Aimless in Afghanistan

Klein is exactly correct.

"The war in Afghanistan - the war that President-elect Barack Obama pledged to fight and win - has become an aimless abusurdity...the enemy escaped into Pakistan and for the past seven years, Afghanistan has been a slow bleed against an array of mostly indigenous narco-jihadi-tribal guerilla forces that we continue to call the Taliban...once bin Laden slipped away, the mission morphed into a vast, messy nation-building effort to support the allegedly democratic Karzai government...But the mission was historically implausible: Afghanistan has never had a strong central government. It has been governed for thousands of years by local and regional tribal coaltions...a good part of the current Taliban uprising in nothing more than standard tribal rivalries juiced by Western arms and opium profits...the far more serious problem is Pakistan, a flimsy state with illogical borders, nuclear weapons and a mortal relgious enmity toward India."

The Aimless War
by Joe Klein
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1865730,00.html