The Taliban are not a part of any popular resistance movement like the Vietcong. The Taliban are actually the ones occupying Afghanistan.

The Taliban were just madrassa students in Peshawar before the Pakistani ISI under Benazir Bhutto armed them and sent them into Afghanistan and recognized them as legitimate rulers when they took over.

The Taliban are a foreign occupying army that swept in during a time of post-war chaos and literally terrorized the population into submission.

We're not occupiers. We're liberators -- a role that we never served in Vietnam, where our opposition was a popular movement that rose up among the Vietnamese people.

Afghanistan is SO not Vietnam. There's just no similarity there at all.

The Vietcong were a popular resistance movement made up of many ordinary citizens and it was led by people who were actual thinkers. Okay, Marxism is a deluded way to think, but Ho Chi Minh had a mind, he was articulate, he had ideas.

And he didn't behead school teachers in order to terrorize students out of learning.

You can say a lot of things about Marxism, but they spread literacy. They didn't actively seek to destroy it by terrorizing young children out of learning.

And that's one reason why the Vietcong won. Being Marxists, they spread literacy instead of destroying it, so they won the hearts and minds of the people.

The Taliban are more like the Khmer Rouge than the Vietcong. The Taliban are genuine cold-blooded sociopaths who think they've had a successful day when they've lopped off the head of a teacher.

It's absolutely sad and creepy how progressives have lost their brains and their morals at the same time over this war.

Obama's going to win, and the Taliban sociopaths who behead school teachers in front of school children, and also their whitewashers and defenders in the American left, will lose.

One thing the Taliban's defenders in the American left are going to lose is any right to ever complain about torture of detainees again.

You can't complain about the torture of detainees when you're busy whitewashing Taliban sociopaths who behead school teachers in front of their students.

And if you're trying to argue that this is just how Afghans behave, then you're just plain ignorant and racist and shame on you.

It looks like the end of Bush was also the end for progressivism.

All the moral ground progressives gained fighting torture in the Bush admin has been pissed away now on Afghanistan.

You can't whitewash sociopaths in the Taliban and have any moral credibility left whatsoever when it comes to prosecuting Bush officials for anything.

Salon's new brand name is all about downplaying Taliban atrocities against women, blaming them on Israel, attributing them to blinkers and misogyny and just shrugging them off as unpleasant, but what can we do?

It's pretty hard to work up any energy over the rights of American women against such a soulless backdrop.

He's smart, he's tough, he's compassionate, and he comes from a complex multicultural background.

Afghanistan is a complex multicultural society. I think Afghanistan and Obama will turn out to be a great fit. He's the first American president who has the background and smarts and cool to finally get that country right.

then convince Obama to hand Afghanistan over to the Taliban tomorrow.

The resulting bloodbath and atrocities and the quick return of al Qaeda and the reemergence into public view of Bin Laden would give the right wing emotional and moral and political unity that they haven't felt in years, just in time for midterm elections.

The Taliban conquered Afghanistan. So it's just plain idiotic to claim nobody ever conquered Afghanistan.

The Taliban was not some popular resistance movement like the Vietcong. The Taliban was a creation of the Pakistani ISI under the Bhutto government. They were mostly madrassa students in Peshawar who'd never set foot in Afghanistan in their lives.

The Taliban was an army created by a foreign power. And they conquered the country by force.

I'm really sick of this manipulative and historically distorting nonsense that Afghanistan is some kind of unconquerable savage country and therefore any war there must needs be Endless.

Every time you use that manipulative and dishonest word Endless, Glenn, I think less of you.

You can't even call out genocide. You have to blame it on Israel. You disgust me completely.

Nobody ever said the war would be Endless. I certainly never called for the war to be Endless.

You can only make a case for Endlessness if you buy into this brain dead argument floating around progressive circles that "nobody has ever conquered Afghanistan" and Afghanistan is the "Graveyard of Empires."

So that puts you in same Idiot category of people who never hard of the Mongol invasion or the Persian Empire and think the Pushtuns managed to beat the Soviet Union on their own.

I think your Habit of Capitalizing everything is Childish in the Extreme.

He thought he could deal with them diplomatically over opium cultivation. HA!

The Taliban convinced him they were going to stop Afghans from growing opium, and then Clinton said okay, and came very close to legitimizing their regime by doing that.

Many people in the Feminist Majority working on the anti-Taliban campaign felt betrayed.

Then the Clinton administration discovered that the Taliban had lied to them and played them for fools.

(But of course the Taliban lied -- they're sociopaths, as everyone in the Feminist Majority knew back then.)

The Taliban merely stockpiled the opium and held it back from the market to drive the price back up to the low it had fallen to after the Taliban first took over and the opium market experienced an oversupply.

So Clinton did sell out Afghan women and children in the beginning, but he learned very quickly that he was dealing with lying sociopaths, not with ordinary tribal Pushtuns.

I don't think he underestimated their evil again after that.