Afghanistan is Unwinnable as a War

If we continue to pursue a war in Afghanistan, we cannot win a military victory. We will be eventually driven out the same as the Russians were. The Taliban do not care about losses. They are the hordes who just keep on coming. Afghanistan will become a poor failed terrorist state eventually taken back over by the Taliban.

But if we have the courage to pursue a different course, we could win. Christopher Hitchens is saying what I have been saying for a while. He says we need to buy the opium crop from the farmers, giving them income but depriving the Taliban of income.

It can be burned or thrown away or perhaps more profitably used to manufacture the painkillers of which the United States currently suffers a shortage. (As it is, we allow Turkey to cultivate opium poppy fields for precisely this purpose.) Why not give Afghanistan the contract instead? At one stroke, we help fill its coffers and empty the main war chest of our foes while altering the "hearts-and-minds" balance that has been tipping away from us.

I think we need to go on from there and pay the farmers to plant other crops. Hitchens mentions reforestation and the replanting of vine crops. Whatever we do we need to be working with the people and building them up and considering the Taliban as more of a police action.

We don't need to send in more troops. We need a radically new strategy.

In testimony before Congress Adm. Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is quoted:

as saying that suicide bombings in Afghanistan were up 27 percent in 2007 over 2006... they are up 600 percent over 2005, and that all insurgent attacks are up 400 percent over 2005."

We need to work on the corruption in the government, too. Apparently Karzai's brother is involved in the heroin trade and has stopped the seizure of some heroin.

Our current government is really incapable of thinking outside the box. So this is why

a secret US intelligence report which says the political and military situation in Afghanistan is "grim" will be withheld from the public until after the election...

The Bushies don't have a good idea so they just hide the situation.