Obama's March to Folly

Reprinted with permission

Weekend Edition
December 17 - 19, 2010

The Myth of Liberal Intervention and the Arrogance of Ignorance

Obama's March to Folly

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney12172010.html

In a recent opinion piece, "Kosovo and the Myth of Liberal Intervention," Neil Clark in the Guardian on 15 December gave the reader a good summary of the some of the myths surrounding the Kosovo war, although he helped to perpetuate one myth, namely that the so-called genocide of Kosovar Albanians by the Serbs could be as high as 10,000. While Clark fudged the issue by using a range of 2,000-10,000, the fact remains that examination of mass burial sites by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) exhumed 2,788 bodies in Kosovo, some of whom were undoubtably Serbs; nor could the ICTY distinguish how many of these bodies were victims of war crimes or were the unintended detritus of NATO's "precision" bombing. The number of 10,000 was a face-saving, last-ditch, "statistical" estimate produced by the US State Department (its earlier estimates were far higher), which had a vested interest in proving the genocide it claimed Serbia had committed as a justification for NATO's "humanitarian" bombing campaign. The estimate of 10,000 was based on dubious (to put it charitably) statistical methods for estimating the number of bodies the State Department said existed but could not find -- once illustrating government's propensity to confuse the a priori with the a posteriori

Understanding the politics and propaganda surrounding the "goodness" of the Kosovo War, the less-than-predicted performance of our weapons, and the war's horrid aftermath (including trade in human organs, drugs, white slavery, etc) is crucially important, because Kosovo became the template for the kind of quick, painless, airpower-intensive, intervention that led Bush to recklessly think he had won a quick victory in Afghanistan, when the Taliban, faced with superior military forces, simply melted into the hinterlands in classical guerrilla/Sun Tzu fashion to fight another day. The initially pain-free Afghanistan operation fueled Bush's arrogance and seduced him into believing that, with a enough duplicity to justify his actions, he could repeat the quick trick by invading Iraq, which would be also a cakewalk -- remember his childish "mission accomplished" performance on the aircraft carrier. The myth of precision bombing and targeted killing that created the false impression of a bloodless -- at least for us -- cakewalk to victory in Kosovo [1] is also reflected in the kind of denial that is now sucking Obama ever deeper into the Afghan trap Bush created, as well as Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and god knows where else.

Obama's denial can be seen in "march-to-folly" character of the just completed, hermetically sealed, strategic review by President Obama and his group thinking team of compliant rivals. They simply rubber stamped our current so-called counterinsurgency strategy to win hearts and minds by claiming that the war is "on track." Meanwhile, over in the Pentagon, the military is planning to shift to a so-called counter terrorism strategy, because the current strategy is on track to what some strategist ridiculously called a "sub-optimal" outcome. This "shift" is code for an escalation of "precision" bombing and the increased use of special forces in "surgical" killing operations of "high value" targets, which of course assumes a degree of reliable, high-grade "actionable" intelligence that seldom exists. Moreover, we know from our experience to date, an escalation of these operations will produce in an unintended increase in the killing of innocent civilians and their property. We also know from experience to date that, in Afghanistan, escalating murder and destruction will fuel the passions of honor and revenge in what is one of the proudest, toughest, clan-based vendetta cultures in the entire world.

One other external factor ought to have ought to an penetrated the closed circle of advisors who conditioned Mr. Obama's decision to stay the course: namely the self-evident question of the cost and effectiveness that results from mirror imaging the kind targeted killing operations that are so popular with the Israeli military. We all know how successful the Israelis have been in creating an optimal outcome to their conflict with the Palestinians.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

Notes.

