Geeze, it's just like the grainy films of Soviet soldiers fighting in the 1980s. They were brutally butchered by the Afghans, and perhaps rightly so. I don't have any brilliant answers, but surely there is another way. And then maybe not. All of this, the lies, the pissing away of tons of cash, the bodies coming back to Dover in the middle of the night, it all has me depressed, and it gets worse with every smug word that escapes from the Current Occupant's mouth, and that of the evil Cheney or the incompetent Rice. How did we fall so far so fast?

God Bless every fallen soldier that tried his or her best to do his duty... tomorrow their names are forgotten. This is not a war to us, only to them and their loved ones. Thank you to the author for traveling there as well.

what? no brittney or anna nicole? no mention of mac and cheese or a passenger's bill of rights? no frustrated grad students complaining to cary tennis? no debate about whether or not barack obama is black or not?

look - i won't say that this type of war reporting is "real life" and all of the above is not. this is all real life.

but it's nice to get a first-hand account of something that's usually so distant to us.

rock on.

Its not like the soviets.

The struggle against the soviets was national in scope. If you remember, there was grainy footage of people jumping on buses, exiting the cities every weekend to go and join up with the Mujahadeen. There is nothing like that happening now.

The Taliban are not popular and have only tepid support in the west and south of Afghanistan.

There are 2 taliban, one is Afghan, the other is the proxy army of the Pakistani security forces attempting to gain Hegemony over Afghanistan and is composed of missguided foreign Arabs who think that they are "liberating" Afghans. They have only a loose connection to each other. In fact the Taliban proconsol who oversaw the destruction of the Buddhas is a member of the Afghan parliament.

Looking at things from an Afghan view point, imagine that your house was invaded by your second cousins who thought that they were doing you a favour by offering you "protection" but they were pissing in you sinks, eating your food and makeing a general nussince of themselves. Then a guy on the other side of town decides to kick your cousins out of your house (for which you are gratefull) and he says that he is going to fix the damage that the cousnins caused and then leave.

The only problem is that he doesnt fix it, or only partly, and you cousins come back and now you have this guy you barely know fighing with your cousins in your front yard, tearing up the yard and frightening the horses. You want both of them to leave so you can clean up and besides, you may not like your cousins but at least you know them but you may give the guy from out of town the benefit of the doubt because he says that he is going to give you money.

I don't think that the Afghans "didn't like the storry" that the CIA guy told, It was just probably incomprehensible to them. Dogs and neighbours have a different cultural weight there than here. They were probably scratching their heads trying to figure out what the hell he meant and implying that your neighbors, who you might be related to, are dogs is a grave and serious insult. Believe me, it is possible to get that from the story even if you had the best translator around. Policy should never be told in parables.

There is a temptation to think that history repeats itself (soviets) but remember that it only rhymes. The other temptation is taht because one thing is bad and consieved in sin (iraq) means that all are conseivved in sin.

I would suggest taht things be taken with the evidence presented and on their own merits and not lumpped, undiffernetiated, into the throw up your hands and walk away pile.

It is unfortunate that people in the west have, yet again, walked away from a beuatiful and poor country like Afghanistan.

Comparing Muslims to dogs, congratulations. Strict Muslims consider dogs to be unclean. An American might not take the Parable of the Wild Dogs as a grave personal insult, but I have a feeling this anecdote was received quite differently in Nuristan.

By the way, everyone should pray right now that Dick Cheney doesn't fire up the border tribes. If Pushtunistan turns into an issue, if the border Pushtuns decide they don't want to be Pakistanis any more, then Pakistan becomes unstable and the future of India falls under a dark mushroom cloud.

Yes it looks bad now.

But this war could easily get so, so, so much worse.

Perhaps I've been spoiled by Salon's superlative reporting over the years, and perhaps I expected great things from this piece given the wonderful imagery on the link. What then could be more frustrating than to read something written by a person in harm's way that contains numerous factual inaccuracies??

The Command Sergeant Major in question was not an officer, nor was he technically in command of anything. Command Sergeant Major is an enlisted rank, not a position. (And if he ever reads your article he will probably knock your block off!!)

Helicopters do not have propellors, they have rotors. In any case, the rotors operate within a narrow performance band. In other words they never really speed up or slow down - they increase pitch and power instead. A forgivable error, but #2 in any case.

An AH-64 Apache Helicopter can carry at maximum 1200 rounds of 30MM ammunition. How one helicopter could dispense "several thousand rounds" of ammunition at one go is a mystery to me. Further, the rate of fire of the M230 cannon is 625 rounds per minute. Even assuming that 2000 rounds constitutes "several" it would still take three minutes of uninterrupted firing to discharge the amount stated.

Great wartime reportage must by definition be accurate and raw. It must not embellish, trivialize, or simplify. It must connect with our nerve endings directly, the more so because we know it is as bare as it is accurate. If your correspondent (or his editor) couldn't get the above items correct, how can we trust him on the remainder of his observations??

We can't.

C'mon Joan, you can do better than this - get off my Teevee and edit your magazine!!

(I look forward to your corrections!!)