Afutilestan X

Hostile occupation is like a coiled spring– the greater the force applied, the greater the force generated when the spring is finally sprung. For instance, triple the amount of occupation forces in Afghanistan, as President Obama has done and voila!– a proportional number of new resistance forces are added to the equation. That’s just the nature of the beast. People …

Afutilestan IX (Update)

US taxpayers funding the killing of its own troops [Note: The arguments of my previous eight Afutilestan diaries explaining why the continuing and escalating presence of US troops in Afghanistan is doomed to fail are incorporated herein.] So what’s new since my last quagmire update? Last night the House approved another $30 billion in military spending in Afghanistan, on top …

Afutilestan (VII): The Great Game Revisited

Geography is destiny, Napoleon is reported to have said. I began to appreciate that political truism early on, thanks to marathon games of  Risk I  played as a kid.  According to Wikipedia, Risk was originally released in France in 1957, as La Conquête du Monde—The Conquest of the World. It was likely modeled on the period of history that historians …

Afutilestan (IV)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai telling American taxpayers to bend over and spread ’em Each one of the nine events from this last week that I noted in Afutilestan III are like separate rooms in a haunted house that Obama is navigating with a very dim candle. The war mongers amongst us lie in wait, trying to push him down the …