I hate war. No one hates war more than those called upon to fight them, and as one who has worn the uniform of both the Navy and the Army, I hate war with a passion.

Having made my point, I know that wars are sometimes necessary to defend citizen and nation. But wars should only be fought when absolutely the last resort and then they should be fought with absolute brutality to discourage their resumption. I am one who believes the Geneva Conventions produced by the victors of the Second World War make war more and not less likely by making them less costly to life and limb.

The war in Afghanistan is a case in point. On September 11, 2001, Saudi Islamists, having formed a military force called Al Qaeda and trained in unconventional war in Afghanistan, attacked the United States by flying commercial aircraft into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. America was at war with Islamism whether it liked it or not.

Early on, the then President, George Bush, determined to eliminate the training camps in Afghanistan and overthrow the Afghan government under the Taliban for their complicity. America’s unconventional forces did a masterful job in assisting in the overthrow of the Afghan government and its replacement with one more to our liking. And for the next twenty years we dallied with the Taliban like a cat with a mouse. We never sought to crush them, so like poking a stick in a hornet’s nest we only stirred them up instead of eliminating them as a threat

If you are a student of world history you understand that a war is over when the loser says it’s over. And the loser will lay down his arms when the cost of fighting on is far higher than the ignominy of defeat. And how do you convince an enemy like the Taliban he’s lost? By killing him and all that is dear to him village by village.

We understood that as we fought the Second World War. We bombed civilian centers mercilessly. The woke crowd that is busy rewriting history are quick to condemn the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they do so out of a complete ignorance of history and the necessity of crushing the spirit of the enemy in war. Our ancestors cut off the heads of their defeated enemies, not because they just delighted in mayhem, but in order to convince those yet alive to give up the fight.

Endless wars are a horror, and wars that are fought in such a way that the enemy can replace its soldiers faster than we are willing to kill them will last endlessly. Or, as with Afghanistan and soon Iraq and Syria, we furl our flags and slink off in humiliating resignation. A nation that is unwilling to exterminate those who would make war upon it will eventually find itself confronting an enemy that is quite willing to exterminate it – probably sooner rather than later.