By arming and training the mujaheddin in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, we created..

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/others/orl-syn-ig0611,0,1747786.story?coll=orl-opinions-other-headlines

Improvised explosive defeat?

WASHINGTON -- The photographs gathered by The Washington Post each month in a gallery called "Faces of the Fallen" are haunting. The soldiers are so young, enlisted men and women mostly, usually dressed in the uniforms they wore in Iraq and Afghanistan. What's striking is that most of them were killed by the roadside bombs known as "improvised explosive devices," or IEDs.

The United States is losing the war in Iraq because it cannot combat these makeshift weapons. An army with unimaginable firepower is being driven out by guerrillas armed with a crude arsenal of explosives and blasting caps, triggered by cell phones and garage-door openers.

This is Gulliver's torment, circa 2007. We have thrown our money and technology at the problem, with limited effect. The Pentagon in 2004 created a special task force called the Joint IED Defeat Organization (or JIEDDO, in Pentagon-ese). It has spent $6.3 billion and assembled a staff of nearly 400, but every day more of our brave young people die, and we seem unable to stop it.

"Once the bomb is made, it's too late," says Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a member of the House Armed Services Committee who has studied the IED problem. She says the best hope is to disrupt the money and supplies that allow the bombs to be constructed. snip

We wrote the book for the insurgents, in a sense. By arming and training the mujaheddin in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, we created the modern dynamics of asymmetric warfare.

[Tesha]

1. Sauce for the goose...

> By arming and training the mujaheddin in Afghanistan to fight
> the Soviets in the 1980s, we created the modern dynamics of
> asymmetric warfare.

Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Were we really foolish enough to think that
the people we taught to kill would never
decide they had reason to think badly of
us? Even after decades of, for example,
propping up the Shah of Iran, Saddam
Hussein, and Saudi royal house?

Tesha