"oximoron [sic] chaos theory"? Since when is chaos theory an oxymoron? And go look at my comments. The closest thing I said to mentioning the butterfly effect was to make a crack about Ed Lorenz talking. The guy was fascinating. I assure you that chaos theory is a real subject, whether you or anyone else likes it or not.

If I ramble about metaphor, it's just fine. If I ramble about math, I'm suddenly a pariah. You have your world view, I have mine. And in mine, there isn't much difference between metaphor and mathematics.

Are you kidding or are you telling me to shut up because I don't agree with you?

AFAIK, dynamical systems is not a banned topic. Are you banning it?

On General Dostum. He and Ismail Khan are only kinda sorta Northern Alliance, more like full time warlords. For most of the Taliban rule, Dostum was sitting it out in Uzbekistan and Khan in Iran while Masood battled it out with the Taliban. They returned in early 2001 when they believed the Taliban would be destabilized (Oops, they were destabilizing before the U.S. ever touched the place in 2001). As for the war crimes: I remain unconvinced that some of the container based war crimes weren't committed by U.S. people directly.

1)Your point-by-point. It isn't just the major economic powers and their over consumption that binds the world together at 7 billion, it's also the food supply, water supply, the speed of news and other ties. Even without our over consumption it would be impossible to dissociate countries and each live separately in harmony. Way too many people.

2) My reference to the math was to indicate where my point of view came from (chaos, complex systems), and to indicate that in my neck of the woods, the inevitability of complexity is a theorem -- an indisputable fact, not just some belief. I had let it drop in the parenthetical for that reason, I wasn't saying donna you worry your pretty little head. I know how many people know about Baire categories and why, and after a lifetime in the discipline, trust me, I know about peoples eyes glazing over or getting upset with me.

If it's okay to allow that what I was saying was indisputably true about complex and chaotic systems without saying such things, fine. The important point with complex systems (my previous was 1000 words so I didn't say a lot of things) is that they look totally predictable if one looks to the past and totally unpredictable if one looks to the future. As in you look at what happened and think, "Well, of course. Any idiot could see it would turn out this way." And then you turn and look at the future and say which path should I take, and think, "This is totally overwhelming how would anybody know what to do?" And the chaotic system looks like one little mistake and the whole thing goes off course.

Is that better? But if I said it that way, would you still understand that it isn't just a feeling, that someone actually proved hard and cold and there is no dispute, that such systems were that way and were the most common type above a certain number of interconnected actors each with a will of their own?

3) It's been that way since the beginning. There have been two complete command and control structures in Afghanistan for quite some time, and it got more completely that way after a combined forces agreement in 2006. What I was pointing out is that the 11,000 man group appears to be the one with Congressional authorization (the U.S. forces under NATO appear not to have it), and it's mission is automatically impossible since the people it pertains to are in a country it isn't allowed to go to. And as I said in another addendum, that means that the status of the prisoners in Bagram is very much not what it is contended to be in this country at all, or those in Guantanamo.

Obviously, the UN was well capable of doing whatever nation-building you feel was appropriate without any US involvement whatsoever.

Hunh? And who should do it? Isn't the U.S. in the U.N. too? The country that supplies the most peacekeeping troops to the U.N. worldwide is Pakistan. Do you think they'd be a good candidate? As per Zalmay Khalizad, he screwed things up in Afghanistan in 2003-2004 by insisting that everything should be dependent on what would look good for George W. Bush in the U.S. presidential election. People there, other Afghans, were doing just fine until he showed up.

I respect your view, that the world community has an obligation to failed states. In fact, the West has generally had a good hand in the failure of those states. But there has to be another way that has a list of goals and a way to achieve them in mind. We already fucked this up beyond belief; we couldn't make it any worse by leaving.

Fair enough, we've been part of the problem leading to the failure of some states. But as macgupta has pointed out, we failed to do the right thing in 1990, we failed to do it in 2002. We have to get it right the third time. Why? Because in 1990 we tried your solution. And guess what? It actually can get much more fucked up and worse by leaving, we already proved that. In 2002, a perfectly good reconstruction was screwed up by the CIA and Rumsfeld funding warlords to the tune of $1 billion while ISAF was trying to disarm them.

But in 2006, the Taliban insurrection, which started with a grand assault on Kandahar Province from over the border in Pakistan, had roots in heroin and Pakistani double dealing, not just U.S. screw ups. The Germans screwed up the police force training, and are quite a bit to blame for the corruption in the country. Others were more interested in looking good on home TV giving out aid to the poor little brown people than building roads and working through the government infrastructure. It wasn't the U.S. alone.

So as to not having a grand plan, see my remarks about complex systems. There is no grand plan that will work, but there is a way to succeed. One would think that heru-ur would really love that scenario. It's the 'move the force of 1000 pounds with the push of 4 ounces', 'iron bars wrapped in cotton', float like a butterfly, kinda Taoist kinda how to fry a small fish thing. Taoism never said hands off, it says "Use a nimble hand and a light touch, and give the opponent nowhere to turn."