The United States government and certainly the current Bush Administration are woefully lacking when it comes to looking at the big, long range picture. I served for seven years as a US Intelligence Officer, more specifically as a Human Intelligence Case Officer tasked to recruit and run human sources who were committing espionage against their own governments and companies. During this seven year period I saw first hand how the US government would rather apply a quick band aid to a problem rather than consider the long range implications or past history. This "band aid" mentality was exemplified not only in my Case Officer training which included schooling in Persian-Farsi language but in the operations that my colleagues and I ran.
Unfortunately, this mentality is all too present in the current US war theaters of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is ludicrous that President Bush could land on an aircraft carrier and proclaim victory under the banner of "Mission Accomplished" after only three weeks of combat operations in Iraq when no one in the Administration had carefully considered the long range effects of our invasion on the populace. And now we are paying the price for our chronic short-sightedness. The same holds true in Afghanistan where our lightning military thrust into the country "defeated" the Taliban, a collection of war lords who have now regrouped in the mountains and who each day gain more popular support as the number of deaths of innocent civilians continues to rise. The support of non-Taliban war lords for US Military operations will decline the longer that US troops are operating on Afghan soil. Soon, cash payments alone will not buy their loyalty to the Karzai government or the US presence. Apparently we learned little from the Soviet invasion and occupation in the 1980's.
As a nation we will continue to blunder our way through the world until we are able to see the big picture and make decisions based on previous history as well as hard facts of the current situation. The inept Bush Administration has repeatedly shown that it would rather apply the "band aid" to give the appearance that it is doing something worthwhile rather than thoroughly study a problem which includes listening to the intelligence experts. The band aid has fallen off in Iraq and Afghanistan and now we are left with festering open sores.