This is what the breathing pieces of living garbage we are fighting have done lately in Afghanistan:
As many as 74 schoolgirls in Afghanistan's far north fell sick after smelling gas and were being examined for possible poisoning, local officials said on Sunday.
While instances of poisoning are sometimes later found to be false alarms, there have been numerous substantiated cases of mass poisonings of schoolgirls by elements of Afghanistan's ultra-conservative society that are opposed to female education.
You have no idea what a hostile environment is until you are a female who tries to learn to read in Afghanistan.
Not that I'm arguing this should trigger a halt to our eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan. A successful fight ends with us transferring responsibility for the fight to locals.
But we should leave in a manner that demonstrates we are shifting the manner of winning and not retreating. We need to help the Afghans as they face a major test this year:
With the Afghan army and police now in charge of security in most of the country (with American and NATO forces in a backup role) the Taliban appear to be launching a major offensive, their first in five years, to test the ability of the Afghan forces to actually provide protection against a major Taliban move to seize control of more territory. The Taliban have not been able to launch a warm weather offensive in five years and in that time have lost control of a lot of territory where they could once roam freely and do as they pleased. The Afghans refuse to say how much more Taliban violence there is, but other sources (aid organizations and NGOs) indicate that Taliban attacks are up over 40 percent compared to last year.
So far the Afghan security forces are holding their own, reporting that they have killed over 4,700 Taliban and captured over 6,500 so far this year, but the campaigning season doesn’t really wind down until September and that’s when you can see how successful the Taliban offensive was.
Afghan losses are a third of Taliban losses, apparently. Ours are scattered so far this year. We've clearly pulled out of major offensive combat operations, and only our special forces are seeking to pull triggers.
We should want our guys to win. They aren't perfect. And Karzai is a piece of work who can't be trusted. But there are worse things.
It's just odd that we say that chemical weapons use is something so awful that we might have to fight those who use them; and we seek to get out of a place where awful people are using them.
But I've mentioned it's a funny world.
