Afghan Pull Out

President Obama has overruled the advice of his generals and rightly so. This pointless but costly war has bumbled on for ten years, daily snatching the lives of brave servicemen and women who give their all as the highest calling of patriotic duty. It also costs the lives of countless Afghans, some fighters, but many innocent. The vision of a democratic state, unified and at peace, was always unrealistic and is now no more than a pipe dream of the most hallucinatory kind.

Afghanistan is a tribal society of centuries standing, averse to central government, with its own tradition of war lords and tribal elders, which has never and will never, re-mould to some democratic system of Western origin. It presently has a government elected by fraudulent means which is widely acknowledged to be the most corrupt in the world. It is financially dysfunctional and cannot even pay its soldiers regularly, because so much of the largess dispensed by the West, lines the pockets of its dishonest ministers and officials.

The Taliban, repeatedly described by generals high on a cocktail of wishful thinking and self delusion, as on the back foot, constantly reappears to commit murder and mayhem. They know they only have to wait, until the foreign troops go, when the Karzai government will implode as its leaders flee, their pockets a jangle with pilfered aid, while their security forces defect to the Taliban, who will then return in triumph to power. To reinforce the humiliation of those who promoted this ill starred campaign, even when it was clear it could not succeed, The Taliban will actually provide, in  spite of its archaic format,  a government which will be a good deal better than the one it has put to flight.