Said Representative Jones (North Carolina):
"Tell me your definition of victory. What is it? Street cars going down the roads that the Taliban blew up?" Jones, who introduced the bill, asked rhetorically during a recent interview with Military Times in his Capitol Hill office. "Hell, we've been training the damn Afghans for 16 years. You can train a monkey to ride a bicycle in three."
Definition of victory? An Afghanistan that isn't a sanctuary for jihadis to plan and carry out a 9/11-scale terror attack inside America.
As for the training, soldiers and police get killed, wounded, or otherwise leave the service unlike the monkey who is owned forever. So new soldiers and police have to be constantly trained.
Even soldiers and police who stay need constant training to maintain skills that are forgotten (or need to be updated) over time.
Leaders of the troops need continuous training to replace losses and to advance up the chain of command to carry out new duties. Oversight is necessary to make sure they are not corrupt because even well-trained troops become combat ineffective if under poor officers.
Representative Jones appears to be under the illusion that you train a soldier and then put that soldier on a shelf where they remain fully ready to fight when needed. Forever.
If somebody would please explain these very basic facts of life to Representative Jones, perhaps he will withdraw his name from the bill and leave it to Democrats to carry out their traditional role of trying to lose wars.
It's a pity that there is no training program for members of Congress. It might not even take three years to knock a modicum of sense into them.
Why everyone doesn't want to minimize the role of the federal government in our lives is beyond me.
