Withdrawal by 2014 sounds delusional to me. This started in 2003. This war needs to stop now. The only way the Taliban could take control of a country that’s been at war since ...when? The Middle Ages? Though it’s still the Middle Ages there. The only way is with the acquiescence of the people. War is normal life for them. They will fight the Taliban if they don’t want them, as they fought us, as they fought the Russians, as they have always fought. Time to go. We have another country to save. Ours.

A note from Afghanistan (“Peace Meals” by Anna Badkhen)”
  “In Lolaguzar, a xeric camp where the wind sculpted sandcastles out of dust inside the refugees’ haphazard lean-tos and dugouts, a young woman named Zulfiya told me about fleeing her home the day the Taliban had press-ganged her husband into the army.  Zulfiya had four children.  With her husband gone, and with no male family members around to protect her, she had feared that Taliban fighters would rape her, so she had grabbed her chldren and walked for six days to Lolaguzar.  She had clutched her infant son, Yakobullah, to her chest the whole way.  When she was leaving her house, Sulfiya had only had the time to dress her five-year-old daughter, Shiuriya;  her three small sons had gone naked.  Now they wore misshapen rugs someone had given them.  Half a mile away, past the skeleton of an unmanned armored personnel carrier and an old Soviet tank that guarded the entrance to the camp, the Pyandzh River, the only source of drinking water, bored muddily through the desert, spreading malaria in the summer, tuberculosis in the winter, and dysentery at all times of the year.  Zulfiya’s new home was a ripped piece of canvas thrown on the dusty ground beneath a dirty sheet of blue plastic propped up on sticks. . . .”

Happy Thanksgiving—if you have the stomach for it.

About as “aspirational” as expecting the US government to behave honorably, or the President to uphold the law, or pursue peace.

What I’d like to know is who, exactly, is the US preparing these Afghani troops to defend themselves from.  It cannot possibly be the only country that has violated and continues to violate international law and Afghani sovereignty, the same country that invaded and occupies, that restored the heroin and opium trade, and commits torture on a daily basis, and deigns itself the right to cowardly kill suspects and women and children by remote control.

I’m reminded of what Gandhi said when asked by a British reporter on the occasion of Gandhi’s first visit to England how he (Gandhi) felt about Western Civilization.

Gandhi’s response:  “I think it would be a good idea.”

I guess I’m giving away my age, but this all sounds like “Vietnamization” to me.