[1] Kosovo is a case study in the failure of high-tech precision bombardment to live up to its promises. US military planners predicted a "precision" bombing campaign would force the Serbs to capitulate in only two to three days, but the air campaign grinded on for 79 days as the target list grew exponentially (because the destruction was not having its predicted effects). Yet when it was over, NATO intelligence determined only tiny quantities of Serb tanks, armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery, and trucks were destroyed. Serbian troops marched out of Kosovo in good order, their fighting spirit intact, displaying clean equipment, crisp uniforms, and in larger numbers than planners said were in Kosovo to begin with. Moreover, the terms of Serb "surrender," which the undefeated Serb military regarded as a sell out by Serbian President Milosovic, were the same as those the Serbs agreed to at the Ramboullet Conference, before US negotiators and Secretary of State Madeline Albright inserted a poison pill to queer the deal, so we could have what the politically troubled Clinton Administration thought would be a neat, short war.

Who is the Wise General in Afghanistan?

Reprinted with permission of editors

December 14, 2010

Memo From Sun Tzu to President Obama

Who is the Wise General in Afghanistan?

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney12142010.html

In the first treatise written on the art of war, sometime around 450 BC [1], Sun Tzu explained why "the wise general sees to it that his troops feed on the enemy,"

"Where the army is, prices are high; when prices rise the wealth of the people is exhausted. When the peasantry will be afflicted with urgent exactions."

The commentator, Chia Lin elaborated on Master Sun's words by saying,

"Where troops are gathered, the price of every commodity goes up because everyone covets the extraordinary profits to be made."

The militarization of development aid is a central pillar of General Petaeus's counterinsurgency strategy to buy the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, ninety per cent of whom are spread out in remote rural areas. So it should not be surprising that the military is controlling the bulk of the billions of dollars in aid money flowing into (and being smuggled out of) Afghanistan.

In the very important CounterPunch report on 13 December, Patrick Cockburn, certainly one of the most informed observers of insurgencies in the Middle East and Central Asia, described how the militarization of development aid in Afghanistan is riven with corruption. Reliance on U.S. companies to manage high-cost showcase projects, for example, has produced tiered structures of subcontractors inside Afghanistan who skim off most of the aid money in administration frees, with very little reaching its intended purpose, which in any case, is usually irrelevant to the needs of impoverished locals, some of whom are living on the brink of starvation. The ubiquitous skimming operations are lubricated by the fact that many of these aid projects are in isolated areas, where progress cannot be effectively monitored for security reasons, and where the military has no idea of what the local people really need. Not surprisingly, effectiveness is measured by the time honored American political-military tradition of counting money spent -- i.e., by measuring inputs rather than outputs, but in this case, instead of tons of bombs dropped on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the metric is tons of money spent to buy the heart and minds of people we are killing accidentally. That these people live in a xenophobic, clan-based, vendetta culture does not seem to have affected Petraeus's strategic calculus.

Cockburn goes on to explain why the aid is feeding a culture of corruption that is working to alienate the people and further destabilize Afghanistan.

In other words, the strategic effect of development aid is to strengthen the Taliban and prolong the insurgency, which under Petraeus's counterinsurgency doctrine, has the happy consequence of increasing the demand for aid dollars even further. The money pumping operation explains, in part, the strategically inane infatuation with never-ending small wars by the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex, notwithstanding Sun Tzu's admonition that, "what is essential in war is victory, not prolonged operations." [2]

Thus, the American taxpayer is faced with an inwardly focused war mongering process which folds back on itself to amplify itself. In the Pentagon, we have a term of art for this kind of never-ending, self-referencing operation: the Petraeus counterinsurgency strategy is a "self-licking ice cream cone."

In context of the wisdom of Master Sun introduced above, Patrick's description of General Petraeus's self licking ice cream cone begs the question:

Who is the wise general?

General Petraeus whose counterinsurgency strategy is based on the theory that you can buy hearts and minds by pumping money or Mullah Omar whose insurgency strategy is to feed off that money flow?

Given the ongoing impoverishment of the middle class at home, the ramifications of Sun Tzu's aphoristic words also apply to President Obama. He would be well advised to ponder Sun Tzu's question in the upcoming Defense Review. But to do that, Mr. Obama must reach out beyond the groupthink mentality [3] of the closed circle strategic advisors that is feeding him the ice cream.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

Notes.

[1] Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translated by Samuel B. Griffith, Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 74.

