The attached article was brought to my attention by a highly-educated, well-read medical doctor of Pashtun descent now living in the UK. It should be studied closely and ought to be mandatory reading in the White House, before the President gets stampeded by McChrystal debacle, the accession of General Petraeus, and his fellow travelers in the War Party (Democrats as well as Republicans) into backing away from President Obama's withdrawal deadline. CS
Why the Taliban is winning in Afghanistan
By William Dalrymple – New Statesman – 22/06/2010
http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2010/06/british-afghanistan-government
As Washington and London struggle to prop up a puppet government over which Hamid Karzai has no control, they risk repeating the blood-soaked 19th-century history of Britain’s imperial defeat.
In 1843, shortly after his return from Afghanistan, an army chaplain, Reverend G R Gleig, wrote a memoir about the First Anglo-Afghan War, of which he was one of the very few survivors. It was, he wrote, “a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has Britain acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated.”
