The theocracy of the past along with women-beating religious police will return to the streets of Afganistan's cities.

Afghanistan: Law Curbing Women's Rights Takes Effect | Human Rights Watch (August 13, 2009)

"Karzai has made an unthinkable deal to sell Afghan women out in return for the support of fundamentalists in the August 20 election," said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "So much for any credentials he claimed as a moderate on women's issues."

But to leave is also unthinkable, given that Al Qaeda remains intact

al qaeda remain intact, largely because they very wisely left Afghanistan years ago and set up in ungoverned parts of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. and if the US were to start bombing there, they'd move again.

al Qaeda is not an army and cannot be countered by military means. In fact it is boosted when opposed by a military force. al Qaeda is an idea, even if a nihilistic one, and you only counter ideas by proposing better ones. You cannot bomb them into submission.

, and the Taliban are ready to overrun the south, if not then eventually the north.

The theocracy of the past along with women-beating religious police will return to the streets of Afganistan's cities. And we will have come full circle

That's related to the ridiculous woman hating version of Islam to which the Taliban (who are not al Qaeda) subscribe. We, NATO, had the opportunity to make a difference to that when we first entered Afghanistan in 2002. But we decided that we didn't do "nation-building", we did military conquest. So we scooted over the border to blow up Iraq and left the Afghans to fester with the same Stone Age infrastructure and the same crooks who'd run their civic organisation before the Talibs ran them out. We basically replaced something bad that left the civil population alone (so long as women were slaves) with something that was both bad and robbed the population blind (and was quite happy with female slavery) and dealt out injustice right left and centre..

Funny how the population prefer the Taliban. They can take anything, but not the injustice.

Can any new strategy or military leader actually change the final result?

No. This is not a military problem and so there is no military solution. But the military is the only thing we're willing to spend money on and we lost the chance to do anything else the day we turned our attention to Iraq.

There is no victory here. There is no honour either. Only the constant question Senator Kerry asked of another conflict;-

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Until then we only have Kipling;-

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

But to leave is also unthinkable, given that Al Qaeda remains intact

So what?

Nobody has as yet made any convincing, or even remotely plausible, case for why exterminating al Qaeda is an important policy objective.

Al Qaeda is in the business of finding new and imaginative ways of using high explosives to stage expensive photo-ops, not in the business of seriously threatening our society, security or even any of our legitimate strategic interests. As it is, we're wasting more blood and treasure hunting al Qaeda than we would be wasting by leaving them alone to fiddle with their photo-ops-with-high-explosives shtick.

- Jake

"Terraforming your own planet to make it uninhabitable hardly counts as epic win." - ThatBritGuy

we cannot leave lest we are willing to throw the Afgani people to the dogs. That would not only haunt Obama for the rest of his term(s), it would haunt the free world, Americans and Europeans alike.

The fact that we are facing even higher costs for oil in the foreseeable future and likely highly significant drops in the productivity of the ecosystem due to climate change makes this policy even more bizarre. It is a "Foreign Adventure" distraction writ large and we cannot afford such distractions. The US needs to match its efforts to its means. This means leaving Israel to its own devices and allowing the US Likud supporters to make their contributions directly to Israel, rather than leveraging them via influence over US foreign policy and the resultant access to the pockets of all US taxpayers. It also means withdrawing from the hundreds of bases world wide. The choice is whether we do it while we can have some influence over the tactics and timing or whether we do it by default, pun intended.

I regret the treatment of women in Afghan society, but I see no feasible means of changing that other than killing everyone. Any haunting that Obama would suffer would be richly deserved. He correctly analyzed much of the situation but, for political expediency, did it anyway. His choice of Rahm Emmanuel as Chief of Staff effectively signaled that he had tied US policy to Likud policies. Another major lose-lose decision. His embrace of the Banksters sealed his doom.

All that is left for the US is to see if we are really stupid enough to elect Palin President and if we survive that catastrophe as an intact society. I have my doubts. The impacts that US society will receive over the next few years would tax the most able and public spirited leaders. Unfortunately, US voters have shown a taste for incompetent tools. Obama is increasingly being shown as simply an incompetent tool, possibly with angst.

[ARGeezer's Crystal Ball of Doom™ Technology]

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Anyway, question.

On Tweety's show (Hardballs) yesterday I heard the phrase "Won in Iraq" in some fashion.  When did we suddenly WIN in Iraq?  Was there a parade and I  missed it?  Are all our soldiers home?

I love the smell of roast chicken in the morning!

Oddly, Rolling Stone's current article Can Petraeus Win The War?, cited above, ends seeing Petraeus at some future date in the White House having at last to deal with putting an end to the war...