If you help create your enemies faster than you can wipe them out how can you win?

Trick question. You can’t win.

There will be two winners who’ve lost an awful lot, if both sides cut their losses and go home.

War is not the answer. Bullying is not the answer. I may not have the exact answer…but, I know it has to do with diplomacy, respect and the ability to mind one’s own business.

Diplomacy only works when both sides respect each other and perhaps even share something in common, it is much too late for diplomacy here.

Play starcraft. rofl, just kidding
1. Stop fighting and against them and work towards solving the initial problem like civil people
2. If you can’t win, join them.

The only winners in war are the companies that finance the war machine.

@interweb those points you make only work in an ideal world, which this is far from. The first point only works if both sides can do so at the same time and if one side wasn’t filled with fanatics that are willing to die in droves without questioning why and the other side wasn’t filled with equally fanatical people bent to make money and if both sides didn’t have hidden agendas. And with the second point, no one likes surrendering and both sides happen to have people that feel that its better to lose millions than to say that they’re mistaken or that they surrender/submit. And starcraft battles only work with Koreans, like me, the rest of the world would get owned by Korea.
@zen_ sad but very true, though there are… freaks, for a lack of a better word, that take George Orwell’s 1984 and see that continuous war is the only real kind of peace. Scary, they also win with every battle.

I guess the amusing part is that I’ll be probably in Afghanistan within the next 3 and a half years, or where ever the hell the US is fighting next.

Removed by me just because

You can’t. Therefore we must slow down the creation of enemies. The West should not help Al-Qaeda’s recruitment efforts.

@mattbrowne The West should not help Al-Qaeda’s recruitment efforts. It is almost a year later now. Bin Laden is dead, supposing, the new #2 is suppose dead also, but they do not really seem to be slowed down that much. I caught a few snippets of an interview some cable show was doing on US snipers and one soldier spoke how in one major battle in Afghanistan he racked up 32 confirmed kills. If we are killing them even at a rate of 8, 12, 20 to one and they have not run out of fighters, when will they ever? Given the fact that they might possibly be related, when one is killed would the surviving not burn with vengeance? When that helicopter was downed in eastern Afghanistan killing 31 soldiers and many from SEAL team #6 it steeled the resolve of the rest of the soldiers fighting from bases in that area. It didn’t make them throw up their hands and want to quit, it made them want pay back more. Why would these insurgence be any different? One you kill might spur his nephew or cousin to take up arms to try to extract a little vengeance. Short of not killing any insurgents, how does the West avoid helping the effort?