Afghanistan is one leak in the dike among many

A recent article about a threat coming out of Yemen again causes me to wonder why, exactly, are we trying to remake Afghanistan.  The original reason for our invasion, as I recall, was because Afghanistan was a breeding, training, and launching ground for Islamic attacks against the United States. 9-11 was apparently the last straw.  So, we had to go in there to reduce or neutralize that threat. Isn't it odd that we invade Afghanistan when most of the 9-11 attackers were from Saudi Arabia?  Why didn't we go after Saudi Arabia?  I'll leave that for your imagination.

Now we have a dozen other nations that harbor the same sort of threat as Afghanistan did.  Yemen is but one.  We certainly don't have the resources to occupy and "remake" each of those, do we?  Why are we so hell-bent on devoting such a large chunk of our military resources in Afghanistan when the real threat is so widely dispersed among nations and regions?  This strikes me as a mega-version of the tactics used by the British during the American revolution:  They lined up their troops in formal ranks with fife and drum and marched slowly against the revolutionaries while their ranks were picked off by hidden natives using assymetrical tactics.  Except now the roles are reversed. 

We can't afford to persist in our costly, ineffective strategy that requires our occupation and attempts to remake the natives (Islamists) into our own image.  These tactics are ineffective even when we focus our resouces into one or two places.  The source of the threat is dispersed, coming from many places, even from within our own nation.  Our leaders have not yet grrasped the truth of the nature of the enemy we are fighting.  We have little understanding for the Islamic mindset that motivates their leaders and followers.  At the same time we have excessive tolerance for their actions and objectives.  We have, to a great degree, minimized the values of our own culture and political system and embraced the idea that we should pump our national treasury into cultures that are the antithesis of our own. 

This insanity needs to stop.  But it won't stop anytime soon because we have thousands of ignorant idealists pouring out of our progressive universities that are hell-bent on remaking our nation and culture into Obama's dream - the progressive's dream - that we are all one, no culture is better than another.  This new gospel promotes the idea that we must not just tolerate, but we must respect and embrace all other cultures as equal to or better than our own.

That is why our nation is in decline - it is by design - a consequence of our affluence - allowing too much time on the hands of academia to devise new ways to control and direct society.  This consequence is filling a cultural vacuum.  We have created this vacuum via our collective passivity, our preoccupation with entertainment and "stuff", along with our falling away from the faith of our fathers.  Oh yes, we still have an "American culture."  But it has morphed from a culture of necessity and substance into a culture of diversion and fluff.  This is a classic case of the historic fall of nations.