Comments on: Political Culture: Of Afghanistan, and a Girl From Nantucket

By: JonCummings

JonCummings — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:47:14 +0000

You know, Lawrence, you're absolutely right. Henceforth I shall try to be more like those other political writers whose fans can't wait to dive into every new column, because they don't know whether the writer is going to be a liberal or a conservative that day.

Centrism is boring. Pick a side; we're at war.

Actually, my last column described how Democrats blew health care, and anybody who's read this one can easily figure out that I'm livid over Obama's pathetically stupid decision on Afghanistan. That's the thing about liberals; we're more than ready to criticize our own side when they screw up.

By: jefito

jefito — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:10:09 +0000

I notice you didn't say he's WRONG…

By: Lawrence

Lawrence — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:56:55 +0000

Blah, Blah, Blah. Every column by you is the usual “All Democrats/liberals are good; all Republicans/conservatives are bad.” You're so predictable.

By: JonCummings

JonCummings — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:47:14 +0000

By: jefito

jefito — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:10:09 +0000

I notice you didn't say he's WRONG…

By: Lawrence

Lawrence — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:56:55 +0000

Blah, Blah, Blah. Every column by you is the usual “All Democrats/liberals are good; all Republicans/conservatives are bad.” You're so predictable.

By: JonCummings

JonCummings — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:25:38 +0000

The falsehood of that claim is well-established. Clinton may not have succeeded in taking out Osama, but he didn't willfully ignore the problem as the Bush administration did while it focused instead on dismantling nuclear-arms treaties and sullying our alliances in its pursuit of a missile defense system that still doesn't work.

By: Lawrence

Lawrence — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:34:56 +0000

“the most pressing topic on George Bush’s plate was stem cells (because he sure as hell wasn’t paying attention to al Qaeda).”

Much like Clinton before him.

By: DwDunphy

DwDunphy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:49:28 +0000

There are only two paths that justify consideration, getting out or getting ugly. I don't think Obama is about to get out, but at the same time the squeamishness about innocent victims has to be resolved. I personally don't want to consider the US starting a scorched earth campaign, but the reason why the technologically unsophisticated enemy beat the Russians so long ago, and are beating us now, is partly because they're integrated.

A house, a school, a mosque could be a Taliban stronghold. If the local Talibani knock on your door in the middle of the night and take residence, are you telling them "no"? If you are a US general with a hunch that the house is no longer residential, are you launching an attack on the hunch, risking a total PR crap shoot? When they find bodies after the attack and some of them are of the family who's house was commandeered, will the Taliban not use that information to poison the populace against us?

We have guns, bombs and tanks. They have a first-hand knowledge of the terrain, how to use it to their advantage, they have the money from poppy fields they've "allowed" the farmers to maintain, if only because they're so poor that the heroin-producing plants are the only cash crop they can count on. In short, the Taliban have fear, power, money and the ills of poverty at their command. We can't attack for fear of turning hearts and minds against us. We turn them anyway for not attacking. If we leave, we risk looking like daytraders which the Taliban will turn to convert the rest of the populace.

What a mess. So we have only two ways to go. If we get vicious, we will kill innocents, we will look barbarous and we will have to live with that. Or, we could leave. Anything between the extremes will add another year to the campaign each day we attempt to decide.