Don’t worry, @Demosthenes. We’ll leave Afghanistan in 2014.

We can leave when every member of Al Queda is dead.

Of course if the US hadn’t have pulled out of Afghanistan so quickly in 89 and perhaps stayed and made good on all the empty promises they made to keep them fighting the soviets you probably wouldn’t be still there now.

This is the dilemma which has plagued the dominant powers in the world for eons. And it doesn’t matter how the list of those powers mutates through the ages, none of them seems able to derive the lessons from the failures of their predecessors. It is and has always been a curious situation of a hopelessly primitive and isolated barren land of no economic value that remains primitive and isolated for that very reason. The unfortunate fact that its location has always been so strategically vital to control of anything traversing it or its role as haven for those plundering such trade, has led each power in its turn into the trap of being mired in the futile attempt to bring primitive tribes to heel in a land of jagged rock and treacherous geography. The same mistakes are repeated again and again since the days of Alexander the Great. How to control or dominate a place whose very geography is so harsh and formidable that it actually renders the occupants impermeable to requirements of the world around it.