So what? There are sub-national political and ethnic wars everywhere on earth right now. Are we supposed to intervene in all of them? And if so, why and what does success look like? Afghanis have been fighting all comers for hundreds of years. How long do you want to be there? 100 years? 300? Why do liberals want to make another Vietnam x 10?

"Where they trained the faithful.."

See, Herbert had it down before George Herbert Walker...*Bushwack*

Children should never play with nasty things.

so the potentially effective target for Kilcullen’s message isn’t the U.S, whose very involvement feeds the Takfiri agenda, but is instead the “secular, moderate” local governments that could potentially move toward meeting autonomy and other needs of the populace, defuse anti-Western radicalization, and thereby pre-empt influence of Takfiri militants by distancing, disavowing, and disinfecting themselves of U. S. “help” and capitalist ideology, simultaneously immunizing regions against the pathology of capitalism and consumerism, and disempowering the Takfiri of their use of local resentment of American empire fueled ". . . because we are intruding into their space."

But this approach could become tolerable only if we, and Kilcullen, were able to disentangle our need for ideological and cultural validation by infection (that is to say, our deep vulnerability to and need to defend against the intolerable, disowned, accurate and inescapable sense of our historical failure) from humankind’s drive toward cultural evolution.

Kilcullen says two things about vacuums.

1- In Afghanistan the Taliban provided the rule of law and conflict resolution when nobody else could.

2- If the U.S. leaves Iraq there will be genocide.

Well, which is it? If we leave will it turn into Rwanda or will it turn into a country with a stable civil infrastructure, albeit one we find less than desirable.(Kilcullen admits that even if we stay we won't be able to put in place the kind of "democracy" Washington likes to think it is a paragon of.)

This is basically warmed over Vietnam era strategic hamlet thinking. Moreover the fear mongering about Iraq descending into genocide misunderstands the economic and social causes of genocide. The IMF destabilized Rwanda. Germany was a basket case. And on and on.

Indeed Iraq will need assistance to pull itself together. But the U.S. is uniquely unqualified to do the job.

And no one sheds a tear for Darfur, the Congo, Tibet and other places so why should Iraq and Afghanistan be any different. Concepts of morality don't apply to states whose overall objective is survival just like morality doesn't apply to animals.

Kilcullen maybe right but he never tells us where we are going to get the money, or the fresh troops needed to maintain the war effort. America owes a debt to many people. The fact US can't pay it's debt is the problem.

The problem is, the Soviet-Afghan War either killed off or sent into exile most of the people who weren't religious extremists -- because they were Communists who fought on the Soviet side.

Those were the people who asked for the Soviet Union to intervene to save them from the civil war they provoked with the tribalists by trying to institute state socialism in a country where most of the population is tribal.

The percentage of Afghans who wanted an American-style democracy was extremely small even back in the swinging sixties before the civil war began.

The Afghan civil war really began in 1973, when Nixon helped the dictator Mohamed Daoud overthrow the King in the name of cannabis prohibition and hippie hatred.

Daoud turned hippies back at the border and ordered a nationwide crackdown on cannabis cultivation.

That's why Nixon thought putting a Communist-backed Pushtun nationalist dictator whose lifelong dream was to attack Pakistan and take the Pushtun areas back into Afghanistan was a good way to serve American interests in the region.

I think the only thing that could save Afghanistan is cannabis legalization.

Afghanistan has only gotten progressively worse since 1973. If only we could get it back to where it was before 1973, that would be an accomplishment.

Yes, they had a weak state, but the hippies were helping the small farmers survive by buying their hashish. Those small farmers could have become the basis for a growing non-Communist, non-extremist middle class.

There was NO opium being grown back then. The tribalists in the south only started growing opium when they decided to mount an armed resistance to Daoud and they needed money to buy weapons.

Daoud was keeping any hippies from entering the country and throwing people into prison for growing cannabis.

So the extremists in the south planted opium and hooked up with professional opium traffickers instead.

Maybe none of that can be undone. But if it could be undone, then I think it won't be undoable until the world has gotten over all this anti-cannabis psychosis that Nixon helped promote.

Don't any of these "experts" read history? what he is decribing is the logic of 19th century Imperialism, carried out by most European powers, and after 1898, by the US. Yes, somehow the natives can't see the great benefits we are (about) to give them! They are rightly suspicious of how an independent , and by definition , selfish foreign country can afford to be so "generous". And what about guerilla warfare, so competently expressed by Mao; remember "the fish are the guerillas, and the people are the sea?" Was Imperialism so successful that the US must continue it, at such a cost to our own life at home? It can't be rational calculation, it must be ignorance. disigny

Why doesn't this article explain this term and the author's reasons for preferring it to "terrorist"?

Takfiri is the Arabic word for a Muslim who accuses other Muslims of apostasy. The term, when applied to our adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, is a kind of propaganda machine in and of itself. It brands our adversaries as "holier than thou" and it creates a wedge between regular Muslims, the ones we want on our side, and the fanatics who accuse them and bring the West's wrath down on them. It's ingenius, not to mention it shows a level of cultural sensitivity and understanding that is not always the US's strong suit.

The term "terrorist" is an utter and complete failure from the point of view of propaganda. Not only does it offend even the most moderate Muslims but it doesn't even make any real sense. Terror is a tactic, employed no less by the US than by Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. 'The US kills hundreds of thousands of people in its bombing campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq and then has the gall and the temerity to call a bunch of illiterate school boys terrorists'--that is how Muslims think.