I saw this leditor in the Philadelphia Inquirer this morning, and my eyes rolled too far. I had to get in there with an emery board to pull it back around to the front. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t brain damage, but after that it became clear that 2009 would be a great time to start making our exit.

Only a little while ago we were in tensions with the USSR. When they disintegrated, their former wards and satellites became independent to varying degrees. In fact, Afghans became completely independent, offering cowboy excess to anyone with more friends or bullets than the other guy. None from the community of real countries recognized any government there, and their isolation was increased by their actual, technical, geographic isolation. And they had no oil. They were a pretty serious bunch before that, and they’ve always been in that hyperbaric neighborhood. But without oil, or even apparently grass, our State Department mostly ignored them, after the late ’80s when we no longer needed to use them.

Thus, Afghanistan became the year 120 bce for almost everyone, while it became summer camp for a group of pretty sophisticated and modern religious psychopaths. They would establish a Nathaniel Hawthorne-era reality show with witches stoned instead of burned, while training and planning to attack the United States of America and its evil interests from the quiet of a cave lost among millions of acres of nothing but crag. This after decades of the USSR attempting to govern them while the USA funded all insurgents- effectively training the counselors who would run the camps. Who goes to a camp without a pool?

When alumni of the training camps in geographic Afghanistan carried out the September 11, 2001 bombings, we finally broke up the power structure there. We occupied the country after several hours of conquest. Then, for some unknowable reason, the Impossible President stopped with the Afghanistan thing, and got on with the Iraq thing. We won the battle and completely forgot about the war- but somehow we also got killed, flew through Clinton’s surplus, looked like a giant idiot and re-installed the same bunch of retarded sociopaths in the Executive.

If any sane people were involved, we would have seen the power vacuum in Afghanistan immediately filled with a post office in every burg, chickens in pots, etc. After 50 years of rubble and privation, this would be the ‘awe’ part after the shock of believing your daughter may be one day allowed to learn to write her name. But nothing. Thus, nothing substantial changed and Afghanistan was again encouraged to remain a collection of flat spots between mountains, more a moon of Earth than geographic territory.

Oh, we built a government, some buildings, some stuff. But then the people ruling by fist came back, offering more carrot and more stick. Bush gave the country back to the people he took it from. Our man in Afghanistan now runs the capital city. He’s a mayor.

So when you look at the exit strategy Bush refused to offer, you’re right. Safe-ish elections in 2003, safe ones in 2006, someone charged with finding the elusive way to turn Afghanistan into something other than the angry dog chained in the backyard of someone else’s trailer, somebody in charge of siphoning money from the Food-for-Oil program (in my fantasy, amid all the other imaginary things in this list is a lack of Bush vs Iraq II)…

In the world as it should be, Afghanistan’s chief export today is young people going to Western Universities, their farmers are growing pot (and tobacco, but they’ve always smoked), their women are dominant in international goat-head soccer, and Imam Jeri is on the Billboard Top 1200.