but as to the other hideout matter here, are you sure you’re not conflating conversations? I cannot (maybe a sign I do need a hideout) recall ever having a conversation with anyone about bin Laden being or not being defense minister for the Taliban. But that indeed was then, a long then ago … and now i have a paper to be written all too soon and this was one of those procrastination-digression-writers’ block-thingies … and glad to exchange greetings :-) albeit truncated for the moment …

While I don’t share all of Weldon’s recent povs (to wit – eek – the fantasy that a McCain term, heaven help us with the SCOTUS from total hell rather than just partial hell, would ever waken this too-benumbed stupor the majority, at least of legislators, would still be in — a position i dare say he — hi Weldon! — writes of with more wit than wits … imho), I do as you rightfully recall (and presumably project here) share his (hi Weldon) pov re Taliban/Al Qaeda/Afghanistan. I had forgotten you, Jack, and I had gone as many rounds on it only because almost everyone took me on (or was it me who took them on?) back in 2001 ff…. grounded in my secondhand knowledge, such as it was/is, via my Afghani friend and would-have-been coauthor — had Bush not launched the war that Oct. 7 am just as we were struggling to finish editing a piece we hoped to publish advocating something quite different. The only real Taliban / Al Qaeda link (at least at that point) was in the person of (granted) their allegedly tumor-ridden, delusional leader Mullah Omar whose family bin Laden had married his own offspring into, plausibly for the most ancient of orchestrated reasons. The Taliban as a whole had other fish to fry and comprised a range of adherencies from moderate to fundamentalist, and well… I won’t rehash the whole argument again unless provoked (and I don’t read you here as provoking :-)

In short, we don’t know and never did know what we were doing in Afghanistan any more (and perhaps even less) than we knew and know in Iraq. I actually think we — errr, Bush’s war deviners — had quite a bit more awareness of the Iraqi blood feud history between three tribes than we did of the Afghan blood feuds because they only ever really caught US attention at a rare time when they were united against our “Great Game” enemy, the USSR.

I agree then with Weldon that the only solution is political. It’s utterly inconsistent that Obama thinks otherwise – or at least articulates otherwise (though i can’t go pretzel on this, i.e., will not vote for much less stomach McCain because of this) – given his very reasonable radicalness about sitting at a table with adversaries and a world-class translator to at least hear each other as unfiltered as possible. The internecine feudal tribal realities of Afghanistan which the Taliban were one kind of bandaid over and now Karzai is another kind of bandaid over are beyond the ken of external military forces. To quote Dylan, how many Khyber Passes must a blind man trail?

I will add one note that to me is symbolic and I know I never noted before. The very name of the country, Afghanistan, taps consciously or unconsciously (for Afghanis) into the root of the quagmire. “Afghan” was the name, originally, that non-Pashtuns gave to the Pashtuns who, as you know, remain a reduced but still decisive majority of the populace of current Afghanistan. The fact that the country’s name is the one derived from how the minority ethnic groups called the majority and that majority (which was getting itself ethnic-cleansed — raped and massacred — by the coalition of minority groups who ruled in post-Soviet, pre-Taliban days) — the Pashtuns — summoned the Taliban (religious students in exile in Pakistan) back to their rescue, which happened via imposition of rigid application of sharia law (e.g., burqas) is the tip of the iceberg for why we are headless in pandora’s box there. Karzai is ethnically Pashtun but a cageyish co-opted guy who was obliged by the West in the Bonn conference in Dec 2001 to entrench the Northern Alliance by making all of his ministers — with much of the real ‘power — be non-Pashtun N.A. warlords and their allies. So the majority of Afghanis (and the original ethnic group named “Afghans”), the Pashtuns, had plenty of reason to see themselves being as collectively co-opted as Karzai was personally. So of course it was only a matter of time before they would be resummoning and/or rewelcoming the Taliban to their rescue.

But, again, the Taliban is not al Qaeda and we have only ourselves to thank for the extent to which they are in any cahoots in the year 2008.

Again, the military did not simply make up the formula for successful counterinsurgency and peacekeeping operations, and we do not now and will never have sufficient troops to meet their criteria absent a draft or, roughly, quadrupling the size of the volunteer Army. The reason various senior officers keep mentioning the formula is in the apparently barren hope that someone on the civilian policymaking side, and perhaps some number larger than one among the population at large, will take note of its implications.

As for impact, well sure: we’re making an impact now and we could expect to make a larger one with a larger presence. Unfortunately it’s a negative impact, and adding more troops who will kill more civilians and turn more survivors against us, breeding more insurgents, seems counterproductive.

As always, your mileage may vary.