“There is unlikely to be anything like a decisive result out of this operation, even in the local area in the short term. Marine commanders will talk up the operation because that is what you do, and the media, Congress and commentators will project their own hopes and desires onto the operation, and then castigate the Marines for not meeting them …. even if this operation goes perfectly it will merely establish small groups of Marines in a number of local areas. This is the right first step. It then requires the re-establishment of local governance, which will take years, and the replacement of the Marines with Afghan troops and police. Trust will only be built up in the eyes of a deeply suspicious local people by a protracted period of careful operations. US Marines are more than capable of doing this if given time, with some of the most successful counterinsurgent operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan behind them, and an intellectual and experienced leadership.”

That, Sir, is an excellent question. I will follow Your example and ask another one: What is the most good?

Is it the will of mothers of US marines? Blue eyed patriots who want to see their kids occupy a little piece of Afghanistan unharmed and believe anything that is fed to them by the media? Or is it the mothers of Pashtun insurgents? Caught in a restricting culture they would like to see their sons and daughters have a decent life in a country that was shaken by various conflicts so many times in the last centuries, only to be held by foreigh forces again.

Or maybe we should look at Zbigniew Brzezinski’s geo-strategic chessboard and state clearly what our elite is after and that we simply need to trample some lives to get there?

I pity every man and women who looses his life.

I was in Afghanistan in 2003 in a quite exceptional visit. I came there not a soldier, but as an express courier, without a Visa. I was still a student at this time and had to deliver some camere objectives for the second german television (ZDF). What I saw there in that short time let my heart freeze. I do not know what good we can do to those people after all the good we had them gulp in the last 20 years.

Fubar.