[2] Griffith translation, p. 76

[3] Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascos, Houghton Mifflin, 2nd edition, 1983

Staying the Course in Afghanistan

Reprinted with permission of editors

December 2, 2010

The Unmentioned Question

Staying the Course in Afghanistan

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney12022010.html

A report, "Afghanistan: Exit vs. Engagement" released on 28 November 2010 by the International Crisis Group (ICG), an organization biased to advocate the neo-imperialistic policy of "humanitarian intervention," is very important and should be studied carefully for at least two reasons:

First, and most importantly, the ICG makes a concise, and I think accurate, summary of how badly things have gone wrong in Afghanistan, particularly at the all-important grand strategic level of conflict, where the destructive effects of a military strategy must be harmony with, but subordinate to, the constructive aims of the larger political strategy. The ICG’s devastating indictment reveals in considerable detail the extent to which the United States and its Nato lackeys have thoroughly gomered up their nine-year intervention in Afghanistan.

Second, the ICG report is obviously written to influence the so-called policy review that the Obama administration will make in December. Obama’s review is likely to simply rubber stamp the "stay-the-course" non-decisions made in the recent NATO conference in Lisbon. What is revealing about the ICG report is that, in stark contrast to its detailed analysis of our policy mistakes, it contains no concrete recommendations for evolving a corrective pathway into the future. The overall tone of the report clearly suggests that the ICG favors continued engagement, but with a counterinsurgency strategy that changes fundamentally to place priority on government reform, as opposed to our current course which focuses on military operations, as a first step in providing security to the people. That sounds good and is consistent with the problems identified by the ICG. Such an approach would be consistent also with the ICG's historical rhetoric in support of other so-called humanitarian interventions. What I find significant in this report, however, is that the ICG report has no discussion of how to go beyond its platitudes. Given the amount of thinking that went into this report, this omission is quite revealing. The ICG -- like the Obama Administration -- wants to muddle through and thereby reinforce failure, because, as a fighter pilot would say, it is out of altitude, airspeed, and ideas.

Moreover, given the nature of the disastrous state of affairs in Afghanistan, the central question attending to any decision to continue the "engagement" until the problems identified by the ICG are resolved is clear:

Has too much water flowed over the dam to turn the situation around -- especially given how our destructive involvement in Afghanistan has shaped the popular psyche, an involvement that reaches back at least to 1979, when we stoked up Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan in the hope of creating an instability in the Islamic underbelly of the Soviet Union that would trigger a Soviet invasion [see note 1]?

This question is crucially important, because the United States has been working overtime to sow the seeds of mistrust deeply into the collective memory of a proud ancient people organized into what is arguably the most complex, xenophobic, mix of vendetta tribal cultures in the world.

On this central question, which goes to the heart of any question of continued engagement in Afghanistan, not to mention the title of the ICG report itself, the silence of the ICG, like that of the US and its lackeys at Lisbon, is deafening.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

Notes.

[1] See Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998

Another Free Ride for the Pentagon?

November 23, 2010

The Root Causes of the Defense Budget Mess

Another Free Ride for the Pentagon?

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney11232010.html

The Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission will be reporting out its results in early December. We can expect that it will focus on domestic spending, especially entitlements, including Social Security. By the time the dust settles, it is quite likely that the Pentagon -- really the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex -- will get a free ride for the reasons predicted by President Eisenhower in his farewell address.

Given the short attention span of the mainstream media, we can expect the Commission's recommendations will be examined as if they are current news, devoid of historical context. But the question of context -- specifically, as it relates to how the spending behaviour of the US government managed to destabilize the improving trend in budget balances of the late 1990s (due in large part to the huge and growing surpluses of the Social Security Trust Fund in the 1990s as well as the effects of the economic expansion) -- is central to any rational determination of whether the enactment of Simpson-Bowles' recommendations will make things better or worse. Given the gravity of our economic situation, this kind of omission would simply compound the ongoing American Tragedy.

