"DGDevin" wrote in message
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"harry" wrote in message
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What made Bush think he could do any better than the might of the USSR
situated right next door?

Well, actually he did. The Taliban was destroyed and/or fled,

Big difference between the two options. AFAIK, they moved with Osama into
the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan until things cooled down. Soldiers I
know who've been deployed in Afghanistan say that they "police" they pay and
train during the day are the ones that shoot at them when it's nighttime.
Sounds as futile as Vietnam where much the same thing happened. Friends by
day, foes by night. In the '60's we were propping up badman Diem and his
crazy wife. Now we've got Karzai and his band of brotherly brigands.

It's kind of like home repair, you have to finish the
job or there is little point in even starting.

It's more like trying to deal with termites. You can kill all that you see,
but if you don't destroy the nest, you're just spinning your wheels. The
Afghan people remind me of an old Clint Eastwood movie about the Civil War
where the townspeople living on the border sing "Dixie" if the Confederates
ride into town and "Yankee Doodle Dandy" if Union soldiers ride in.
Taliban, USSR, US, British - the Afghans have seen them all, lived under
them all, and don't much change the way they've done things for centuries.
They just wait for the next invader to come when the current one leaves.

We're delusion in thinking we can replace a long-standing tradition of
bribe-based family and tribal culture with a modern democracy from the top
down. It just doesn't work that way. We sure didn't have to ram capitalism
down the Chinese throats by force. They came to it (like gangbusters)
*when* the time was right. Same with the Sovs. The Afghan people mostly
don't care about democracy - they just want to get back to living the way
they've always lived.

We should let the Taliban back in, let them build their government up and
THEN topple it. Right now, they're doing the same to us, blowing up
whatever WE try to build. It's pretty pointless and VERY expensive.
Despite the recent "leaked" news reports extolling Afghanistan's alleged
mineral wealth a while back, they really are of little strategic interest to
us. To the Sovs, maybe - they are as near as Canada is to us and that
represents a legitimate strategic threat.

The BS line about "denying Al-Qaeda a place to plan future attacks" made me
realize people will believe anything. To believe that crock, you have to
ignore the fact that this is a huge world full of places that bad men can
use to plan attacks if we deny them Afghanistan. As we can plainly see,
Pakistan makes just as good a terrorist incubator as Afghanistan - maybe
even better because eventually Pakistanis will refuse to allow US troops to
kill their countrymen with our drones.

We could easily force Pakistan over to the "dark side." We wouldn't like it
very much if some other country started killing Americans by remote control.
Well, they don't like it much, either. From what I read, each day it
continues creates deeper anti-US sentiment, even from the Pakistanis that
hate the Taliban. For them, it's a question of national sovereignty, just
as it would be if it were happening to us.

--
Bobby G.