Careful, lawyer. You're resorting to argumentum ad hominem.

Glenn is actually proposing one of the extreme poles in the land of solutions in South Asia, total non-intervention/immediate withdrawal. Another extreme is total war. There are probably other extrema, but those are the ones in the U.S. and usually promoted by their adherents as the only choices available. Those of us who want neither are lumped by both extremes as among their enemies. If we try to argue that it should be otherwise, then Glenn advocates calling us all "chickenhawks"*, or says "You go there"**.

It's just diatribe, it may be effective at shutting up any more complex arguments, but it isn't to be mistaken for the truth.

* At the para just before the update, and at the update itself: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/07/afghanistan/index.html

**Today, at page 10, comments.

Why should I "go there"? Is this, "You don't support immediate total withdrawal so you are a warmonger, where's your gun, chickenhawk" infantilism? Ah, the dauntless crusader against guilt by association. You regard yourself as an expert on the place without "going there", and you don't even read, except as it supports binary choices available here in the U.S. Have you read Steve Coll's book yet? It only came out 5 years ago. Read Gretchen Peters yet? An expert on drugs like yourself should have at least looked at it. Yes, I'm being caustic. But that's because you are being Manichaean and uninformed.

Ahmed Rashid lives there. He doesn't describe it as any way like what you describe. The stringers at the Times live there. They don't either. ICRC has its biggest delegation there in the world there. They don't either. Lawyers for the prisoners in Bagram refused to even call the place a region of armed conflict as of 2008. You haven't bothered to find out why, have you? There are American missions there, two commands (with some recent joint sharing), even two sets of U.S. troops. Do you even know what they are and what their function is? No. Just yell "empire" and "occupation" and "invasion" and apply as above, cf. Vietnam, Iraq. Even now, the Red Cross only considers 30+% to be conflict zone. You rant about 80% Taliban control and in the next essay talk about occupation which entails military and political control. Why don't you study first, instead of just adopting the fun rhetoric?

The only two choices allowable, here, on antiwar.com, in Derrick Crowe's pieces, and, not surprisingly, on all the neocon sites, are war to victory and total 100% withdrawal. Given the history of the region, it's current state (don't even restrict yourself to Afghanistan, some of these things are true from Persia to the Irawaddy) doesn't support such Western reductionist simplicity. Sorry, only in cloistered halls is such tripe called a broad general picture, or an executive summary.

Answer just one question: What will happen to any re-development programs under a total withdrawal of all foreign forces? What will happen to the UNFPA's program for reducing maternal mortality? What is your plan, you, Glenn, for the millions of refugees and IDPs? What do you think should happen in Pakistan? Did you even know that there was a major Army offensive launched there yesterday? Your precious nationalists didn't grow up in Afghanistan, in large part they grew up in refugee camps outside the country. Dismal hideous places, the kind of which will embody your solution in its entirety if you don't know what you are doing and just pull out.

And will you take credit for any civilian deaths that result from your plan of total immediate withdrawal? Or is it only a crime to kill little brown people with bombs, not neglect, ignoring the horror of mortality in permanent refugee camps, and a blind eye towards atrocities? They've always been that way, right Glenn? Just ask Alan Grayson. Did you get my quip to macgupta about Akbar renaming Purushpur as Peshawar? The hatred of empires in South Asia is about neglect, not some British racist view of the Pathan "warrior race".

Your wonderful Jalauddin Haqqani, and some of his cohort, like his buddy Gulbaddin Hekmatyar are responsible for the devastated state the country was in in 2001 (3.5 million refugees before the U.S. even looked at the place, thousands dead in fighting in 2001 prior to September). They are just as brutal as Rashid Dostum, thank you very much. The Pakistanis will not suffer any government they believe contains so much as a single "Indian collaborator" to hold power in Afghanistan. They nurtured the Taliban from 2001. Take credit for all these players' actions on executing your plan of withdrawal, and the sociopathy of not caring about them, chickenhawk.

Wow. And could you tell us, perhaps year by year, how many Americans there were in Afghanistan, that they could surround Taliban anywhere in the country? And apparently in Pakistan too, since that is where the Taliban have been during most of the "occupation", and since that is where David Rohde was held, and where the Taliban group that captured him is based? 32 million people in Afghanistan, how many U.S. troops does it take to "occupy" the country in such a way that its "nationalists" are always surrounded by foreign occupiers?

The U.S. occupied Iraq, Glenn. This is Afghanistan. Do you truly fail to understand any difference whatsoever? Has that natural ability of litigators to become experts on any subject they touch just kind of failed here?

No excuse for the prisons, no excuse for the callous attitude on bombing civilians, no excuse for torture, or for backing and arming people like Rashid Dostum, especially when other U.S. troops were trying to disarm him. But no excuse for suddenly going all propaganda and resurrecting everybody's favorite anti-war slogans, appropriate or not, either.

BTW, the reason it is thought that many Taliban can be split off and reasoned with is that they are fighting for money, not because they are simple nationalists.