Six months ago, the progressive leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) presented its analysis of the root causes of the explosion in the federal deficit (also attached below). CBPP laid out its assumptions quite clearly and it provided a baseline for evaluating the context of any recommendations emanating from Simpson - Bowles. But it is by no means a definitive baseline. One area not discussed by CBPP, for example, relates to long term impact on the deficit flowing out of the permanent increases in the core defense budget (that part of the defense program unrelated to our ongoing wars) put into place by the Bush Administration before 9-11, between January and August of 2001. The magnitude of these increases, which had nothing to do with any kind of change in the threats facing our country, can be seen in Slide #1 on page 2 of my June 4, 2002 statement to Congress (here), which is reproduced below:

I constructed Slide #1 using the budget numbers that were inside inside the Pentagon's computers at different times between April 2001 and February 2002. The the sum of the "yellow" and "blue" bars, for example, denotes the total as of Aug 2001, well before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The "red" and “light blue” bars show the budget amounts we added after 9-11 and were in the computers as of February 2002. Bear in mind, the data in Slide 1 was never disputed by the senior budget officers from the DoD Comptroller's office (the organization that produced these numbers) who were among my "opposing" witnesses in the congressional hearing where I made this presentation (including the spectacularly inept Tina Jonas, who as the deputy under secretary of defense for financial management at the Department of Defense, was charged with reforming DoD's corrupt financial management system, as task at which she failed miserably).

The impact of omitting the growth in the core defense budget that took place in the spring and summer of 2001 is important when trying to understand how we moved into our current deficit posture, not to mention any effort to fix the current mess in the Pentagon. That is because the deficit predictions attending Bush's tax cut plan were based on the long term effects of a nominal defense budget estimate made in his so-called "place holder" budget released, appropriately enough, on April Fools day of 2001 -- i.e., where the defense totals were portrayed by the "yellow" bars only.

This nominal defense estimate assumed a constant dollar freeze in defense spending for the six years between Fiscal Years 2002 and 2007, as is clearly portrayed by the "yellow" bars in Slide 1. This long term defense "forecast" was a central part of the deliberately misleading effort to front load the Bush tax cuts by downplaying future consequences of those tax cuts with regard to the size and shape of the federal deficit.

I can say this with certainty, because the detailed spending plans that were in the Pentagon's computers by August 2001 were based on budget guidance totals emanating from the Bush White House in late winter 2001. So, while Congress was debating the tax cuts in the context of a President's budget prediction that, among other things, the flat defense spending levels portrayed by the yellow bars in Slide #1, inside the Pentagon, we beavering away to increase those levels to the totals shown by "blue" bars in the core defense budget, an activity which was also authorized by the President. In addition to being a dishonest sleight of hand to sell the his tax cuts, Mad King George's flim flam operation in early 2001 fueled the long-standing, recklessly-destructive decision-making behaviour in the Pentagon summarized in our open letter to the Simpson-Bowles Commission, and discussed in more detail in my June 2002 statement to Congress, not to mention in my 1983 testimony to Senate Armed Services and Budget Committees, reported accurately in the 7 March 1983 issue of Time Magazine.

But don't expect the mainstream media or the self-styled defense scholars, practitioners, and wannabees now rushing to demonstrate their relevance to deal aggressively with the corrupt financial management practices which are at the contextual core of the defense budget mess, as described in our open letter to the Simpson - Bowles commission.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

Are Republicans or Democrats Good for the Economy - 1st Cut

Question for Tea Partiers: Prior to 2008, Who Created the Most Government Debt?

Fallows posting can be found here: 

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/11/where-did-our-debt-come-from/66530/

Obama inherited a federal deficit that was spinning out of control (mostly because of decreased tax take and increased expenditures for automatic stabilizers, e.g. unemployment insurance), and pressure is growing to cut Social Security (perhaps the most efficiently run program in government) while placing Defense (one of the most inefficiently run programs) off limits.  These political  pressures are not new and in fact have been building up for years.  So, as a first cut into a complex issue, perhaps it is time for the angry masses to ask which political party put them into the fiscal straight jacket that is setting them up for this horrible choice?

