You're such a radical.

Oom, I'm not trying to prove anything about the CIA, nor am I attempting to argue with Ondolette about his views about Afghanistan. I defer to Ondolette's oh-so-revered wisdom in all things Asian, Central Asian, and Mathematical, of course.

But just as Glenn is not the only game in town when it comes to discussing civil rights violations, torture, FISA, surveillance, and the hypocrisy of the media, neither is Ondolette the final arbiter of what is truth and what is not.

I disagree with Ondolette about many things, but I cannot give you substantiated documentation that will prove what involvement the CIA has in so many of the issues discussed in this comment section. If I had the goods, so would everyone else. We are beginning to see some of the truth right now, but there is so much more.

And of course I know the difference between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. My point was that even if Ondolette and others want to scoff about covert operations or CIA involvement in the heroin trade, or their record of interfering in the elections and governments of sovereign nations, things that I have studied as much as Ondolette has studied Asia, does not mean my points are not based on facts rather than "conspiracy theories" or any other minimizing and derogatory term you want to toss at them.

It's the condescension most of us dislike, not the information.

You're such a radical.

I take that to mean you apologize for wrongly accusing me of not watching the videos. Apology accepted.

So, based on Obama's civil rights record as President, with the latest insult being his use of Bush's signing statements to disobey the law, who's voting for him again? I can say I'm not and I've informed him of that.

Obama has basically placed all of his hopes for re-election in the bet that the economy will turn around enough that he'll keep a significant portion of the voters that helped get him elected. Despite the arguments of how he hasn't taken the right steps to turn the economy around anyways, even if he had, this is a gamble as it very well may be something that is simply out of his control. Thus, I'm truly amazed that he has decided to blow off the voters who would have been on his side despite a possibly bad economy by turning his campaign promises about the rule of law and civil rights into lies. It's simply no longer "change I can believe in." It's change I believed in and still know is necessary. He deserves to lose if he doesn't change himself. Pathetic.

I simply don't understand how so many Democrats have failed to grasp why candidates like Nader become a problem for them. No amount of bad mouthing how I may vote in the next election will make me vote for the guy, as his course in civil liberties is inexcusable. On this issue, it would be like someone giving me crap for not voting for someone who robbed me and others at gun point, with their excuse being that because he gave a bit of what he took to the poor, his crime doesn't matter. It may be a difference between that and the thug who would rob me and keep everything to themself. But, in the end, I still got robbed. I can't bring myself to vote for such a person, particularly when Congress now has the numbers to undo all of the ugliness in regards to civil liberties from the Bush regime, especially if the President was on board.

My vote for Obama is turning into the most disappointing vote I ever cast. Die hard Republicans may be ok with their choice lying to them. I'm just not that way. This has turned into too much.

What on earth is going on?

Mathematical discussions on dynamic systems and what somebody already referred to as the oximoron chaos theory is beyond believe to be included here. The "butterfly effect" is as pertinent to historical events as Scrodingers dead cat quantum mechanics is. Maybe if we do not observe anything in Afghanistan nobody would know if they are dead or alive, not the cat but those funny brown people (after all quantum theory says that).

Polite writing does not seem to bring any response, so let me bit a bit more direct: ondolette stop your pedantic writings and deal with the unpleasent realities of US objectives in Afghanistan. Otherwise you may give us a disertation how lapiz lazuli trade was affected because of the Taliban intransigence and since that material is important to some sectors of the female population we have to intervine. (come to think about that is as good a theory as any that you present)

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."