http://digbysblog.bl...t-looks-like.html

[Ed link]

[. . .]

When Mr. Gates was asked here if the conflict would last 10 or 15 years, he made a comparison to the cold war. “I think that we are in many respects in an ideological conflict with violent extremists,” he said. “The last ideological conflict we were in lasted about 45 years.”

This idea that anyone, much less the Secretary of Defense, would make such an analogy between the Cold War and a regional conflict in a broken country, with all the attendant "central front in the war on terra" folderol, has to be very worrying to the safety and security of troops in that part of the world, fighting and dying for an extremely uncertain cause. Searching for meaning in Afghanistan is futile. You just have a bunch of old warhorses justifying the whole thing to themselves. Are we bringing democracy and freedom to a remote part of the world?

And then there were the daily frustrations of (British Lieut. Colonel Graeme) Armour's job: training Afghan police officers. Almost all the recruits were illiterate. "They've had no experience at learning," Armour said. "You sit them in a room and try to teach them about police procedures — they start gabbing and knocking about. You talk to them about the rights of women, and they just laugh." A week earlier, five Afghan police officers trained by Armour were murdered in their beds while defending a nearby checkpoint — possibly by other police officers. Their weapons and ammunition were stolen. "We're not sure of the motivation," Armour said. "They may have gone to join the Taliban or sold the guns in the market."



Are we solidifying a strong central government?

...once bin Laden slipped away (nice passive voice there -ed. ), the mission morphed into a vast, messy nation — building effort to support the allegedly democratic Karzai government. There was a certain logic to that. The Taliban and al-Qaeda can't base themselves in Afghanistan if something resembling a stable, secure nation-state exists there. But the mission was also historically implausible: Afghanistan has never had a strong central government. It has been governed for thousands of years by local and regional tribal coalitions. The tribes have often been at one another's throats — a good part of the current "Taliban" uprising is nothing more than standard tribal rivalries juiced by Western arms and opium profits — except when foreigners have invaded the area, in which case the Afghans have united and slowly humiliated conquerors from Alexander the Great to the Soviets.

[. . .]

Murican Neoconmen meet Hottentots and Lose, but not all-at-once.
(Best to sever a vein than an artery.. if you want your occupier to $$bleed to death.)