I actually read it all, oh and I like the picture at the top.

Well, reminds me a bit of what I read about Vietnam, where they had special forces teams working with mountain tribes who actually managed to create a relatively secure border. For some reason though they took away the special forces and replaced them by south vietnamese soldiers who saw the mountain tribes as subhumans or something. You probably guessed that this was no longer a relatively secure border.

Seems like they did the same in Afghanistan by not really helping the locals and removing all special forces who are trained to establish local resistance among the population. Since those special ops guys are now in Iraq and that is a mess as well, I would guess the Iraquis hate them too much to cooperate or something, so they could just as well send them to Afghanistan where local support seems to be stronger.

Then again, Afghanistan has less oil...sorry, but that always springs into my mind.

Ah well, and then there are our soldiers drunkards who make photographs with skulls and other weird things, wondering why the locals don't want to be trained as police officers. Ok, there are probably some decent guys, but a few bad ones can already spoil the whole operation, i think afghans know generalizations and prejudices just like we do.

I mean if some soldier would make a photograph smiling next to the body of your dead family member he shot before, would you go up to his buddy(who might actually be a nice guy who wasn't involved in that photographing stuff) and ask for help or tell him where the resistance are hiding?

To some extent it seems like our soldiers don't all respect the values of the countries they are stationed in, there are definitely leadership faults, but if Joe soldier pees on all of the locals' values, the best master plan is unlikely to help much.

My