It is time to leave Afghanistan, as Lee Sharkey pointed out in her Nov. 22 letter to the editor. The cost of the wars is too high.

One of my points when voting for President Obama was that he did not support our “nation-building” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I understood that we would soon be out of those wars. We are still there.

By remaining in those “nation-building wars,” we have created more terrorists from those strongly opposed to our democratic way of life, that which we seek to impose upon them.

We ourselves, self-styled messiahs of liberty, are radicalizing the two nations, embedding them in their Medieval traditions, rather than opening them to democracy, a fact that has been obvious since the Bush administration.

It is time for President Obama to make the decision.

The cost of “nation-building,” changing a culture fundamentally opposed to our own, is too high.

What is the cost?

The cost is the lives of our sons and daughters.

Tom Fallon, Rumford