I get a lot of emails from people of the Vietnam era. Journalists and veterans both - sometimes in the same person.

These are quotes about Afghanistan from people who have seen many things, in many places that I hope I never will:

In Afghanistan, the vast majority of the populace is now anti-American. We are supporting a corrupt government. The Taliban gives the concept of terrorist “hit and run” a whole new meaning. As we all know, Afghanistan has been the graveyard of big power intervention for over 250 years. As the Times article points out Russia had invested twice the force level than we ever had, and they had to quit.

As Americans, we have a history of winning wars, starting with the Revolution (in which for all effects and purposes we were the “Taliban”), and more to the point, the Indian wars. But those battles were the result of “manifest destiny” in which we had an entire people moving inexorably from East to West. It was gravity. As the Indian
chiefs often said “There are always more of them.” However, as a cautionary note, it is useful to remember Custer’s last stand, where
the Indians amassed themselves to the point where there were more of them than of the 7th Cavalry.

We have done the best we can in Iraq. Yet, that struggle is still not resolved. Pakistan is falling apart. A corrupt government cannot
protect its own borders. Afghanistan is essentially the same as it has been for centuries. There is no level of troop increase that will change that. All we are doing is squandering lives and exhausting our military.

We can’t afford to keep on doing it.

...and:

During a visit I made to Pakistan last year for The Straits Times in the wake of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, a Pakistani friend handed me a most arresting document – an old pamphlet first published in Lahore in 1901 - Report on Waziristan and its Tribes. “This will make your work easier,” he said wryly. “Just copy what’s in this, changing only the dates.”

The Pakistani, U.S. and British intelligence agencies had just named Baitullah Mehsud as the mastermind behind Ms Bhutto’s killing (in) December 2007.

The pamphlet included an analysis of the tribe written in the 1860s by one of frontier history’s most renowned British officers, Brigadier-
General Neville Chamberlain.

The Mehsuds, wrote the brigadier, “were formerly celebrated as the earliest, the most inveterate and the most incorrigible of all the robbers of the [Afghanistan] border.

“It was their boast that while kingdoms and dynasties had passed away they alone of all the Afghan tribes had remained free, and that the armies of kings had never penetrated their strongholds, that in their intercourse with the rest of mankind they knew no law or will [other than] their own.”

...and:

The point of this reminiscence is that Afghanistan is not a country entirely populated by crazed, bearded fundy warriors.

You also gotta remember that for most Afghans, Afghanistan as a nation is hardly relevant. They fight for family, tribe, warlord, ethnic group, personal honour and one other reason. This best summed up by a Talib fighter Newsweek interviewed for one of those mindless newsmag stories. "What will you do in the new millennium." Lots of inspirational messages from all over. The Talib told us, "I want to die, soaked in my own blood, fighting for Islam".

As Sebensky said, the Russians finally realised this after much agony...these guys will die for a cause. What cause have the poor bloody furriners flown in for a tour or two. Like the Viets, the Afghans live there, they don't want to go nowhere, they don't want to have heathen roundeyes on their patch. They never did (read a bit of history) and they'll be there long after our boys have dragged themselves back home, the lucky ones with a Purple Heart as their only reward from a grateful (?) nation. (And in the context of this discussion, al-Qaida is irrelevant. It long metastasized, and it has lethal cells all over the Islamic world and potential recruits in Muslim communities outraged at what's going in in an Islamic country. (We currently have terrorist trials going on here, in which the war in Afghanistan as a motivation, figures.)

Whenever I get involved in discussion of what we should "do" about Afghanistan, I say, "Nothing. Just get out". And then I quote Mr Rudyard Kipling, the great chronicler and champion of the British in the subcontinent, whose lines below are as relevant today as when the British were being pounded over a century ago. The Brits as we all know, lost.

Afghanistan wins all its home games.

"The Young British Soldier" (1892)

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

They need home. We should not be wasting the lives of our young Americans, or those of others, in what surely must be near the most desolate nothingness on the planet.

Bring them home. They will do whatever we send them to do, yet they cannot do there what no one else in recorded history could, and to try is to condemn them to ugly and unnecessary death and misery.

Bring them home.

Now.

I am, as of this morning, optimistic that the President is looking for a way to get our troops out; "the bridge out." Ambassador Eickenberry's memos may have provided the critical mass. No one knows the area and history better in terms of the military.

http://washingtonindependent.com/28153/meet-gen-turned-amb-karl-eikenberry

Sy Hersch says that there has been a little civil war among the Generals, but that Obama is taking the reigns now. I think he added something to the effect of 'it's about time, too.'