I just watch this documentary that National Geographic created following a group of Green Berets in Afghanistan. The soldiers are very intelligent and motivated people who sacrificed themselves after 9/11 to join and fight for the people in our country. The American people and our elected leaders are the true idiots. We have wasted hundreds of thousands of lives in Afghanistan (both Americans and Afghans) needlessly. I think that we were right to overthrow the Taliban, but the way we have tried to pacify the country after that is totally wrong. The Romans showed 2000 years ago how you can control the known world when you only have one Roman citizen to each of hundreds or thousands of other people. the Romans were able to bring the Pax Romana, 300 years of peace to the world, through much more effective strategies than we use today. We use a stupid strategy called winning the hearts and minds which will never work when those hearts and minds are afraid of being shot by Taliban. A better strategy would be with the Romans did when one of their soldiers were killed, they killed a hundred locals at random and they told the locals to hunt down and prevent any more Romans from being killed. Afghan locals would then have a choice of for SURE getting killed by American bombs and troops if one of us died or MAYBE being killed buy a low tech Taliban supporter. The local villages would push out all of the Taliban and fight for us. Afghanistan would be at peace now with only a few thousand dead instead of hundreds of thousands dead. Ignorant short-term compassion cost enormously more lives in pain by not following the hard but right long road.