Afghanistan and that the battle is important and part of the key to keeping our country safe from a future attack.  What we do here and now will be critical to whether we see mushroom clouds over a major or several major US cities in the next ten years.  That is why I support General McChrystal and the timely deployment of as many troops as we can sustain in theater.  Well that and the memories of the men who have died already in trying to keep the US from the depredations of the people we're fighting.