In addition to the theories of generals and diplomats, the president and Congress may wish to pay careful attention to the words of an Afghan villager named Ghafoor. He told a correspondent for the Economist, "We need security. But the Americans are just making trouble for us. They cannot bring peace, not if they stay for 50 years."

Nice try. But how do we know "Ghafoor" isn't with the local Taliban? How do we know he's even real and not just made up for his pithy quotability?

I think its pretty tragic that this platitudinous baloney about Afghanistan consisting of nothing but eternally squabbling Pushtuns keeps being regurgitated by the media.

There was peace in Afghanistan throughout the fifties and sixties, right up until the King was overthrown by his nationalist-socialist relative in 1973.

In fact it was still more or less peaceful for a few years after the Daoud takeover.

The reason why Afghanistan STOPPED being peaceful was because the government of Daoud was a dictatorship whose politics veered between Mussolini and Marx.

Marxists in Kabul, fundamentalists in Kandahar -- that mix became violent around 1976.

It's sad that so many Americans buy into this idea that Afghanistan has always been in the shape we left it in after the Red Army left in 1989, and that's somehow the natural state of the country and it can't ever be any other way.

We left in 1989 and thought we were finished with the country. Then we got 9/11 as a parting gift from our former ally Bin Laden.

I don't think this is a country we can walk away from safely until we HAVE found a way to bring peace.

Sure, we can walk away now, but just like in 1989 -- we'll only THINK we're safe.

Great writing but it was all spoiled when I realized that the premise is basically that marijuana is the Antichrist.

Mind if I have a cigarette?

It's still America, ain't it?

In the beginning I was transfixed but by the end, the ludicrous paranoia and stunning hypocrisy got to be too much and I just felt really let down.

That novel certainly does qualify as a "riveting epic of paranoia."

I can see Obama singing along to Could You Be Loved but I cannot see him putting up his dubs or twos for Snoop.

That's just idiotic.

We helped turn a beautiful Sufi heartland into a Wahhabi terrorist hellhole when we funded rapists and war criminals to fight the Soviet Union and then turned them loose on Afghanistan after the war was over.

It's our moral obligation, in addition to being in our own national security interest, to do everything in our power to keep them from falling down that Wahhabi terrorist hellhole again.

Great job, Mr. President!

There was no opium being grown in Afghanistan until after the Daoud government cooperated with the Nixon administration and ejected all the hippies and chopped down all the cannabis and mounted an attack on Afghanistan's native hashish culture.

Opium cultivation in Afghanistan didn't begin until the late seventies, when the Pushtuns began their armed resistance to the Marxist government in Kabul.

Most of the medical cannabis being grown right now contains Afghan genetics.

If we had the moral courage to legalize marijuana and allow Afghans to export their traditional hashish products legally, then we could make serious inroads against the opium business.

They owe Afghanistan big time. Every Marxist theorist outside of Kabul recognized that you can't have a worker's revolution in a country without workers. Even Andropov understood this perfectly well, but he couldn't resist the temptation to play in the Great Game.

The Soviets went to Afghanistan mainly to f*** with us and we went mainly to f*** with them. Together we helped that country destroy itself so badly that it could not recover on its own.

And I think the history of the last 50 years shows that there is no exit from Afghanistan. We thought we had an exit in 1989 and boy did we ever find out we were mistaken.

Afghanistan is located in the perfect place for a nuclear superpower proxy war, and for terrorist training camps. As long as Afghanistan remains a failed state, it's going to serve as the staging ground for all kinds of bad behavior.

If there's even a remote chance of fixing things now, we all have to pitch in and stay until the job is done.

I'm shocked that a poetry expert like Camille doesn't get the difference between traditional Afghan Sufi culture and the puritanical monstrosity of Wahhabism that is forced down the throats of anyone who lives under the Taliban.

Afghan Sufi culture is extremely rich in music and poetry. The Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi would have been called Jelaluddin Balkhi if his family hadn't been forced to flee the Afghan city of Balkh for the Turkish region of Rum in the face of the conquering Mongol hordes in the early 13th century.

Wahhabi Islam is a sterile puritanical ideology that considers any form of human sensual feeling or expression as inherently corrupt.

Back in 1989, when we left, we left behind squabbling Pushtun tribals. It only took a few years for the Taliban and al Qaeda to fill the power vacuum and take over the country, after which they began a systematic annihilation of traditional Afghan art and culture.

It's shocking to me that a person like Camille who considers herself both a champion of the arts and a student of history could fail to perceive the costs of "getting the hell out" right now.

We'd have to watch musicians, artists, poets and feminists being hanged in public. We'd have to watch an entire culture being destroyed by hate.