Lose yourself in the fog, the Af-Pak alphabet soup. You haven't learned enough junk about stuff yet to make a reasoned argument.

Maybe you'll learn the answers to some of those nagging, irrelevant questions that ondelette ignores. Questions like, "how long are we going to be in Afghanistan?", or "how do you define victory?", or "WTF are our goals over there?", or "how much blood and treasure is this nation building exercise going to cost?"

Maybe ondelette, Master of Acronyms, keeper of all things factual, named, and grouped, can enlighten us all as to how long we need to stay in Afghanistan, how he defines "victory" and what it entails. How long he thinks it will take to achieve and at what cost (lives and dollars). He always ignores those nagging irrelevancies, waving them off as "racist", so he can focus on informing everyone about facts, names, and groups in the hope that maybe, if we're lucky, we'll all become as informed as him, and finally see things the way he sees them (i.e. the "correct" way).

It is not our job to find monsters abroad to slay just to make you feel morally superior.

Find? I think you misspelled "create."

And yes, it was "your" job, for 20 years. "You" did it admirably well, and scorned the world when it asked "you" to do something — anything, no matter how meager — to support those people in Afghanistan who were in the "not crazy fundamentalists wanting to murder their neighbors with American money" camp.

How do you feel about the job "you" did? On a scale of 1 to 5, in terms of outcome, what would you say? Did it work out the way you'd hoped?

Wait, what's that? You say you didn't plan anything at all? You were totally ignorant the entire time?

Well that's nice. You closed your eyes so you didn't have to look. Good for you. That must be where you got to learn so much about feelings of moral superiority.

I take back what I said about respecting your willingness to be honest. Apparently I was too quick to give the benefit of the doubt.

When the Taleban blow up children, they are responsible. When American's blow up children, then Americans are responsible.

The difference is that we don't control the Taleban. "We" do control the military. (maybe)

There are no good guys in this movie.

All this noise about Michael Jackson, and no one cares about the drone murders in Pakistan. I find this bizarre and incomprehensible.

I guess it's the Taleban's fault for "hiding among civilians".

Who has a link for downloading the kill file?

A little snippet of info about military/terrorist ops. Each one is a message as well as an op. The planners also measure before what is the likely blow back and can they endure it.

So, al Quida who wanted the US out of Islamic lands attacked US government/military targets abroad. Their fight was with the US government NOT the American people. And they could risk the blow back because they and the Americans were in foreign lands giving them a good chance of escape.

So ask yourself why on earth whilst apparently not informing the Taliban in whose house they were resident did they attack the American homeland attacking civilians? Doesn't make sense does it? And in no way would further their specific aims.

Which is just one of the many reasons why al Quida did not do it. Unless of course ondellette for upmteenth time of asking, comes up with some proof that I, the FBI or the Taliban haven't ever heard about.

As Amity points out, there was quite a lot of ongoing reporting and intelligence on the activities of jihadists and so-called al qaeda prior to YKW. Similarly, but on a much smaller scale, there was a plethora of information, engineering studies, grant requests, and hair-on-fire alarm about the levies in New Orleans.

And, similarly, there was a lot of finger-pointing when the inevitable disaster occurred. Re: YKW, Republicans blamed Clinton, liberals blamed Bush, tin-foil-hatters blamed the neocons, the CIA and, of course, the Jews. Re: New Orleans, the city blamed the state, the state blamed FEMA, the media blamed Bush, and the Cheese Stands Alone.

When the cloud of blame dissipates, we are left with taking responsibility for our failures. When leaders do not take responsibility for their failures and, instead, continue on the road to further disasters, ignoring the evidence, refuting the facts, or eschewing prosecuting (or at least FIRING) some of the guilty, then what is the point of having elections?

Afghanistan, imo, was and always will be a failure. We should leave. Iraq was not only a boondoggle has cost us billions and untold casualties for what, exactly?

And for Ondolette to throw out that straw man argument that those of us who oppose being in Afghanistan blame the CIA for everything, I recommend doing a little homework on the CIA. No, they are not responsible for what's going on there now, but they did train and equip al qaeda originally, along with the taliban; they have a decades-long record of mucking around in foreign wars, and every day we read something "new" about their covert and illegal operations.

I'm with Pendinska - disband the organization. Stop funding it, period.

I don't hold that the press is entirely and solely to blame. It is us, as well. But it was also the whole "wag the dog" bit surrounding the Clinton impeachment that the press got into. Here was this looming threat, on A17, but nonetheless there, and when Bill Clinton tried to do something about it, admittedly probably the wrong thing and very ham-handed, perhaps, there was a huge chorus of "wag the dog" and "manufactured threat".

Way back in the 1980's, there was a whole movement on the campus I was on, that contended, much as some of the people around contend today, that the whole Soviet invasion thing was being misinterpreted and that the CIA was briefing the refugees on what to tell people on their way out of Afghanistan before they got to the refugee camps. Because it just wasn't possible that the Soviet Union, and not the great evil U.S., was using 'mothballs' (globs of sticky white phosphorus dropped from planes and helicopters) and that Afghan children were playing with them until the sweat from their hands ignited the stuff and killed them.

I don't think I was as well informed as you say I could have been in those days, and I admit you are right that I could have been. I could have been more than many others, too. I remember thinking a friend of mine was paranoid when he talked about a lot of that stuff in the mid-nineties. But he was in India (our discussion took place there), and I just assumed that some of his stuff was tinged by the rivalries in the area, even though he'd actually been to Afghanistan and seen the fighting there with his own eyes. I know better about what he says these days.