While we in the U.S. have been obsessing over Iraq, there is still our original war, still being waged. Some grim reports have been coming out lately, suggesting that we are not doing so well. I suppose we are in a bit of paralysis over what to do with Pakistan, since it has a leader who publicly allies himself with the GWOT, and a population firmly in support of the Taliban.

Anyway, Time has an article that you may or may not have seen, and it's a decent primer on the challenges we still face. There's also some chilling video from Helman province, with live shots of Talibanis burning a school, and a depressing interview with the province's minister of education.

Given that we already have a shortage of Arabic translators, and given that Pushtun isn't exactly taught in our high schools, I wonder at how effective our counterinsurgency can be. Given that we're already straining to feed the beast that is the Iraq war, I wonder about whether we will really give Afghanistan the attention it needs.

I also wonder whether the U.S. population is ready and primed to think seriously about what's going on in Afghanistan. Signs are not good. The covers below are all from the same week. Note the slight discrepancy between what is fed to Americans versus what the rest of the world gets.