Far less than the $1+ billion in additional foreign aid (buried in war supplemental bills rather than the normal foreign aid appropriations process) in 2003-05 to non-'stan countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Djibouti, the Philippines, and Colombia) to "encourage" them to become part of the "coalition of the willing of the invasion of Iraq....not as active participants putting their own troops at risk, more like "you can stay on the sidelines, just be our cheerleaders."

Which means both wars do not meet the criteria for war and the resulting victory.

1) Smoking gun:
Iraq - Saddam's WMDs and intentions to attack America.
Afghanistan - WTC and Pentagon.

2) Strategic Objective:
Iraq - kill Saddam so that he does not attack America.
Afghanistan - remove bin Laden and his allies; making that land hostile to him.

3) Exit strategy defined by the Strategic Objective:
Iraq - stay there forever with military based to dominate the region
Afghanistan - phase four planning.

Not one reasons exists to justify "Mission Accomplished". Every reason exists to be in Afghanistan. Afghanistan would have been a success (according to military doctrine) had our leaders bothered to understand and execute critical points two and three.

We have no choice in Afghanistan just as we had no choice in Kuwait (despite the ignorant naysayers Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc who were finally corrected by Thatcher and Scowcroft). Reason why we must sacrifice so many good Americans in Afghanistan - our leaders were wacko and extremist. So we must fight that war all over again. The second war is always longer and more difficult when a nation screws it up the first time. Another debt we must now pay due to no fundamental military knowledge combined with excessive mental midgetism.

Damned engineers!

Mike Yon looks at the quiet side of Afghanistan, where they haven't seen any war for 40 years... lots of pictures.

Searching for Kuchi & Finding Lizards

Well someone must be doing something right. This PDF was released by Secrecy News, a site I frequent. Fairly telling. I just hope it continues...

continues:

http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2009...tml?pfstyle=wp

Sounds like paranoia, becoming confused about how the enemy knows things. They don't understand most of the technologies involved. So they don't know how they're watched from the skies, how information is harvested and processed, maps of associations built, etc. But they have to blame somebody. Innocents will suffer; like the numbers of Gazans killed for being Israeli "sympathizers".

A new series of pictures.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/200..._part_two.html

I found this little tidbit buried in another news story from the Times in the UK.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle6788799.ece

This type of news should be exploited more often to expose the involvement of Iran in the region.

This is a troubling development. I am watching an interview on PBS Leher Hour now.

US taxpayers sponsor the Taliban

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/t...ng-the-taliban

Yeah. But Blair's a lying war-mongering little shit. So don't necessarily believe a word he says.

I am more concerned about the extremely dodgy election they just had.

Many poeple were too scared of retaliation by the talleban to vote, showing that in many places the rule of law is definitiely not estalished.

Many people who wanted to vote complain that their ballot papers never arrived. Yet those areas have recorded full returns with big turnouts, and almost all voting for Karzai.

There are many serious "irregularities" of this sort that materially affect the result.

Karzai will probably continue to be president, but his percieved legitimacy has evaporated.

This will further undermine the authority of the Afghan government, and worse, the constitution; people will be more inclined to flout central authority, and less inclined to risk their lives serving its armies.

This is very bad. Almost 8 years on, and we are at least as far from a viable exit strategy as we have ever been.

So what are we going to do? Walk away and let the talleban continue thier shennanigans, and probably end up in control, if not of the whole country, then of some "tribal regions" like in Pakistan? Or are we going to stay there and bleed indefinitely, continuing to piss off the locals with the occasional regrettable collateral damage incidents?

Anyone got any better ideas? How many troops would it take to "surge" Afghanistan, and for how long?

Rule of law? Authority of the Afghan government? Afghanistan has never had either of those things, ever. It's the Word's most primitive country, bar none.
They don't even have roads where most Afghans live, so how do you govern people you can't even reach?

Exactly. We (I know, using "we", it is a little grandiose t be including Australia, but we came a long for the ride) went in despite this, and I am still wondering how, when, and even if, we are going to get out again.

Afghanistan eats armies. So far we have been getting off lightly.

The Afghan people have the Taliban on one side and our bombs and troops on the other. Meanwhile we're helping prop up a government which is essentially criminal and no more enlightened than the Taliban we're fighting.

We shouldn't be there. At all. We are doing no good whatsoever. We're sending boys to die for nothing.

I agree with much of what you said. A Western style democracy is doomed to failure in Afghanistan. I think we need to stop the ramp up of troops and move back to a Special Forces style of intervention.