The Bloomberg Opinion editorial you published Aug. 21 (“Another View: Can the U.S. recover from the Afghanistan debacle?”) makes the point that the president should “recognize this misadventure as a failure.”
Bloomberg is certainly right about that. However, the Bloomberg Opinion Editorial Board failed to draw the most important lesson from it: We have no business taking military action in other parts of the world unless American citizens are being attacked there.
Bloomberg Opinion states, “Abandoning loyal Afghan allies to their fate will haunt future U.S. interventions around the world.” They failed to say that we simply should not be engaging in such interventions. Diplomatic efforts, yes, but not military action. We should stop believing that we can control what goes on in other countries through our military.
Intervening in the internal affairs of other countries is ethically wrong. It is also doomed to failure. We should have learned that in Vietnam, but we did not, and now we repeated that in Afghanistan. I hope we can stop being slow learners.
Cushman D. Anthony
Yarmouth
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