The Wikileaks document dump

I suppose I need to comment on this, since everybody else has.

1. The comparison to "The Pentagon Papers" is apt. This is a detailed historical document dump of the progress of the war, from near the start to about 8 months ago.
2. Note the "eight months ago" part. There's nothing in these documents that puts our troops at risk. If our troops are still in the same positions that they were in eight months ago, we're fucked anyhow.

So what is the bottom line that these documents tell us? Well, nothing that we don't already know -- that we are no closer to conquering Afghanistan today than we were eight years ago. The only way to "win" in Afghanistan is the Tamerlane way -- extermination of entire populations, i.e., genocide. Tamerlane was the last person to successfully conquer Afghanistan back in 1370 or so, and his descendants the Moghuls then swarmed down from Afghanistan in the early 1500s and conquered all of Pakistan and Northern India. But Tamerlane had some advantages we don't have. Tamerlane had no logistics tail -- none. He fed his armies by seizing the food, weapons, and supplies of the peoples he conquered, who no longer needed it because they were, err, dead. Tamerlane was not put off by squeamish notions of killing women and children. If a province defied Tamerlane, he simply turned it into an unpeopled wasteland without bothering to try to kill only combatants. He was by all accounts possessed of an amount of viciousness that make even the Taliban look like Boy Scouts, an amount of viciousness that no army of a would-be democracy could ever contenance because it would repulse too many taxpayers.

In short: Unless we turn the U.S. into an empire led by a vicious warlord like Tamerlane, there's no point being in Afghanistan. The place can't be conquered short of doing it the Tamerlane way. Temporarily occupied, yes. Conquered, no.

'Nuff said on that, we already knew all the above, just felt like ranting...

- Badtux the History Penguin