Afghan 2.0

[cwolff]

I can't see how this ends well. Hopefully I'm wrong and being too pessimistic.


The mission is no longer about complete control of Helmand. Old efforts to establish local governance and rule of law here have so clearly failed that they are no longer in the picture. The Marines are simply trying to keep Lashkar Gah from falling to the Taliban, and to help the Afghan forces come out of their barracks and put up a fight.

There is no withdrawal deadline this time, and no clearly defined strategy to end the war — other than hoping to persuade the Taliban to give up and eventually talk of peace.

[cwolff]

This is what we're fighting for and protecting?


KABUL – Last summer, an Afghan police commander invited me to his post for tea — and to view his “beautiful” boy sex slave.
I stumbled through a farm of chest-high opium poppy stocks to reach his mud-and-wattle outpost on the outskirts of Tarin Kot, the capital of southern Uruzgan province that is teetering in the face of a Taliban upsurge. On its open roof, a slight teenager sat next to his hulking captor, stealing sad glances at me as he quietly filled our tea glasses. A shock of auburn curls jutted out of his embroidered pillbox hat and his milky eyes were lined with kohl. The commander flaunted him the way a ringmaster exhibits an exotic animal. “See my beautiful bacha (boy slave),” he said, blithe and casual, a gun dangling at his side.

[Taernath]

This is what we're fighting for and protecting?

Yep.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI