Great Power contentions

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Sadly true. Our one hope of establishing an Afghanistan that might have really worked died on 9 September 2001 -- two days before the attack that triggered the War on Terror.

I do not believe Afghanistan is conquerable without the use of a level of resources that is unsupportable (and/or a methodology that is entirely unethical by modern standards), and establishing the cultural change needed for the alteration of Afghanistan's self alteration into a modern nation-state does not appear to be any more in the offing now than it was at this same juncture in the previous century.