Afghanistan: Ain’t That The Problem?

This isn’t a reply to Dennis but is the only route I can go to post here. I’m working off a MacBook and can only post via a reply. I wanted to remind folks of South Vietnam’s Nguyen Van Thieu. In 1971, Thiệu ran for re-election, but his reputation for corruption made his political opponents believe the race would be fixed, and they declined to run. As the only candidate, Thiệu was thus easily re-elected, receiving a suspiciously high 94% of the vote on an 87% turn-out. I’m not seeing any daylight between Thieu and Karzai.

This war is confusing. I’m a regular political blog reader and consider myself pretty well informed, but if a 10 year old kid walked up to me and asked me why we were at war in Afghanistan I don’t think I could provide a good answer — if any answer. To me, McCrystal looks like some kid just asked him the same question. He’s stumped, too.
Right now, we’re pretending that we can prevent religious radicals from plotting attacks on us by sending troops to a country where there are a bunch of religious radicals and dropping bombs on them and their countrymen from drones. There must be a word for when someone is trying to solve a problem from the wrong end. ‘BassAckwards’ is as close as I can come to it. We are trying to stamp out the effect, when we should be focusing on the cause. Once you change the cause, the answer solves itself. Focusing on the effect without changing the cause keeps you solving the problem in perpetuity.
Bush’s answer to ‘why do they hate us? They hate us for our freedoms!” set us back decades on this problem. We need to re-ask the question and look at it intelligently this time around.