to defeat the tribal resistance. And he is an optimist and an ignoramus, ignoring the fact that every Afghan they kill will create two or more family members who will be obligated by every sense of decency and honor that they bear within them to extract revenge of equal or greater lethality.
The simpleminded dispute on tactics and strategy between two arrogant imperialist idiot suck-up warmongers is summarized here:
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/02/military_taliban_afghanistan_080207w/The prompt for this mini-rant was a very insightful interview on Bill Moyers Journal with Sarah Chayes, who gave up her PBS reporter job to set up workers coops (making herbal soaps and such) in Kandahar. She has that all too rare Rachel Corrie type faith that doing good work to counter injustice and hardship is simply necessary, and her comments on how people in Afghanistan cope with, understand, and are impacted by the US occupation and puppet government are very revealing.
See the index at
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html and click on the "watch" link when the story appears to see the video. I recommend this to all who might suspect that brute force and overwhelming economic domination may not turn the people of that nation into obedient proles.
The transcript is at
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02222008/transcript2.html(edit minor typo)