To win or not to win, that is the question.

 I hate the idea of war at the best of times. My parents drilled into me what the horrors of war were really like. My father served in North Africa for the German army during WW2, but luckily was captured early and spent the balance of the war in a prison camp in Texas. 

He was part of an anti-aircraft battalion, and he told he that they had so many anti-aircraft cannons going off that when one aircraft was hit they never knew who had done the kill shot. But to his dying day he was haunted - literally - with the thought that it might have been one of his cannons that had killed an enemy.

My mother lost both her parents when a bomb hit their home and while she was out at work at a munitions factory. (I suppose one could question why the Allies were bombing homes and not munition factories)

SO yeah, they both knew about the horrors of war.

BUT..... The world war ended quickly, because the Allies put everything into the effort to win and even nuked Japan to send a clear message to surrender.

WHY, you ask, is any of this important?

Because the U.S. has had a reputation since WW2 of not winning any wars. Afghanistan being the latest example. Blame Bush. He didn't need to get distracted by invading Iraq and in turn that was the impetus for ISIS.

Why didn't the U.S. conduct the war in Afghanistan in the same manner as it did against the Nazis? Go in full force, bomb the hell out of Taliban held areas, hunt them down wherever they would hide.

Then we might not have been there 20 years, only to leave with our tails between our legs, and have the Taliban come back into power.

I will be told that the dynamics are different this time. Are they really? 

Or is the only difference now the optics? Because of 24/7 news coverage and the internet, massive casualties would have caused an anti-war fervor in the U.S.

Or as some have suggestion, the more we would have killed, the more enemies we would have made. That argument doesn't fly because our enemies are back in power in Afghanistan, and it depends on which people you don't want as your enemy.

Imagine all those women and children and non-Taliban Afghans who are now going to be looking at the U.S. as having abandoned them. 

You either go into a war to win, or don't go in. Am I right or am I wrong?