I had something I wanted to say with regard to the Camden Conference on Afghanistan and General McChrystal. I tried all last night and this morning to view the comments and put one up but this website kept crashing.
I've been posting comments here for more than a few years and never had a problem until about a month ago when it began taking two or three tries to get in and write a comment.
What I'm really looking for is some explanation. Is it the ads? Too many images allowed on the front paged articles? What's the problem.
Getting back to our warlord in Afghanistan, General McChrystal... I suppose we have as a nation a mental image of the competition for power in this ungoverned area as fairly ruthless, barbaric and uncivilized.
When we come knocking on the doors of the local drug dealing islamic jihadist terrorist fanatics we have convinced ourselves are worse than the ___ (insert next favorite ethnocentric fearmongering racist ephitat here) I can see where we might want our lawyers, guns, and money to come across as the scariest hitters in the room.
That might be the pentagon propaganda, MSM, Netflics Action Adventure genre talking, but most people have been so assimilated by the Borg in this regard that resistance to what the media tells us to believe really is futile.
McChrystal is perfect for the Jason Stratham role. We don't want somebody complaining that there is no legitimate government for us to support, no enemy infrastructure to attrite, no way out of the bad movie we are going over budget on, we just want to crank up the volume, take another jolt and start blazing away.
The reason Afghanistan is a problem that lawyers, guns and money can't solve is that its like Maine, You can't get theah from heah.
The Middle of the country is a series of relatively sparsely habitated folded mountain ranges you can't tunnel through, bridge across, go around, fly over, blow up or parachute into.
The cities on its ring road can't even dependably transport local agricultural products into the cities or electoral results out of them. Schools, hospitals, supermarkets malls and democracy aren't among the comming attractions being advertised in the writing on the wall.
We are what the locals around here call a tick magnet. Our karma lacks the harmonious oneness with the cosmos that would protect us in the Pandoran woods and keep all the nasty stuff off of us. We are presently blowing up villages in Pakistan with predator drones just to keep our casualties in Afghanistan at a minimum.
McChrystals concept is a lot like the basis of Sharia law. If your hand steals you cut it off, if your feet try to run away you cut them off. If your head has dangerous thoughts you cut it off. Then, very humanely and scientifically where any part of the body has malfunctioned and you have removed it you replace it with a prosthetic; in this case local village leaders with a special forces team that can defend the village by killing any of its villagers who side with the Taliban.
A year ago Afghanistan had reached the point where the operation Phoenix style kidnapping, torture, and murder didn't work and the right wing death squad salvadorean dissapeared people solution had crashed and burned and the people were choosing the Taliban as the more humane of the two evils they were faced with.
McChrystal did the only soldierly thing possible and asked for an extension of time, more troops, more arms and more money claiming without them failure was inevitable.
Obama called his bluff and said ok, heres the support you requested, you have the year you said you needed, get it done and either way there will be no further extension of time and no second chances.
I think its time to leave, to walk away before it becomes another one of those routs in the face of a popular insurgancy we are becoming famous for.
The same thing applies to whatever the hell this website is doing that makes it impossible to put up a comment.