If however, the central of your remark is about my own remark, i.e., gratuitous censure, allow me to clarify: It is linked and is exclusive to the assumption/judgement call you made

... that was what I tried to dispute and only that (plus the cat thinggy.)

There are a long series of underlying premises that I simply reject, I guess. Here are a few:

1. Nato is something independent of US foreign policy aims rather than nearly wholly subservient to US foreign policy aims;

2. Nato has a proper role to play in Afghanistan now that no one responsible for attacking the US in 2001 are in any way shape or form wards of, sponsored by or protected by an internationally recognized Afghan state;

3. That Nato actually has a coherent mission in Afghanistan today to actually be succeeding at other than propping up a Kabul-centered authority of very limited nation-wide legitimacy;

4. Even assuming Nato had a properly defined mission, it cannot possibly be furthering progress, via force, in a country where it (via the US) has done so much in its power to snuff out the preconditions for that progress. Hell, the donors can't even produce a proper fraction of the aid they promised, and yet we're talking about Nato military (and explicitly combat) missions? Progress under these conditions? No way.

I would further add that Nato in particular lacks proper authority of legitimacy in any long-term improvement of and progress in Afghanistan for the simple reason that the dominant Nato power (ie the US) is greatly responsible for the conditions which caused so much misery in Afghanistan in the first place, both directly (remember Stinger missiles?) and via proxy (first the so-called mujahideen fighters based largely in the NWFP, later via the PK ISI). I'm sure you're familiar with what Americans call blow-back. Lack of legitimacy is one element of it, and this applies just as much to Afghanistan and what has happened to it since the Soviet pull-out as to what happened in Iran in the 1970's. Whatever credit the US does get in the country is for trying to make amends for having helped fuck things up, irremediably it turns out, in the first place.

Note also that a large portion of Afghans (historical Afghans, not simply those who happen to live today within the borders on internationally-recoginzed Afghanistan note the Paktoonistan movement) live in PK and supply resources not just to opponents of US/Nato in Afghanistan but also to opponents of Islamabad.

Ultimately, there is a historical basis for the lack of connection on this issue we are having. I, very simply put, do not see the US, and via extention, as a good guy here, as relates to Afghanistan. Never was, still isn't. Better than the Taleban, objectively speaking, much better, if one accepts the premise that they are different. But this fact is quite hard to unbundle, given the US is a primary cause of the Taleban in much the same way Israel, arch-enemy of course of Hamas, was its original primary cause as well.

And you may not like the cat analogy, but I'm not entirely sure I'm making myself understood. Just because the US or Nato makes noise that it is doing something for some universal good does not mean that this is in fact what it is doing or even primarily intending to do. The US is, first and foremost, looking out for the US. Ascribing some higher goal to the US and to Nato, I think, is greatly mistaken.

But, to employ another analogy, you know, when humpty dumpty fell off the wall, all the kings horses and all of his men couldn't put him back together again. Especially since it was the king and his men who pushed humpty dumpty off the wall in the first place.
And, upon being interviewed from his deathbed, in the end humpty dumpty expressed very little by way of heartfelt appreciation for the attempt the king's horses and men made to re-assemble him. Quite the contrary, he was very much upset.

Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant