The forgotten war in Afghanistan

So the U.S. is now going to send 3,200 additional Marines to Afghanistan.

How wonderful that this other grandiose adventure by Bush is in need of another "surge."

But why are these surges only manned by U.S. troops? Very simply, the other members of the "coalition of the willing" have told Bush to take a hike.

In Vietnam, our R-and-R periods were taken in Hong Kong, Japan, etc. Only Bush could conceive of a plan to designate Afghanistan as the R-and-R area for Iraq troops.

Over a period of 10 years, the Russians couldn't subdue Afghanistan but lost thousands of soldiers in the process. We can conclude that either the Russian's were incompetent militarily (which is an absurdity) or Afghanistan was as susceptible to non-Asian control as was Vietnam as both we and the French found out.

Civil Wars are exactly that; conflicts between two nationalist groups with different goals and only a fool gets in between them.

One of the characteristics of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.

James Prescott

Schaumburg