Afghanistan

I'm even more opposed to our continued involvement in Afghanistan than I was 2 days ago. The reason? I read a book: To Afghanistan and Back. It's a graphic novel/travelogue by Ted Rall, a liberal alternative cartoonist/journalist. He took the unusual step, after the Afghanistan war started, of actually going to Afghanistan:



In short, the situation is far worse than we've been led to believe. Neither we, nor the Afghani government, nor anyone else really has control over the country. And we're not going to be able to control it, either, short of a massive WWII-style invasion. The British failed to control it, the Soviets failed, and we will fail. Hamid Karzai is basically just the mayor of Kabul, and he and the American-approved government ministers are all former oil executives. And they're the least corrupt leaders in the country, as the rest of the place is ruled by gangsters. The "Northern Alliance" and the Taliban aren't just similar — they're the same people on different days. In Iraq we're sitting in the middle of a civil war, in Afghanistan people don't even have enough ideological or ethnic loyalty to give a shit about that, it's just relentless gang violence over money, territory, and power. The uniform code of law is Sharia, not because people are particularly good-natured or religious, but because their society is so fucked up that nobody has the civil authority to make and enforce laws, so they go with the one constant they have. And since we don't have the balls to put enough troops on the ground, we engage in indiscriminate bombing campaigns that kill and maim civilians, destroy what's left of the country's infrastructure (all built by the Soviets), and accomplish nothing because we don't even know who we're really fighting.

And, by the way, the Al Qaeda leadership is chilling in Pakistan. But we can't bomb them because they have nukes.