critical moment. if the united states had said we are going to take this little group of people and maybe a few hundred to a few thousand allied troops and contractors and leave them there, then that would have posed the taliban with the question of whether to escalate. and i think we would have gotten trapped into a whole series of the kinds of dilemmas president obama faced in 2008, 2009 when the situation was moving in the wrong direction and we had to either escalate and surge or accept that we were on a trajectory to losing. so no, i really don't believe that there is some sort of minimal permanent war making that you can do and also, for a lot of the reasons you were bringing out which is that war is the fundamental choice of state craft and this is something that u.s. military troops are taught that, you know, in good terms, war is a different kind of act of state from other sorts of acts of state and when you start treating it as this little paint