Saturday, June 26, 2010

There is no honor in pissing into the wind.

We have a new general in The Kabool Quagmire in support of the same old policy that wasn't working before. But it should work this time because the new guy in charge wrote the policy, right? No, totally and completely wrong. We are half fighting a war in supports of those who don't want us. Our leadership seems determined to waste hundreds of lives and $Billions of dollars chasing a chimera of nationhood for a scrum of quarrelsome tribes. Or as Bob Herbert puts it,
We are sinking more and more deeply into the fetid quagmire of Afghanistan and neither the president nor General Petraeus nor anyone else has the slightest clue about how to get out. The counterinsurgency zealots in the military want more troops sent to Afghanistan, and they want the president to completely scrap his already shaky July 2011 timetable for the beginning of a withdrawal.

We’re like a compulsive gambler plunging ever more deeply into debt in order to wager on a rigged game. There is no victory to be had in Afghanistan, only grief. We’re bulldozing Detroit while at the same time trying to establish model metropolises in Kabul and Kandahar. We’re spending endless billions on this wretched war but can’t extend the unemployment benefits of Americans suffering from the wretched economy here at home.

The difference between this and a nightmare is that when you wake up from a nightmare it’s over. This is all too tragically real.
We have all gone through the looking glass.

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