[Skybird]

I would nobody recommend to headlessly increase his engagement in Afghnaistan without clearing out the objectives first. The politicial goals for Afghanistan, as voiced by our beloved leaders, are slogans and phrases only, having little or no link to reality. Right now, poppy is cultivated under NATO protection. Sympathizers of the Taleban get bribed. The alliances between Afghan tribes are fluid. deals are done with the arch-enemy. The Pakistani secret service has it's hands everywhere, strongly sympathoizing with the Taleban. On both sides of the border, talking of an Afghan civiol war and a war between Kabulistan and Pakistani is growing. Musharaf at the same time has serious troubles to keep alive and keep it all together, playing fould double games on NATO and maybe even has no toher chance than to do so. The Taleban have infiltrated bigger and bigger parts of Afghan society, especially the farmers. It seems they were able to gain sympathy not only amongst Pashtuns, like last time, but in all ethnicities there - and that is new. That also is helped by the regular civilian mass killing by American bombardements causing "collateral damage".

It'S a maze, and NATO blindly stumbles around and does not even know wether to move to the exit, to the centre, or where the noise is coming from, and wether the pink sky means it is sunset or dawning, or is a poppy-dust induced hallucination. It should go back to the North Atlantic.

What we know is that the poppy cultivation hit all-time record highs with NATO standing by, Taleban successfully undermining administrative and civil structures, and Pakistan steadily moving towards war. - Some thousand more troops are hardly able to change that. I would prefer to see a fundamental change in strategy, away from trying to win battles in foreign countries like Afghnaistan and Iraq, and towards sealing our own homesphere against these places: militarily, economically, politically, touristically. We need to battle civil infiltration, and ideological indoctrination taking place in our places at home, dependance of oil, and demographic pressure from legal and illegal mass migration. In how far our armies fighting endless battles they do not understand and cannot win on the other side of the planet, can help in that, is mistery to me. At the same time the Taleban, and other factions!, are winning by successfully preventing NATO to gain military victory. They must not militarily win by themselves.

Afghanistan was lost in the first 18 months after the Taleban had been temporarily chased away and attention shifted towards the unneeded Iraq war, not giving Afghanistan the priority support that it would have needed. If you plant new flowers, you water them immediately after that - not two weeks later. Not even half of the promises that were given, had been kept, and many projects were misled by lacking knowledge, stupidity, and unavoidably mistakes, which often went at the cost of the farmers.

NATO's problems are self-made. Wait, NATO even was not involved from the start, and later allowed to get lured into the mess...