<Mary Anne?

Yes, Dave?

First, there's a reason why I'm a librarian and not a general. I'm not qualified, intellectually or temperamentally, to make military judgments.

Also, at the risk of sounding trite, and certainly sounding threadbare, hindsight is 20/20. It's very easy for me to say what would have been better after the dust has all settled.

Finally, I disagree that this is an unwinnable war for the US. But my definition of victory may be different than the one deployed here.

The US has blasted off an estimated 2.5 billion dollars of armaments in Afghanistan, it's dropped a greater tonnage of explosive on Afghanis then it did during the whole of ww2 on Germany.



It has given 350 million in humanitarian aid.......

And ten thousand dollars compensation to families of those it it hass killed and injured accidentally.

Mary Anne... you have almost 3 billion dollars worth of resources.......A nation brutalised by 20 years of civil war...........A regime that rejects your values outright........and a powerful organisation, gaining recruits daily, that is convinced that America and all it stands for is a force for evil in the world.

Would you have used your resources differently?



When I was little, the nuns gave me homework. Hours of it. Tons of it. I hated it. It taught me everything I know.

Not the lessons in school, though they were an important place to start. They were the instructions. The homework was the follow-up and reinforcement.

I can't second-guess the military response to 9-11 because I'm not military. But as a child and student of politics, the lack of follow-up and reinforcement in American foreign policy scares me. If we are to be seen as we see ourselves, we cannot continue to focus high-pressure attention on an area of the world, say "That's done, then", and go home. There has to be homework. We must revisit the places we go so that we may both learn and teach: learn what worked and teach who we really are.

Twenty years of civil war is plenty of time to make our better nature known to people. That so much more was spent on armaments than on aid is regrettable if only because of the simple picture it allows people to paint, but the comparison is beside the point. The point is, we had a chance to show those suffering that evil doesn't have a Western face, and we missed it.

Some of our politicians in America think that aid is throwing money down a rathole. Depending on how it's distributed, sometimes it is. So what has to happen is a way to adapt the distribution process so the help gets to the people intended. (So easy to say...) There's a puzzle to challenge our strategic thinkers, because the answer will have to be different every month.

Most people I know aren't interested in blowing themselves up. Most aren't interested in blowing up other people either, even when angry at them. Most people I know also didn't grow up hungry and ignorant in places where things and sometimes people blowing up were regular occurrences.

When children who do grow up in places like that get old enough, some of them will value life so lightly and have so much undirected anger that they will follow the first charismatic leader offering them someone to hate. Osama bin Laden is, IMO, a few letters short of an alphabet, but he is charismatic without doubt, and profoundly intelligent in his sociopathic way. Sanity is not a prerequisite for leadership.

So Americans need to focus our efforts on heading things off before they come to this pass and more people learn to identify us by our bombing patterns. One would hope that the Marshall Plan would be a lesson in the smart way to win, and not just an aberration in history’s classroom.

One more thing I’d do, and this is such a no-brainer to me: require diplomats at all levels to be able to speak, or at least understand, the damn language of the country to which they are posted, no matter whose pals they are!!! This is currently not the case. “Everybody speaks English.” Uh huh, sure. Our way of life, as represented by our appointed representatives, goes through interpreters. If our words are to be expressed properly, they must come out of our own mouths. If we are to understand what’s going on around us, we must rely on the testimony of our own ears.

A tough one I know... and unfair of me to ask...... but I'm sure you have an opinion worth shareing.

[laughing]

I’m not sure it is, but I couldn’t just let that go.

BTW..............perhaps one day we might discuss questions such as the "irish Famine" ( Though obviously not on a " Current Affairs" Board) What my (protestant English) ancestors did to your (Catholic-Irish) ones was beyond question, shameful.



But they did have thier reasons, and those reasons I'd like to discuss... please understand... I use the term "reasons"... NOT justifications.



And maybe we could also discuss the second-longest-lasting racial grudge match in American history: the Irish vs. the African-Americans. (The prize for the longest-lasting goes to the Native Americans and the Americans of European descent.) The Irish are no angels and have given as good as we got.

I know that the Famine is a complicated thing, that there were reasons, mostly economic, for British policy, and that the British humanitarian response, once conditions became known, was heartfelt. But it was belated, a fatal delay that took an already fierce national rivalry and turned it to a deep and abiding hatred. I look at some of my country’s current policies, think of my ancestors’ suffering, and I wonder if politicians, or even regular people, understand the value of a bushel of wheat in the war against hatred.

Regards--
Mary Anne