Afghanistan

After watching Lara Logan's segment on 60 minutes tonight I was reminded again of my concern back in 2001 when I heard that we were going in there. Afghanistan is an incredibly hard place to fight any sort of conventional war. The geography is a guerilla fighter's paradise with mountains so high and steep that any and everyone in the valleys are sitting ducks. The elevation is so high that helicopters must restrict their loads. The only time you can see your enemy is when he is shooting at you. The only warriors to best Alexander the Great were Afghans (after 4 years of fighting he made peace with the biggest warlord and moved on to India). Now we are fighting a war there with against well-equipped, motivate enemy. It is doomed to be a losing war unless we can get unfettered access to the havens in nominally Pakistani tribal areas. I say nominal because Pakistan doesn't really rule that part of the world either. The tribal areas are autonomous because no one has ever been able to successfully impose their will upon them. Not the Persians, not the Greeks, not the Hindus, not the Moguls, not the Russians.

Even if we get access to the Pakistani tribal areas it will be a hard slog that is costly in human lives. Despite all the rhetoric about accomplishing a final defeat of the Taliban, we have to understand what it may cost us.

It seems to me that the only way we can be truly successful is to somehow become the champion of the local people to the point where they prefer association with us to association with the Taliban. Given that American ideology differs so much from local traditions, that is a tall order.