Posted on 08/24/2010 7:08:33 AM PDT by LibWhacker
Everything you always wanted to know about Afghanistan
Kabul
If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama. I called my wife. She said, no, she certainly is not vacationing at government expense in some jet-set hot spot with scads of her BFFs. Looks like I’m not President Obama. But I am a reporter, fresh from Kabul. What do you want to know about Afghanistan, past, present, or future? Ask me anything.
As all good reporters do, I prepared for my assignment with extensive research. I went to an Afghan restaurant in Prague. Getting a foretaste—as it were—of my subject, I asked the restaurant’s owner (an actual Afghan), “So what’s up with Afghanistan?”
He said, “Americans must understand that Afghanistan is a country of honor. The honor of an Afghan is in his gun, his land, and his women. You take a man’s honor if you take his gun, his land or his women.”
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
No one does it better then PJ. Glad to see him back
BFL
Long but worth the read.
“The Suicides usually attack early in the morning,” Amin said. “It’s a hot country and the explosive vests are thick and heavy.”
bttt
"Afghans have failed to move their corruption from the Rod Blagojevich model, which we all deplore, to the Barack Obama model, which we all admire."
Awesome! Full of facts, quotes, humor, information, while giving an overall picture of a most confused country. I will think about much of what I read here for a long time. Thanks to you, LibWhacker, and also to PJ.
Bookmarking for later with a short comment: While we certainly needed to do something to break up al-Quaeda training camps and the Taliban that supported them, we are flying in the face of significant history to expect a true victory in Afghanistan. There is a reason behind “The Place Where Empires Go to Die” moniker. The early guerilla warfare approach of “The Horse Soldiers” with a blend of the Wild West with modern tech gives a better ROI, IMO.
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