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The conservatives have a couple flaws in their arguments and an exaggerated sense of 'success' in Iraq, upon which they base their renewed jingoism in Afghanistan. First. they repeatedly harp on the 'surge' in Iraq as if that had been a magic fix in Iraq and then they point to it to say the Democrats were wrong to oppose the surge. I have seen no evidence that it was the 'surge' that fixed everything. That is just the spin that the Bush Whitehouse put on it and their collaborators in the mainstream US media.. In fact, it wasn't the so-called 'surge' but the 'big bribe' implemented by General Petraeus that bought off opposition long enough for there to be a coalition among Shia warlords that could then act as an enforcer of sorts. This coalition of warlords with Maliki at the top has turned on us anyway and told us to get out of Iraq and is playing footsie with Iran, China and Turkey, not us. In fact to this day, US forces in Iraq are just an adjunct of the warlord coalition over there. So the cons trying to 'replay' the 'surge' in Afghanistan is ridiculous because the 'surge' wasn't some magic fix responsible for "peace" in Iraq. In fact, it was very questionable what influence exactly it had on all the violence which by the waycontinues barely abated over there, but the press just has gotten tired of reporting on it. That's for one. So Biden wasn't wrong. And second, the Afghan people don't need "protecting". The cons are misinformed. If the Afghan people wanted to fight the Taliban, they would. The overwhelming majority of them don't want foreign forces there. That is what energizes the Taliban. Nationalism. The Taliban is not some monolithic entity. It is a confederation of warlords all united to drive the foreigner from their land. The Taliban chieftains are strongest where the Pashtun majority live in the south., Many of them said they are not interested in exporting terrorism to Europe or the USA, they just want foreign troops out and they want to run the country under their understnading of harsh Islamic fundamentalism. That isn't the US's problem what kind of government the Taliban want. The fact is, this crap about the population needing to be protected is stupid. What the neocons and Obama are saying is that the Afghan people need to be protected from themselves because support for the insurgency is high among the general population. If they want to have a civil war over what kind of government they want, let them. It isn't our concern. There are a number of countries with Al Qaeda and training camps in them. Pakistan is the epicenter of it and we are not allowed to go in there or touch them. So what good is a holding pattern in Afghanistan, sticking our finger in the dike? We can't even get development projects going in Afghanistan because the Taliban and AlQaeda fighters will fire on our troops while they try to build them and will dynamite whatever we try to do. Also, any of the local population who cooperates with us or NATO make themselves a target for reprisals and murder of their families. So they won't help us, nor will they 'stand up' according to our dictates. and the war mongers in Washington have a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole scenario there because they are ignorant of the culture there and the socio-political realities there. We, the US, and NATO are considered invaders, infidels and imperialists over there and they think we are trying to force our beliefs on them. We will never be able to use a counter insurgency strategy. The Soviets had 500,000 troops there. What makes you think 100,000 or even 200,000 NATO troops there will succeed where the Soviets failed? They don't care about our 'community policing" good cop bad cop policies. They will still fire at and kill us and blow up our attempts to impose a government on them.