A. Democrats?

B. Moderate Republicans?

C. Right Wing Republicans?

Hint:  

• Green => Reductions in the burden of Gr. Fed. Debt (as measured by the debt to GDP ratio)
• Red => Increases in the burden of Gr. Fed. Debt

The Pentagon Game

Weekend Edition
October 1 - 3 , 2010

Inside the Rat's Nest

The Pentagon Game

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/10/01/the-pentagon-game/

[Note: I have corrected some typos and changed a few words to add clarity to this essay. FS]

Sardinia.

A recent article by William Pfaff illustrates how the Pentagon set up Mr. Obama to do its bidding in Afghanistan. The name of the bureaucratic game, of course, is to remove all realistic alternatives to the Pentagon's preferred decision before that decision is made. Pfaff's discussion is based on Andrew Bacevich's new book "Washington Rules." I have not read Bacevich's book yet, and will not be able to until I return to the states in November, but I have read several reviews and from that perspective can say that the behaviour Pfaff describes comports well with behavior I witnessed in my years in the Pentagon.

The picture is more subtle and far more complicated than that portrayed by Pfaff, however.

Pfaff looks at the game playing from only President Obama's perspective. In Washington, the game is played at all levels, all the time. I have seen, over and over, how a Secretary of Defense gets set up by the bureaucracy just like the Generals set up Obama. Also, when serving as low ranking officer on the Air Staff, I saw many cases where lower ranking generals using the same tactics to set up senior generals, especially the AF Chief of Staff -- who was always considered the least informed guy in the room. In fact, I was once ordered by a two star general to lie to a three star general [Wheeler note: Spinney did not also say that he refused]. Colonels are always trying to maneuver generals into promoting their agendas. This is the way the real world operates, and the name of the game in this kind of staff work is always the same: remove all reasonable alternatives to your agenda to insure the decision goes your way. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

The Pentagon is a rat's nest of military-industrial factions, factions inside factions, and ever shifting alliances -- all competing with each other for money and power. The information game is easily played at all levels -- which is one reason why this behaviour is so intractable. Mafias inside the AF are hosing each other as well as the AF Chief of Staff, ditto for the Army and the Navy, the different services are hosing the Secretary of Defense as well as each other; the Secretary of Defense is hosing the President. All are working the press and the Congress ... this is going on at all levels, all the time. It is simply the human condition in large government bureaucracies where billions of dollars and careers are at stake, and leaders ignore it at their peril. .

The key to playing this game successfully is to make a leader dependent on formal communications channels and the chain of command, then you can use the bureaucracy to filter what flows up to him/her. This is known as the mushroom treatment -- keeping the boss in the dark and feeding him/her bullshit. Savvy leaders understand this and also understand that trying to stop this kind of behaviour is futile. To avoid being trapped, they must be proactive and action to let the sun shine in by opening up other pathways for he information to flow in.

The only way a leader, whatever his level in the bureaucratic hierarchy, can do this is to carefully cultivate alternative informal back channel communication loops to trusted people scattered throughout the lower echelons of his organization. By discretely accessing a multiplicity of views, as well than bureaucracy's preferred solution, a leader can determine when he is getting the mushroom treatment, and more importantly, gain the leverage needed to pry open the door to real alternatives. The author Robert Coram, in Boyd: the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, has an excellent discussion of how back channels worked in the Air Force and the Office of the Secretary of Defense during the Light Weight Fighter and A-X debates [that led the enormously successful F-16 and A-10 aircraft] in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as in the strategy development for the first Iraq War in 1991.

Back channel access to alternative views also gives a leader leverage over his subordinates. Once his subordinates appreciate that they can not control all the information flowing into their boss's brain, the game opens up and a leader can do some broken field running. Indeed, a subtle leader quickly learns that the best results often occur when he makes it clear he knows when a subordinate is setting him up by tailoring or withholding information, but chooses to give the subordinate a second chance (in bureaucratic jargon, this is known as appealing to his patriotism). That subordinate will never forget the experience, particularly if the leader has already established his cojones with a couple of ruthless well-timed career executions for similar behaviour.

