Four years ago in London I was hijacked by an Afghani taxi driver. He defended the rights of the Taliban to blow up the Buddhist Bamiyan statues. I don't think the Taliban could have picked a clearer symbol to attack in order to announce to the rest of the world they were in charge there, as they completed that dissolution of form.

There's lot of loose cannons of thought and incomplete expressions of the Afghan situation in too many of these letters.

Rather than join this scuffling about, I'd like to suggest a couple of books I've read recently on Afghanistan that give the issues many appear to be dancing about more flesh and background logic.

Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story

http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-History-Afghanistans-Untold-Story/dp/0872864944/

http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100741260

Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0312426593/

http://www.annjonesonline.com/

There are others, but those two books I think bring the essential points on Afghanistan out in the clearest way possible for many to grapple with. The book by Ann Jones helps personalize the points made in Invisible History. And if I were to read only one book on Afghanistan, it would be hers.

If any books are too much effort, Brave New Foundation has recently released their ReThink Afghanistan 'film' on the web, in group screenings, and as a DVD:

http://rethinkafghanistan.com/

It comes with the visual overkill of using a limited set of images available to them, but the film drives the points that need to be understood about our present engagement in Afghanistan. And how in the end it will finish itself off.

The real question before us now as Americans, is how soon that end will come. And what price we will pay for it in the years ahead, as the Taliban and allies, reassert control over their 'countryside'.

Homezone to Salon's personal boudoir web extravaganza.

I've said it before and I have to say it again.

If you wish to keep me as a reader you will loose this idea that multi-jarring low information visuals are better than words.

It's just as easy for me to go somewhere else now that there's almost no content worth reading at Salon.

If you want to use visuals in a more appropriate fashion you can always check out the Guardian uk site for a classier range of hints.

But clutter, idiot visuals without content, having to click to understand what I want to read (and what's not worth it) - will find you off the list of sites I go to.

It's bad enough that your most useful feature, the letters have devolved into a bunch of jargonized name calling. Don't fix that mess of the proletariat's revenge.

Clearly it's too hard to fix what helps you stand out from the crowd, when there's the rest of the web showing you how emulate poor design in some race to bottomize information.