Blood for Nothing - WHY?

I have been asking for a while what in the hell are we doing in Afghanistan?. Blame Michael Yon for providing the kernel that got me asking that. His wonderful reporting from Afghanistan made it apparent we had shifted our mission and our warriors were being ordered to put their lives at risk now for altruism, not US national security. Ralph Peters asked pretty much the same question yesterday in his column titled, "Blood for nothing." What worries me is as the question is asked we lose sight of the fact that real warriors and their families depend on the answer. They have only one mission in their view ... fight alongside their brothers on their right and left and come home whole to their family. Inherent is all that, is the belief that what we ask them to do is for our national interest. We tell them is to protect us and their families and when we say that, it must be true or they will sense the lie. As the President considers the request to send more troops you should keep a number of things in mind. First off, the military commander's job is to meet the given mission. In this case, the mission that started out as drive out the Taliban and destroy Al Qaeda has become nebulous. It is not in the military commander's prerogative to question the need for the mission. That is a political question and the military commander has two options, execute it to the best of his ability or resign. So the policy maker has to decide, not the warrior, whether the mission is worth spending our blood and treasure to do. I have suggested here before that one way to determine whether a war was vital to the US national security throughout American history was to war game the consequences of not fighting it, or worse, losing it on our way of life, national security, and economy. When you look at WWI and WWII you draw completely different conclusions. WWI was a war that never needed to be fought by the US. Vietnam was another, and today some will say Iraq qualifies as another needless war. Few questioned Afghanistan initially. The right of self defense and to hit back at those who slaughtered 3000 of our people was clear. The question now is whether that which we ask our warriors to do is still that mission or whether is has morphed into something else. Today we are still in Afghanistan. On the table is a request to send more American warriors because the mission was always under resourced, the "NATO coalition" proved to neither have the heart nor ability to perform COIN. Hopefully, as the President considers the request for more boots on the ground he has decided first, "what do we get out of it and whether it makes us safer?" If he does not, then we do great disservice to our wonderful warriors.