Peddling faster on the exercise bike

The ‘cultural conservative’ Bill Lind has another typically acerbic essay on Anti-war.com in which he fears that in Afghanistan, General McChrystal and the Obama administration are just ‘trying to get somewhere by riding faster on an exercise bicycle’. And that’s just one of his milder criticisms of the US military’s counter-insurgency strategy, as outlined in Field Manual 3-24and as advocated by the omnipresent John Nagl. ‘Hubristic nonsense’ is Mr Lind’s term for our effort to transform Afghanistan into a society on the model of, say, Sweden:

'Afghanistan is to be made into a liberal, democratic, secular country with rights for women as defined by American feminists. That is baying for the moon, and it can have no other outcome but failure. Setting unattainable objectives makes doctrine irrelevant, because it guarantees defeat.'

Read it, if only because it’s such fun to see the right and left having a meeting of the minds out of sight behind the barn. Blue skies! – Dan Ford