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Originally Posted by ninty

There are 19,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Along with troops from most other NATO countries. Canada has 1,000 troops there and that number is supposed to go up.

The forces there are under NATO supervision not UN and the Canadians there are part of the Provincial Reconstruction Team. I think the Americans are still looking for "terrorists" but some of them are also part of reconstruction teams. Soon they'll be a mcdonalds and starbucks on every corner of Kandahar.

FYI, Bush is interested in making Afghanistan work. Why would he? What does he care if one country out in the middle of nowhere. All it does is cost money time and manpower.

The reason for going to war in Afghanistan was terrorists that attacked the US on 9/11. However, it has been noted that the US wanted to attack Afghanistan before 9/11 even happened.

Take this article from March 15, 2001:

http://www.janes.com/security/internati ... _1_n.shtml

And this one:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1550366.stm

From the Janes article, sounds like we should have gone in earlier