1. The Taliban are Pushtuns.

2. Pushtuns only make up 40% of the Afghan population.

3. The Taliban don't even hold half of Pushtun territory.

So not only are progressives too lazy to open a book on Afghanistan, they also can't do math.

I guess the left isn't really smarter than the right after all. I had my hopes, but now I see they are dashed.

to do more to protect rape victims from the criminal justice system.

I think prosecutors these days think rape victims exist to serve their careers, instead of thinking that their careers exist to serve rape victims.

You're not serving the victim if your own closure matters more than hers and you're willing to prevent her from feeling closure so that you can feel yours first.

If the Taliban is only "blinkered" and "misogynist," then waterboarding is only "slightly uncomfortable" and "a bit unpleasant."

If those are the rules, then let's take them all the way.

Make no mistake: I despise the Taliban for its blinkered views on modern life, especially its misogyny.

Misogyny? The Taliban are full on sociopaths. Hateful, cruel, disgusting.

They kill parents just so they can hand the female children out as wives to their soldiers.

That's a little bit more serious than misogyny, Joan. That's murder and child rape as a way of life.

And this is Salon, where Roman Polanski is the Devil?

He only raped one child once. He's the Easter Bunny compared to the Taliban.

I can't believe you would call them "blinkered" and "misogynist."

Those are words you reserve for the Bible Belters in America, not deranged Taliban sociopaths who are systematic serial rapists and torturers and murderers.

The Communist rule in Vietnam is a paradise of civil liberties compared to the sociopathic cruelty of the Taliban.

And the mess the French made of Vietnam was in no way America's fault. We weren't in Vietnam to repair any mistakes that we'd made previously.

We were just there to service the Cold War, the same reason why we decided to help make the Afghan civil war ten times as bad as it was by helping the Pushtuns beat the Soviet Union.

Afghanistan NOW is a completely different case from Vietnam and I think it's just another sign of the intellectual weakness on the part of progressives that they're reaching out desperately in the Vietnam direction after failing to make their world class brilliant argument that Pushtuns somehow beat the Soviet Union on their own.

And oh yes -- another brilliant argument -- nobody has been able to conquer Afghanistan, from Alexander the Great to the USSR. That's who savage those savage Afghans are. Completely immune to civilization and rule of law.

(Racist much?)

Forget the Mongol invasion, forget that Pax Mongolica allowed the Silk Road to go right through that supposedly savage and unconquerable country.

Forget also that Afghans speak Persian as their government language for a reason. Because they were once part of the Persian Empire -- those supposedly unconquerable savages.

People claim to care about the war, but not enough to crack a book. They don't care THAT much!

This intellectual weakness on the progressive side happens to be incredibly self-serving, because if we forget that it was ONLY with American help that the Afghans were able to beat the USSR, then we can forget that we were a big part of how the country got as messed up as it is now.

I was very optimistic after Obama won. Hooray --- progressives are educated, they're aware, there aren't going to be any more gross insults against common knowledge or episodes of breathtaking stupidity dominating political discourse any more.

But oh no -- on Afghanistan progressives have proven that they despise book learning just as much as any religious ignoramus on the right.

I'm especially disgusted with Libertarians, who did plenty of celebrating when "we" beat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, but never gave the tiniest shit how the Afghan people were supposed to rebuild their country after "we" claimed "our" victory over "our" enemy and left them in the hands of warlords and terrorists.

The whole thing just makes me want to vomit.

Good thing I have plenty of herbal anti-emetic on hand.

Celebrating because they got the Communists out of Afghanistan, so the Afghans could live under freedom at last.

Then handing them over to the Taliban who are so sociopathic and controlling that they make life under Soviet Communism look like a freaking paradise of civil liberties.

The Afghan people.

and then left them in a broken country so they could be preyed on by the war criminals that we trained and armed.

And we celebrated our "victory" without ever giving them a second thought.

This war is our karma coming home.

I think we need to accept our karma like grownups and do whatever we can to beat the Taliban, because the Taliban would not even exist without us.

comes from the fact that we helped turn Afghanistan from what it was in the sixties to what it is today.

I'm sure all the Libertarians were overjoyed when we came back from Afghanistan in 1989 with Soviet Communism suffering a black eye and a broken nose.

Libertarians were really happy about how that war ended, except they didn't give a shit about the consequences of this superpower proxy war for the Afghan people. And they still don't give a shit.

We left that country in a shape only fit for warlords and terrorists.

We came home and celebrated our victory and left those people struggling to stay alive in a country whose natural environment and social fabric had been so ripped apart, it's taking more than 20 years to recover.

If we do that to them one more time, then we will deserve whatever bad shit happens to us as a result.