How has the war in Afghanistan made U.S. safer?

How has occupying two nations at a cost of 5,000 dead, 35,000 wounded and a trillion dollars made us safer from an enemy that more resembles the Apache of Geronimo than the panzers of Rommel?

If protection of the homeland against another Sept. 11 is the goal of this war, how relevant to that goal is the building of clinics and schools in Kabul and keeping the Taliban at bay in Helmand?

Are we fighting other people's wars, rather than our own war?

We Americans are today widely hated in the Arab and Islamic world by scores of millions, out of whom al Qaeda need but recruit a few hundred suicide bombers to wreak havoc on our country.

Does having 200,000 U.S. troops in their part of the world, fighting and killing Muslims, make our country more secure than defending our borders, keeping radicals out, running al Qaeda down, and tracking and killing them where they are?

To win the war we are in, we have to fight the war we are in, not the war we prefer to fight because no one else is so good at it.