It is of course the problem with war...

There are I suppose two real paradigms for war in the modern world and the democracies that bellicosely wage it.

One padigm is of course Churchill with Thatcher as tribute band. All the nation must stop, industrial relation problem cease for we ARE at war. This are is ideally made according to the rules and waged against a state or at least an army. This was of course the war that toppled Sadam Hussien.

The other I guess is Korea with the tribute act of vietnam - the long long bleeding to death of a country sucked into an international war, with invisible foes.

The trouble is that this second war appear, or at least appeared in the nineties to be one one could wage on the cheap, to curry political good will, and claim one was doing something. Old Yugoslavia is the clear paradigm - a heart hearted war, that ground on, but eventually ended, and ended in the result the west wanted. Thousands of 'them' died, and relatively few of 'us' in comparison, and when the war finally ground to a halt, we could declare victory.

This model was (after the grim initial hiccup) the model applied to Iraq. America lost thousands, the Iraqies hundred of thousands, the war ground on , and yet the result eventually was roughly ok (or we could it was) - it was good enough.

Now the real trouble with Afghanistan is that even this war of 'result' seems unlikely to work to be good enough - we are caught simply in a conflict - another tribe or worse the copy or mirrior the the taleban that had an ideology other than tribal politics.

That is there are three sides, the tribes of the northen alliance ho govern in their interest, the Taleban part tribe part ideology, and us, in a state on apparently fairly endemic warfare. The oddity of the situation is then that we cannot pull out without allowing a clear disaster as the 'untribe' of the Taleban gains supremacy and then acts against us. There is no choice. Ir worse a state of endemic warfare is the choice.

This is not then war on the cheap so much as an importing a state of endemic war right into the heart of the west. That is we face the chioce, if we play by Afghan rules we ought to wage true war- a war we might win, but would cost a lot of money, lives and equipment. Or else we go on pretending that this war is like Yugoslavia, a war of attrition to be one in the end.

now it is very obvious to the military the kind of war we are in. A war they understand perhaps rather too well - the trouble is that Brown is too dopey to realize it, and Obama too habitually cautious to decide what to do, or else they are too blinded by their own very cod pacifisit rhetoric that denies we are simply warmongers in a state of warmongering. Trouble is that denial costs us lives - and does not help the those non warmonger afghanistanize who are caught up in the violence,