So let's do a headline round-up to see how well we're doing.
Pakistan has punted and allowed their own locally-grown Taliban supporters to replace the government's existing laws with sharia law in the country' northwest province.
Maybe this is a sop to the militants after another US drone strike kills 31 people there. What the hell, those people are all militants--they deserve it.
Meanwhile, the Taliban, which does not seem to understand that they are only allowed to fight in Afghanistan, is kidnapping people off the streets of New York.
So US envoy Richard Holbrooke is telling India this is all a really dangerous development...
Meanwhile, purely in the interest of regional peace, Israel has bumped Russia out of the number one slot as the major weapons supplier for India, adding significantly to the $9 Billion it has already sold there....
But that's OK, since Israel at least has a coherent foreign policy, including flouting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (with tacit American support), while semi-publically announcing its new covert war against the Iranian nuclear program [assassins, not bombers], and grabbing another 432 acres in the West Bank to insure that its new confused coalition government will start its work in an era of peace and stability.
Iran meanwhile moves to strengthen its air defense system, which Russia [India's Number Two arms supplier and the nation we're now dickering with to allow military supplies into Afghanistan] assures the US won't include any of those S-3000 air defense missiles that Vladi Putin swears he didn't sell to Teheran. Never mind those high-level Russian-Iranian military talks going on.
We're now shipping supplies to Afghanistan across Russia because Vlad also talked Kyrghyzistan into shutting down our bases there and evicting our troops.
In the midst of all this, 3,000 of my brothers and sisters of the 10th Mountain Division have arrived in Afghanistan as the spearhead of the surge that is supposed to fix the whole mess.
Which is really confusing, because last week the President wasn't sure whether he was going to order a surge or not....
Maybe the President ought to be paying attention to the former Soviet troops who left Afghanistan with their tails between their legs in 1979:
"It's like fighting sand. No force in the world can get the better of the Afghans," Oleg Kubanov, a former officer, said at an anniversary concert in Moscow.
"It's their holy land, it doesn't matter to them if you're Russian, American. We're all soldiers to them."...
The last Soviet soldier to leave was the commander of its forces in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Boris Gromov, who crossed the Friendship Bridge across the Amu Darya river into Soviet Uzbekistan at midday on February 15.
"I am convinced of one thing. That it is irresponsible to forget about lessons like Afghanistan," Gromov, now the governor of the Moscow region, told Russia's Rossiskaya Gazeta daily.
The US, which led its own invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, is preparing to pour more troops into the country in an attempt to tackle a surge in Taliban-led violence
Russian veterans have warned that the US is set to relive the nightmare faced by the Soviet forces.
"They'll send more in and they'll lose more," Andrei Bandarenko, a former special forces officer, said of the US plans.
"What does Obama [the US president] know about the situation on the ground?"
Shamil Tyukteyev, who lead a regiment in Afghanistan between 1986 and 1988, also said that the extra troops would only make the situation worse.
"You can't put a soldier outside every house or a base on every mountain. We saw it ourselves, the more troops, the more resistance," he said.
Remind me, again, exactly what we're accomplishing by remaining in Afghanistan?
Better yet, somebody remind the President, before he gets around to gambling with another 30,000 American soldiers' lives....
And you wonder why the MSM doesn't give you foreign policy coverage?
Because it's actually scarier and more convoluted than talking about the government taking over control of America's banks....
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