A Look At Why The U.S. Military Cannot Win Wars

Mark Thompson, Time: Why the U.S. Military Isn’t Winning

Half-hearted campaigns don’t change much on the ground

In June 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria swept through Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, and drove out the Iraqi forces that the U.S. had spent $20 billion training and equipping. Last May, they did much the same in Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province. This week, the Taliban—the Islamic fundamentalists running Afghanistan who sheltered Osama bin Laden as his lieutenants plotted the 9/11 attacks—retook the northern Afghan city of Kunduz after the U.S. invested $60 billion building Afghanistan’s military. It marked the first time the Taliban have taken a provincial capital since 2001.

Taliban leader Mohammed Omar has been dead since 2013. Navy SEALs hunted down and killed bin Laden in 2011. The U.S. regularly announces it has killed assorted ISIS leaders, and has said it has killed more than 10,000 of their followers. So how come after spending all this American money, and the deaths of so many of its adversaries, cities governed by leaders allied with the U.S. keep falling into enemy hands?

WNU Editor: President Obama is only mentioned in the second to last paragraph of this post.