I usually enjoy my morning news read. It’s not always good news, I but it always makes me think. That’s normally a good thing, but not this morning. This morning its just frustrating. This morning I was reading about Afghanistan.

According to the Associated Press, Afghanistan is set to receive $16,000,000,000 through 2015. This is intended to show the Afghanistan that even though we’ve gone home, we haven’t abandoned them. While this may ease our consciences, I doubt it’s going to be much comfort to the dead on all sides in this most pointless of conflicts.

Before everyone rushes to remind me about Osama bin Laden, or the evils of the Taliban let me clear up a couple of things. Osama bin Laden wasn’t captured because we invaded Afghanistan. He wasn’t found livng in an Afghan cave, he was found and murdered in a nice suburban compound IN THE COUNTRY NEXT DOOR! That’s probably why it took ten years to find him. The second punchline in this comically unfunny joke is the Taliban.

When it became obvious that they weren’t going to find Osama any time soon, the invaders needed a new justification. That’s when they hit on the brilliant idea of saving Afghanistan (especially its women), from the Taliban. This is such a noble idea that I feel mildly embarrassed calling it idiocy. Unfortunately, it’s idiocy. Yes we kicked the Taliban out of power and installed our own little puppet regime (YAY!) but that hasn’t worked quite the way we thought it aught to. You see President Hamid Karzai is much more aware of local realities than are the minions of the invaders states.

What this means in practical terms is that he has been negotiating a power sharing plan with the Taliban. Ummmmm yeah, those same Taliban we invaded Afghanistan to get out of power. The guy we put in power is offering to bring them back into the government. That sounds like success to me. This is the same puppet president who announced a while back that if Pakistan went to war with the U.S. he would side with Pakistan. Not wanting to bite the hand that feeds (or in this case created) him, he went for the nice, solid groin kick instead. That’s political reality in Afghanistan.

Sadly, it takes more than ten years of warfare and half-assed social initiatives to undo centuries of cultural norms. That’s been the painful lesson learned by every invader of Afghanistan. You can defeat the army and capture the cities, but Afghanistan is neither of those things. Afghanistan is a proud, defiant people bound by centuries of tradition regardless of what anyone else does or thinks.

This was made painfully evident in another news story I read this morning. Al Jazeeara has a story about a woman who was accused of adultery and executed in the street in front of a cheering crowd. Earlier in the week, a woman and two of her children were beheaded by her ex-husband. This was described as the latest in a string of “honor killings”. Violence against women has increased sharply in the past year according to an independent human rights group. Odds are, it’s only going to get worse with the impending withdrawal of the invading armies that have encouraged at least the pretense of change.

The sad truth is that it can’t be changed from the outside unless you’re willing to commit to the long haul which is more in the nature of fifty to one hundred years of unrelenting effort both military and socio-economic. That’s how you make changes. We’ve once again proven that walking in, shooting some people and dropping a pile of cash is nothing more than a tragic and heartbreaking exercise in futility on a grand scale.

Cheers, Winston