Looks like I was depressingly prescient in thinking the Koran burning was maybe the result of a growing contempt for Afghanistan among US troops as some rogue solider goes on killing spree of civilians. I think the effort there was doomed anyways, but something like this seems destined to make that a certainty.
I always believed counter-insurgency was a flawed theory, conjured out of the frustration of not being able to fight the war you really want to fight, that could only possibly work under specific conditions, namely a lot of troops, a long commitment and an understanding that changes effected cannot be merely structural, they must be cultural as well - neither of which Obama was willing to comply with or acknowledge when he ok'd the 'surge'. I maintained all along that Obama originally embraced the Afghan war in the 2008 primary for reasons of political expediency; I believe his support of the surge was done in the same spirit [ie you only had two real choices, go big or go small - he chose a middle course that was doomed to eventually fail but offered him the best chance of a tolerable political pay off given his prior endorsing of the effort there as the 'good' war relative to the 'bad' one in Iraq] - the current malaise is what you reap from those compromised seeds. Not that I'm pretending Bush and Rumsfeld do not deserve blame here, maybe even most of the blame - but, as with all things Obama, I was intrigued by how people refused to look beneath the surface of the decisions he was making - I saw nothing but political calculation in his thinking on Afghanistan and therefore if this thing totally comes apart, I'm sure not gonna be surprised by that.
Same goes for Libya by the way - that place is a mess and slowly sliding towards civil war - and yet his supporters still talk about it [well, they don't actually talk about it, they merely quietly remember what they thought they thought about it six months ago and try to pretend that Obama's vaunted humanitarianism doesn't look quite shallow when comparing the imagined carnage of Qaddafi to the real carnage of Assad] as if it's some kind of brilliant success. It was a stupid, utterly misguided endeavor and I am entirely convinced history will prove me right on this.
