But no counterinsurgent I’ve ever met has ever argued that just because violence is insufficient in counterinsurgency that it’s unnecessary.

I would argue that exact point. I belong to the rather small community of pacifist counterinsurgents. It might even be a community of one. I believe that the proper conclusion to draw from the work of Col. John Boyd (if there is a patron saint of counterinsurgency, he is it) is that modern warfare is a fool’s game. We can expand the scope of the WOPR (”Joshua”) doctrine to include all war: the only winning move is not to play.

They’re in Pakistan now.

See if this helps explain it. Try listening to the Jeff Sharlet interview with Alex Jones,

http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/Blog/?p=2678

This progressive is of the conviction that the war is illegal. There is only one course of action and it does not involve weapons of any kind other than words on legal forms and those that may be of use by personnel rounding up recalcitrant perps.

Is this war winnable? As we see some of the video coverage on the Afghan war I wonder if there ever was an actual end strategy. NATO troops have been less willing to continue this madness because they thought once the Taliban were brought to rein, their mission would be road-building, school and hospital construction and other humanitarian projects that would help the Afghan people get back to some sort of self-sufficiency. Those prospects have all but evaporated.

Once G. W. Bush abandoned Afghanistan and his hunt for Osama bin Laden in order to bomb, invade and occupy Iraq, his “cakewalk” war, conditions in Afghanistan continued to deteriorate and the Taliban warlords are back in business as never before.

In Afghan Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

Is there something more noble about this war that I’ve missed?

First we can’t burn the poppy fields because the opium crops keep the farmers from starving and the Afghan people will side with the Taliban if we take away their living means. Then, we discover the opium profits are being used by the Taliban and al Qaeda to train in the madrassas of Karachi and Islamabad, Pakistan so the recruits can learn how to kill Americans and other westerners.

So, now the word is we are destroying the poppy fields again.

In the meantime, toady generals like McKiernan who was replaced by General McCrystal still haven’t figured out how to stop the increasingly sophisticated roadside bomb attacks which were developed and tested in Bush’s personal war of choice in Iraq. The much-touted General Stanely McCrystal, if anyone recalls, was instrumental in covering up the disastrous investigation into former pro football player Pat Tillman’s death as a result of friendly fire.

Let’s also not forget the other high tech operation in Afghanistan, you know, the one where we win the hearts and minds of the Afghan villagers when we send in unmanned Predator drone aircraft to fire “precision” missiles directed (”flown”)from an airbase in Las Vegas, Nevada that wipe out dozens of civilians. But hey, we got a couple of bad guys — I think!

So, here we are over 7 years later, pouring thousands of more troops into Afghanistan while approximately 130,000 U. S. troops languish in Iraq and remain totally under the thumb of the Shiite Islamic government of Nouri al-Maliki who now restricts where and when U.S. combat troops can and cannot go — thanks to Bush’s Status of Forces Agreement that had no input or advisory role for the U.S. Congress.

Hey, you wanna know how come we’re still not rounding up those bad guys during the “fog of war” and sending them off to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba? That’s so 2002!

I wonder how much health care these two $10 billion per month Bush-Cheney adventures would buy for millions of Americans? Silly me.