Inkwell Institute

Preface:  After I wrote this posy the Taliban has had an 18 hour attack on the US and NATO….signalling the possible beginning of their Spring fighting season…..on a side note…..did you relize that an American dies abut every day and a half?

Since the recent debacle in Afghanistan….the US Army dude that went on a killing spree…….there has been much conversation about the Afghan Mission…..the Left wants us out…the Right wants us there until a final solution…..God only knows what that actually means……

But let’s be real……there is NO final solution!

There is a saying……Afghanistan: Place where empires come to die……..

There is an old Afghan saying…..”Beware, under each stone on every mountain lies a sleeping lion”

First, Romney recently talking about the mission kept calling the people Afghani……the people are afghans and the bank notes are Afghanis….I know a small thing but if this dude wants to bolster his foreign policy chops he might want to know what he is talking about…….

Sorry, I digress…..

The mission?  Is it to create a viable stable country where none has been in about 700 years?  Is it to see that AQ does not ever have a place to once again inflict pain on the rest of the world?  What will be the final solution?

A stable government?  They held elections and people participated….but that does not make for a stable government.  Pres. Karzai is about as popular with the Afghan people as a rattlesnake in heat.  He is little more than the president of Kabul once into the hinderland he is Not even close to representing the people.  plus the biggest cash crop in the country other than opium is corruption!

Ambassador Galbraith, with a sour taste in his mouth from his own experiences with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, insisted the war was doomed because our Afghan partners in the Karzai regime are hopelessly corrupt, inept, and illegitimate in the eyes of the Afghan population. O’Hanlon insisted that the new “counterinsurgency strategy” could work.

Then there is the continuing fear factor of a resurgent AQ…personally, I think AQ is a dead entity….it is so diminished that drones and special ops can handle anything that they dream up…..Our only strategic interest in Afghanistan is ensuring transnational terrorists cannot establish a haven from which they can launch attacks.  Through aerial drones and special operations forces, the United States has become adept at keeping al-Qaeda on the run. Al-Qaeda is not a sufficient reason to build a thus-far fictive Afghan state with a thus-far aspirational monopoly on violence in its own territory.

So what is the end game, the final solution?  Lots of lip service….but NO one and I mean NO one has any idea of what is the final solution or what it looks like.