The War in Afghanistan is futile and a waste.

Ok lets try this again. lol First off my opponent claims that the war was a waste because the number of military lives lost exceeded that of the number of civilian lives lost. However this does not include the subsequent lives lost to terror attacks since 9/11 in the US and since my opponent brought up the coalition throughout the world. (Source#1) shows some of the most major terrorist attacks that have happened over the last 10 years but there are literally hundreds more that have happened each year. And by no means do I mean any dishonor to our Allies but if we remove the non-American lives lost we see that we have lost 2,259 service members. That's nearly 700 less then the September 11th attack alone. So the correct answer is no we have not lost more soldiers then civilians so far. But to the more important point, with the statistics and numbers aside, it is the solemn duty of each soldier to protect with his life if necessary the lives of his people. I would gladly give my life a thousand times over if it spared even a single civilian life and while not every service member feels the same way the majority of them do or did. But even if they don't feel that way it doesn't matter because protecting the people is the very basis of our existence. Even if the death toll was 10,000 soldiers it is still better then even a single civilian casualty. Even 1 is unacceptable. So it is far more acceptable for a soldier to die then it is for our citizenry to die. One of the most monumental things I've learned in my time in the Corps was something an instructor once said to me. "Know the difference between a life wasted and a life spent." If a solider dies but his death resulted in a civilian getting to live then this is not a wasted death but a spent one. So this begs the question is our sacrifices resulting in the lives of our citizens being protected? I will answer that later on as it ties with my next point. "Is it reasonable to conclude that without the war we would've lost more lives and had more 9/11 type events? I answer, no." This is incorrect. (Source#2) shows that since 9/11 there have been around 50 known terrorist plots in the US alone not including the thousands that have happened around the world nor the likely dozens that we will never even know about. your probably sitting there asking "why bring this up, this makes it look like the war isn't doing anything to prevent terrorism?" ill get to that in a bit but first lets look closer at source2 as well as (Source#3) and see who it is that is conducting these plots. As we can see a whopping 84% of all known terrorist plots were conducted by home grown terrorist. US citizens. Most of them were born here, grew up here, went to school and had jobs and lived normal lives just like you and me. Pro even brought up this very problem within out nation and it is certainly one that needs addressing though I would not go as far as to infringe on Muslims rights to practice their freedom of religion or banning them from coming to this country. But my opponents assumption that by focusing on border security and tighter immigration laws instead of the war in the Mid East we would have less terrorist attacks here is wrong since the majority of these attacks are being conducted by our own citizens. Do terrorist sneak across the border from time to time? Of course and it is a problem we need to work on but obviously not the most serious one since foreign attackers only make up a small percentage of known terrorist plots. So you all are probably sitting there still thinking "this still just looks like things that hurt your own cause, why bring them up?" Ready for this bombshell? Why is it that the vast majority of terrorist plots in the US are home grown radicals and not foreign radicals? The majority of radical jihadist are foreign primarily from the Mid East and only a small percentage of US Muslims are radical yet they are the ones behind the majority of these attacks. So why aren't these foreign groups attacking us? We know they want to. They want nothing more then to kill us. It could be argued that this is due to our awesome homeland security and border defense. Obviously not the case and if you look at the numbers we only see a few cases of foreign jihadist attacks on the US. So where are they? The answer. They are to busy fighting our military in THIER holy land! because for every US boot in the Mid East fighting them in their back yard its 5 less jihadist coming over here and fighting and killing in your back yard. Because we are taking the fight to them they can NOT take the fight to us and this is where I said my first point ties in here. Our actions over there are safeguarding the lives of our people here. If we weren't over there I guarantee you that there would be far more attacks on US soil. Like I said lives wasted vs lives spent. Our sacrifice over there ensures the safety of our people. those are lives spent. Will it stop all terrorist attacks? Of course not. Will it bring about the end of terrorism? Probably not. But it keeps our people that much safer. So that age old question "how do soldiers 10,000 miles away keep me safe here?" is answered. Better to be proactive then reactive. Better to be on the offensive and not the defensive. So in conclusion this war and the sacrifice of our service men and women are neither futile or a waste. As for the costs of the war I thank my opponent for cutting the price he mentioned in half since the Iraq war is not the topic here but I would go further and say that the cost is actually around 1.5 trillion since the war in Iraq was far more intricate and was against an actual uniformed military and government and thus would have cost more. But anyway I don't think there is a price on the lives of US citizens and thus the cost to ensure their defence doesn't really matter to me. There are far more worse things then the war that we waste way to much money on that could go to more important things. Like our broken welfare system or this obamacare train wreck. I'll go ahead and rap that up for this round. In the next round I will point out why we choose Afghanistan for the site of this war. Good luck to my opponent in his next round. #1 http://www.google.com... #2 http://www.google.com... #3 http://www.google.com...