BOB HERBERT: Reliving the Past

[laststeamtrain]

Reliving the Past
By BOB HERBERT
Published: September 4, 2009

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And they will be fighting and dying in a particularly unforgiving environment. Afghanistan is a mountainous, mostly rural country with notoriously difficult, lonely and dangerous roads — a pitch-perfect environment for terrorists and guerrillas. Linda Bilmes, a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has been working with the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz to document the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. She told me:

“The cost per troop of keeping the troops in Afghanistan is higher than the cost in Iraq because of the really difficult overland supply route and the heavy dependence on airlifting all kinds of supplies. There has been such a lot of trouble with the security of the supplies, and that, of course, becomes even more complicated the more troops you put in. So we’re estimating that, on average, the cost per troop in Afghanistan is at least 30 percent higher than it is in Iraq.”

The thought of escalating our involvement in Afghanistan reminded me of an exchange that David Halberstam described in “The Best and the Brightest.” It occurred as plans were being developed for the expansion of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. McGeorge Bundy, who served as national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, showed some of the elaborate and sophisticated plans to one of his aides. The aide was impressed, but also concerned.

“The thing that bothers me,” he told Bundy, “is that no matter what we do to them, they live there and we don’t, and they know that someday we’ll go away and thus they know they can outlast us.”

Bundy replied, “That’s a good point.”

We’ve already lost more than 5,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and spent a trillion or so dollars. The longer we stay in Afghanistan, the more resentful the local population will become about our presence, and the more resentful the American public will become about our involvement in a war that seems to have no end and no upside.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/opinion/05herbert.html?_r=1&bl&ex=1252296000&en=aca08736a6e52505&ei=5087%0A

[Skittles]

1. there's no fucking point whatsoever

and Obama is not only staying the course but INCREASING THE NUMBER OF TROOPS there - while allowing repukes to say HEALTHCARE COSTS TOO MUCH MONEY.....I am in fucking bizarro world