Not 19th C. Afghanistan. 20th C. Afghanistan (the Soviets) and 20th C. Iraq (the Brits.) The situations are the same.
Look, we've got 44,000 troops in theater without Kevlar vests, which can't be delivered fully until the end of next year. We've been in the theater for six months, and we still have some people who are living on MREs. Brown and Root and Halliburton are bilking the taxpayers for services they are still unable to deliver, and our troops are paying the price. Sure, commerce is being transacted and the banks are open and there are internet cafes, but our casualty rate has begun to escalate, our folks on the ground don't speak the language or understand the culture. Our policy makers, most importantly Bremer and his staff, think they are dealing with uneducated non-humans, and treating them that way, we are not making friends. Iraq has the highest percentage of adults with advanced degrees of any society on earth, many of them earned in western universities. Forgive me if I sound angry. I'm enraged at the casual way this whole campaign has been waged; the casual way the lives of our military are spent on an unneccesary, elective war. What did Rummy call it, "untidy?" Yeah. Death is usually untidy. Do these assholes think they are going to live forever? Someday, "untidy" is going to find them.
And it will end badly because of the hubris that impells it. Bushco, the whole batch of it, the neo-cons and all, are a facet of the American psyche. They are our darkside. Upthread, an eloquent post spoke in terms of Shakespearian tragedy, Greek tragedy, of how things ending badly is not about justice. We westerners like to think that we live in a just world, that actions bring proportionate results, that societies operate like Newtonian physics. It ain't true. That since Saddam is gone, and we're better than Saddam, this is a net win. Wrong. The mind of the east knows that if you do something for the wrong reason, if it is an apparent good thing, you will pay for your dark motivation, your shitty execution, your unwillingness to take it all seriously.
This was supposed to be a "cakewalk." Bushco put American lives on the line without ever taking those lives, or the cause to which they were committed, seriously. These are unserious people willing to waste lives for an ideological experiment. To them, our dollars and our lives are "whatever." If it doesn't work out, they aren't going to lose their millions, their ranches or their thinktank positions. The stakes are a little different for the rest of us.
Albert Einstein once said that "God doesn't play dice with the Universe." But Bushco is willing to treat our lives like a crap game, one they can leave when they lose interest. Bill Bennet is really an iconic figure here. What's losing a few million in the slots here or there? There's plenty more where it came from. But Bushco is treating us as his bank, of blood and treasure.
Yes, I'm angry. Deal with it.