tally ban

With the wheels finally coming off the US operation in Afghanistan, it looks like we're gonna be out of there ahead of schedule.

It couldn't come too soon. We've been in Afghanistan a dozen years, and for 11 of them we've had no stated goal or purpose in being there. Afghanistan has become pure warfare for its own sake -- the Pentagon occcupying a country halfway round the world just to be doing it.

But now, just as the new Secretary of War arrives on his first trip there, the Afghan president, Mr. Karzai, is signaling that the relationship between his country and ours is over.

Speaking a day after two Taliban bomb attacks that killed 17 people, Karzai said the bombings served Washington's aim of trying to convince Afghans that U.S. forces were needed.

"Those bombs that went off in Kabul and Khost were not a show of force to America. They were in service of America. It was in the service of the 2014 slogan to warn us if they (Americans) are not here then Taliban will come," Karzai said.

"In fact those bombs, set off yesterday in the name of the Taliban, were in the service of Americans to keep foreigners longer in Afghanistan," he said in a speech.

There's a lot more at work there than just traditional Afghan xenophobia. Karzai and his allies are secularists, and fear the Taliban, but have learned to hate America worse. After 12 years of our bombing, killing civilians, and torture, can you blame them?