Behind the 8 ball.

Has it really been eight years since we started this phase of the Afghanistan catastrophe? I can hardly believe it. Even so, those dark days of late 2001 are beginning to seem like a long time ago now. It was a difficult time, to be sure, on so many different levels - a nation still reeling from the 9/11 attacks, lashing out at one utterly destroyed by decades of warfare, much of it stoked by our government (with the cooperation of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia). We are now told that the place is being overrun by religious fanatics - the Taliban - who want to bring the place back to the 13th century. From where it stands now, that wouldn't be a very long trip.

The Soviets pounded the living piss out of the place, to be sure, but we made a very conscious decision to fund and support hyper religious elements within Afghan society as the core of that nation's resistance efforts - some say before direct intervention by the Soviet military, and certainly thereafter. Our relationship with Pakistan's ruling general Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq during the Reagan administration helped transform Pakistani society into one that is now, if not ruled by fundamentalist Islamists, at least defined by the degree to which that extreme brand of religiosity has constricted civil society.

So, if we go back eight years, we should certainly go back another 20 years before that... and more, when the Carter Administration started funneling support to the Mujahideen - a policy later carried forward with great enthusiasm by the even more craven Reagan, who built the effort up into the largest C.I.A operation up to that point. That was when legions of fighters from Muslim countries (including that guy named Osama) flocked to the Afghan frontier to fight the Russians and, into the bargain, any thought of secularism in that country. When the Russians left, we lost interest and the place went even more profoundly to hell, descending into fratricidal war and chaos that made even the Taliban's tenuous rule seem stable by comparison. But the one-eyed mullah and his pals, along with Sheikh Osama and his, were creatures of our own manipulative foreign policy.

And all these years later, here we are again, poised on the brink of yet another policy decision. Will Obama, Nobel Peace Prize in hand, commit another 40,000 troops to an effort he just shored up with another 17,000 a few months back? I'm almost certain that the answer will be... more dynamite from the Nobel laureate, for the people of Afghanistan. Change comes hard. Mighty hard.

luv u,

jp