Spend 1/10 of the war costs in just one year on education, infrastructure, and business development and Afghanistan "problem" would be on the way to solution. Just like "Charlie Wilson's War," you raise $2B to run the Russians out of Afghanistan but can't get $1MM to improve the school.

There are ZERO statesman left. The military industrial complex from back in Ike's day continues to rule. War fuels the economy - old men play war games, young men die!!

They all should have listened to the Brit Robert Fisk years ago...he has lived there and reported on Afghani situation for years, knows the terrain and knows the people. He warned that it was utterly futile, insane...to try to "win" in this land, where no one has been able to fight the wild terrain and the tribal life, weather and entrenched madness for CENTURIES.

Give it up, and walk away heads held high.

Robert Fisk (who writes for the Independent newspaper of London) lives in Beirut - not Afghanistan. He has travelled from time to time into Afghanistan, but does not speak Pashto or Dari. He speaks some Arabic (and in 1996 he interviewed bin Laden in Arabic, while he was in Afghanistan). Advice that an Afghan war is unwinnable is sage

As Yogi Berra once said: It is Deja Vu all over again. Someone else once said : The one thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history. Go back and just catch the basics of Vietnam. Our current president Oh Blah Blah has carried the fools joke of the previous two "War Heroes " to the ultimate insanity. I wonder if Lewis Carrol were alive would he put this insanity in a sequel?

1) Writing sage articles, testifying to the truth:
As long as it is allowed this is necessary. For one, maybe somehow there is some people (they seem to be labeled "independents") who can be influenced into knowing actual facts and reality. Also, for histrory to know we weren't all compliant sheeple and lemmings. Even if it is just like in Fahrenheit 451 where hope was lost but they memorize great books for posterity, for the future.

2) Since Obama mostly ignored his campaign promies, I wish he had ignored his bravado on Afghanistan. I still believe that after 9/11 we probably could have asked the Taliban to hand the culprits over and world pressure would have made them do it. But we (Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft) didn't want to treat it as outlaws doing illegal things. They wanted a war, and they had planned and prepared for a war in Iraq. Afghanistan to them was just the excuse to go at Iraq. The media was pretty moronic to go along, but they were calling anyone who was against them as traitorous and all were cowed.

3) Petraus will get the job now. Big whoop on that choice.

I would like to see a savvy, articulate, investigative journalist really peer into the question Anonymous 23:46 raised. How free is a president of the USA in this day with a very powerful, mostly secret, security/intelligence conglomerate without unaccountability to anyone, and a very politically and economically powerful military-industrial complex without unaccountability to the general public?

What I wonder about most is why McChrystal wasn't stripped of his command, and his rank, for the cover-up of Pat Tillman's death.

I'm in Afghanistan right now w/ an NGO doing agriculture work. I've been here for a month and have a couple more to go. I'm not in the "war" zone down south. Before I came I read "Descent into Chaos" by Ahmed Rashid which is stunning. It made me realize what a pernicious influence Pakistan has been all along. I feel that without them (and the Gulf money), the Taliban wouldn't exist. Everybody in Afghanistan knows that they are Pakistan's puppets. And we continue to outfit Pakistan with huge weapons systems and believe their lies. They've given Al Qaeda the recipe for nuclear weapons. If we crack down on Pakistan, alot would change instantly in Afghanistan. We can't abandon Afghanistan though. That is what led to 911. Not to mention that the people of Afghanistan don't deserve it.

Generals dont start wars nor do they end them.
We, the people, are permitting the government to start and conduct wars. As Eisenhower said, beware of the military, industrial complex.
The French lost in Viet Nam, so we showed them.(Did we?)
The Russians lost in Afghanistan, so we are showing them.(Are we?).
Nothing but government hubris and taxpayer money.

Maybe McChrystal realized the war is lost and he didn't want it pinned on him. He couldn't quit "to spend more time with his family" so he bad mouthed his boss and walked away with his rank and retirement intact.

The "war" is just a colonial effort to grow the empire. As such, I think at its core, it's corrupt, unethical and immoral.

Nothing we do there changes this basic fact.

That said, what McChrystal did was a challenge to our democracy. There are many on the right who don't think we should have a civilian commander and chief and I think President Obama showing some strength and testicular fortitude, for a "change", to fire him for insubordination was one of the best things he's done while in office. The only other things he's done so far that I think are true to the people who elected him were the stimulus package and forcing BP to set aside some money for the future failed attempt at "recovery".

The strategy in Afghanistan will be screwed up as long as we fight for century old separation of the Pashtun people between those living in Pakistan and the little third of them living in Afghanistan. Why fight to perpetuate the Durand line set by the British to dominate the area. In addition, once again we align ourselves with the most corrupt regimes against their people.
We are so dumb that we are outsmart by people ever dumber than us! Let Pashtunistan choose their own nation. Liberate Pashtunistan!

Vale, Ben Dover, but Rome is the worst example you could have chosen. First of all, the fall of the Roman Republic was an internal political matter which, like the fall of the early Roman kings, ushered in hundreds of years of subsequent Roman history and expansion.

By the time the city of Rome fell, "Rome" --city, kingdom, republic, and empire-- was roughly a thousand years old. The Eastern Roman Empire persisted in some form until the Turks took Istanbul in the 1450s CE.

Anyway, the fall of the West and the much later fall of the East were both due to conquest by aggressive migrant peoples. They finally succeeded because the Romans couldn't fight them off any more.

It's this, among other things, that leads to the fear of "weakness" that afflicts many reactionaries. The actual history of the Roman Empire at least superficially supports right-wing militaristic arguments better than it does yours.

Invoking the Fall of Rome in re Afghanistan is likely to cause more problems than it resolves.

The game being played in Iraq and Afghanistan is far bigger than grumpy generals and erstwhile presidents. The reality is that a military victory isn't required because it's less profitable than a protracted occupation. So we'll all be bemused by dramas like McChrystal's and all the while the money will continue to flow from the public treasury to the defense industry, and realize in our heart of hearts that there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. Because if there was, we would have done it by now.

The war is about the control of Opium. The Taliban seized the opium fields from the afghan producers and started selling the opium to the highest (no pun) bidder. The CIA didn't like that because it stripped a massive amount of undetectable money from the 'black-ops'. The CIA couldn't just go over an blow them to smithereens, so in comes Osama, the jackrabbit on dialysis who can evade an entire world looking for him. A few instructions on jetliner flights by the CIA and next thing you know, we've got a reason! Wow. Of course the oil in the Caspian needed a way out to Amerika as well so it's all very convenient now to convince the US Gov. to go over and free the poor Afghan's from themselves...

Illegal aliens are emboldened enough now to threaten the despised gringos with "all-out war" if we simply enforce our immigration laws.

I'm not making that up.

A military is supposed to protect its own country's borders, not other countrys' borders on the far side of the Earth.

Most Americans want our immigration laws enforced. We do NOT want yet another amnesty (or any euphemism for amnesty, like "reform" or "pathway to citizenship") for tens of millions more illegals!

We are already seriously overpopulated.

All these gun-ho guys should go and sign up and finish these wars as they have all the answers. Bush and Obama need their expertise or was it they just needed trigger pullers as the Pentagon calls our soldiers. No lack of respect there guys. You go over and bring our soldiers back PLEASE.