Of course, the subordinate leaders in a bureaucratic hierarchy hate back channel information loops, because it undermines their power to manipulate their boss. They will do everything in their power to snuff it out and maneuver their boss back in the dark room where they can resume feeding him bullshit. That is why a leader must exhibit subtle discretion; opacity is essential for this kind of operation to work over the long term.

It is easy for Pfaff to say Obama's hands were tied by the generals, but that is not the whole story. The mushroom treatment will not stop until Obama realizes he set himself up it by placing careerist sharks and professional bureaucratic apparachiks in the key subordinate national security positions without setting up compensating channels of information.

Rather than naively claiming to study Lincoln's team of rivals, he would have been better off studying the master of all back channel operators, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who understood bureaucracy, having served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, overseeing the toughest and nastiest bureaucracy in Washington. But that, of course, assumes Mr. Obama wants To Do rather than To Be.

Afghanistan: Deja Vu All Over Again?

On Aug 9, 2010, Wired carried the attached chart of the evolution of Taliban attacks between 2004 and 2009 (reproduced in the top six charts in Figure 1 below).  These charts were constructed from the now notorious Wikileaks data base by Drew Conway, a enterprising graduate student at NYU, using the open source statistical analysis program known as “R.”

In one sense, Conway’s charts do not tell us anything new -- anyone who studies the reports about Afghanistan flooding the internet knows Taliban attacks have been increasing sharply.  

But in another sense, Conway has made a useful addition to our knowledge, because his graphical synthesis shows the breadth and scale of the increased intensity of combat.  Bear in mind, however, the Wikileaks data base is not a scientific source of data; it is a compilation of reports of contemporaneous events, many made by young and low ranking observers.  They can be thought of as impressionistic snapshots of a complex moving scene. No doubt, these reports also became more frequent and covered more territory as we increased the number of people writing these reports, as a consequence of our increasing forces deployed in Afghanistan over the years.  No doubt, there are other biases in the database.  On the other hand, this data base is the most comprehensive source of information publicly available and its shear volume gives it gravitas.

Conway's charts also provide grist for other comparisons.  In Figure 1 below, for example, I have added three maps below Conway’s six charts to show the historic invasion routes of Afghanistan by Alexander the Great (330-327 BC, the British (1838-1842), and the Soviets (1979-1989 -- the shaded arrow sweeping through the middle is the airborn coup de main launched on Kabul on the first day of the campaign).  I constructed these charts from multiple historical sources.  Bear in mind, they show general lines of movements, not specific incidents like Conway's charts. 

Figure 1

Nevertheless, the historical comparisons make clear that the current war in Afghanistan will be one or lost on the same ground as the earlier conflicts -- namely, the rugged regions around what is now called the Ring Road, which encircles the even more rugged central mountains.  With one exception (at least it the only one I know of), the conduct of war in Afghanistan has always resembled guerrilla war where the locals resist invaders and retain the initiative in hit and run attacks aimed at wearing down the invader by attacking the invader’s long vulnerable lines of communication in the "ring road" regions.  That one exception, shown in Figure 2 below, is the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, which swept through the the central "impenetrable" mountains shown.  What may also be unique about the Mongol invasion is that it may have had the most lasting impact on Afghanistan in an historical sense -- it's legacy was a changed the ethnic mix of the country.  Today, Mongol influence can be seen clearly in physical features the Hazara people, who have a unique culture, and who occupy the forbidding center of Afghanistan.  The priceless Budda monuments at Bamian destroyed by the Taliban in the 1990s were in Hazara territory.  

Figure 2

Bottom line legacies: Alexander left names of cities and a heroic legend, albeit he had to bribe hostile tribes to let him exit Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass.  The British and Soviets left legends of humiliating defeats.  And what of the Americans?  Well, it is beginning to look like, As Yogi Berra would say, "deja vu all over again."

Chuck Spinney

Hammament, Tunisia