How did we get here?

This a great piece sent to me by my fiend Dr O. He's a brilliantly diabolical fellow who like me is secretly working to bring the whole place down from the inside. But all kidding aside, we were discussing terrorism and tactics and somehow got to this. It shifted the discussion to cognitive dissonance something I discuss a bit int TO&S and so worth highlighting here.

HANSON: A nation of promiscuous prudes - Washington Times

HT Hanson and Dr O.

Toddlers of War

I once took a position that it was too early to tell about the future of the nations we’ve recently invaded, Iraq and Afghanistan. In challenging a Marine Officer's assessment that Iraq was a win I said we’ll see what path the next generation takes the kids we gave candy to all those years - I said let’s wait and see their choices as political creatures over the next ten or fifteen years. And so here we are looking at Afghanistan on April Fools 2013 where it’s being reported a young man of 16 has stabbed an American SGT to death while he played with local children. They can’t verify the age of the attacker who escaped but if they’re speculating then this kid is probably someone known to other personnel on scene.

 So maybe we don’t have to wait that long to see where this has taken us.

Yes this is only one incident and I don’t offer it up as the final piece of evidence Afghan and Iraq actions have been for naught, there is ample evidence to back that hypothesis and little to show otherwise. No, this one incident is significant because if it’s true, the attacker is between 15 or 18 yoa. That means when we arrived there this attacker was barely a toddler between the ages of 3 and 5.

New meaning to the word 'infantry' (literally child or youngest soldiers).

Our benign empire has made a foe of a baby despite our best efforts to win hearts and minds, using our special forces to terrorize and abduct locals we knew (76% of the time or so) were terrorist ring leaders and describing dead relatives of this kid as collateral damage without facing scrutiny or justice is what brought us here. A guy from Kentucky barely old enough to realize the folly of our adventure is lost and in his place we have a new, young enemy and probably many others waiting to stab the rest of us in the neck.

There isn’t anyone to blame except ourselves, no one in government is individually responsible for the inept strategic planning or lack thereof, there is a lot of blame to go around as far as most American’s are concerned the war is over and has been for some time, we’re just waiting for one or two guys to come back since the president declared our exit date in 2009. Keep the 68,000 US service personnel in Afghan in your thoughts while you enjoy attacking the self-esteem of colleagues today with office pranks.