Afghanistan looks increasingly like the Taliban are going to repossess their former digs.

Chimpy whines, cries, and stomps his feet, insisting that Iraq is full of “turrists” hellbent on climbing into bed with your mom, painting crescents on your Bible, and parking camels in your back yard.  In the meantime, a well-known, implacably hostile band of true radicals is on the march in Afganistan AND Pakistan, and as this British report tells us, it increasingly looks like they’re going to win in BOTH places.

Let us paraphrase the pathetic waste Condoliesalot Rice for a moment. Chimpy, when are you going to pay attention to a place where “turrists” actually OPERATE?!? By the time a mushroom cloud appears over Houston, it’ll be too late. Iraq says they don’t need us anymore-but there’s obviously a place where we’re needed badly. What will it take for you to actually act like a frigging grown up one time in your life? After a lifetime of wrong, couldn’t you do the right thing JUST ONCE?

We’ve been writing about Pakistan and Afghanistan for months now, because THIS is where the real danger lies. Radicalism hiding behind a crescent is fanning out from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area, and thretens to overtake both places. It is quite possible that what we’ll wind up with is some kind of “Greater Pakistan” under the flag of the Taliban. And we already know that the Taliban will harbor violent radicals, because they’ve never shown any hesitation to do it before. The big twist this time is that they’ll also be able to share some nukes with their ideological brethren.

Maybe they won’t make it to Houston to raise their mushroom cloud. Maybe they will. I think it is far more likely that we’d see the cloud over Moscow or St. Petersburg first, and I don’t see that as any kind of a desirable outcome either.

Could we please shut the petulant little piece of shit in DC up, and let the grownups try their hand at policy?

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Britain’s most senior generals have issued a blunt warning to Downing Street that the military campaign in Afghanistan is facing a catastrophic failure, a development that could lead to an Islamist government seizing power in neighbouring Pakistan.

Amid fears that London and Washington are taking their eye off Afghanistan as they grapple with Iraq, the generals have told Number 10 that the collapse of the government in Afghanistan, headed by Hamid Karzai, would present a grave threat to the security of Britain.

Lord Inge, the former chief of the defence staff, highlighted their fears in public last week when he warned of a ‘strategic failure’ in Afghanistan. The Observer understands that Inge was speaking with the direct authority of the general staff when he made an intervention in a House of Lords debate.

‘The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than many people recognise,’ Inge told peers. ‘We need to face up to that issue, the consequence of strategic failure in Afghanistan and what that would mean for Nato… We need to recognise that the situation – in my view, and I have recently been in Afghanistan – is much, much more serious than people want to recognise.’

Inge’s remarks reflect the fears of serving generals that the government is so overwhelmed by Iraq that it is in danger of losing sight of the threat of failure in Afghanistan. One source, who is familiar with the fears of the senior officers, told The Observer: ‘If you talk privately to the generals they are very very worried. You heard it in Inge’s speech. Inge said we are failing and remember Inge speaks for the generals.’

Inge made a point in the Lords of endorsing a speech by Lord Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader, who painted a bleak picture during the debate. Ashdown told The Observer that Afghanistan presented a graver threat than Iraq.

‘The consequences of failure in Afghanistan are far greater than in Iraq,’ he said. ‘If we fail in Afghanistan then Pakistan goes down. The security problems for Britain would be massively multiplied. I think you could not then stop a widening regional war that would start off in warlordism but it would become essentially a war in the end between Sunni and Shia right across the Middle East.’

‘Mao Zedong used to refer to the First and Second World Wars as the European civil wars. You can have a regional civil war. That is what you might begin to see. It will be catastrophic for Nato. The damage done to Nato in Afghanistan would be as great as the damage done to the UN in Bosnia. That could have a severe impact on the Atlantic relationship and maybe even damage the American security guarantee for Europe.’

Ashdown said two mistakes were being made: a lack of a co-ordinated military command because of the multinational ‘hearts and minds’ Nato campaign and the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom offensive campaign against the Taliban. There was also insufficient civic support on, for example, providing clean water.

Ashdown warned: ‘Unless we put this right, unless we have a unitary system of command, we are going to lose. The battle for this is the battle of public opinion. The polls are slipping. Once they go on the slide it is almost impossible to win it back. You can only do it with the support of the local population.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 12:21 am and is filed under AfGONEistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.