Thanks to our braindead president and his tunnelvisioned staff, we now have the makings of a disaster in Afghanistan. Bush supporters will howl with indignation that it was all Bill Clinton's fault, but the reality is that in John McCain and Barack Obama, we have no effective solution. Obama will be overwhelmed by the crisis, while McCain wants to go to war with Iran. Such a grand finale to a once great nation.

Obama wasn't so overwhelmed 6 years ago in his speech denouncing the Iraq war resolution, while almost all of Congress (including John McCain) and frankly most of the US bought into the Bush administration's marketing campaign.

How could Afghanistan get worse than it was pre-9/11?

And why do you assume a President Obama would be overwhelmed, any more than any other president?

Afghanistan will be fine. There is a prison break and the Taliban took a few villages, oh no, the same has happened every year. Kaplan is just alarmist. The truth is Afghanistan will never be perfect, it has never been perfect, there will always be rebels there. Thing have gotten progressively better in Afghanistan since 2001. The entire coalition strategy there is one of inches. They slowly consolidate an area, and then move on to another. No big amazing victories for the newspapers, but real honest to god progress on the ground. The North and West of the country are relatively calm, all the problems are on the Pakistani border.

Of course the troops there could use a lot more men and resources, and that would help them accomplish their job a lot better and a lot sooner. But with what they have now they will succeed. The end result may not be a perfectly stable country (think more like Colombia with FARC), and it may take another ten years, but in the end Afghanistan will be weak state. Not a failed state, but a weak state that works. In the case of Afghanistan a weak state may be a job well done.

That's my feeling. When I hear people say we need to "rebuild" Afghanistan, I remind them that Afghanistan has never been built in the first place.

The reason it is notoriously lawless and unstable is due to the tribal culture of that country. It's the reason a central government has always had a lot of difficulty establishing any real authority outside of the Kabul and a couple of other towns.

If we can just keep the center, and the people generally loyal to the government, while the outskirts remain lawless, then we've done our job. We didn't really have a huge goal in the first place. It has always been to destroy the Taliban and its ability to rule that country, and keep it from being a place where Al Queda (or the next international mass murdering jihadist group) can set up operations.

Afghans did something NATO never did - they defeated the Soviet Army and consequently brought that once-mighty Empire to its knees. Our hubris regarding Afghanistan is astounding.

Indeed. The Afghanis had an interest far more compelling than NATO's desire to push back the Soviet Union: they wanted to live in their own way in their own country, not as Soviet slaves.

Please understand that the ones with hubris regarding Afghanistan are generally the ones criticizing American hubris elsewhere.

When they say they want to "fix" Afghanistan, they don't seem to realize they mean to make the country a Western satellite, part of a Western-American empire. In their eyes "finishing the job in Afghanistan" must mean turning it into something like the San Gabriel Valley. But, because it would be done with good intentions, it doesn't some how count as empire.