Questioned by John McCain, General Mattis said that we’re not leaving Afghanistan; we’re starting “a process of transition to the Afghan forces.” But that process never seems to get past the starting point. ...Maureen Dowd, in ""Lost in a Maze"
Here's the question -- and I can't find a transcription of the hearings to find the answer. Did Mattis actually say we're starting a process of transition to the Afghan forces? "We're starting"? Because if he did he's a liar. That process was started ages ago. The only reason he would say "we're starting" now is to spin a dead-awful situation.
This is not Obama's turn-over-a-leaf-new-war; this is George W. Bush's now ten-year-old pointless, costly mistake -- a prolonged mistake in which we were promised all along that we were just turning over Afghanistan to the people of Afghanistan. Stop believing that the new leader of a old and powerful bureaucracy is going to turn things around, even as decent a leader as Obama.
It's getting difficult to determine which country -- Afghanistan or the US -- is better governed.
During the debate over war funds on Tuesday, Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, warned that we are in a monstrous maze without the ball of string to find our way out.
“All of the puzzle has been put together, and it is not a pretty picture,” he told The Times’s Carl Hulse. “Things are really ugly over there.”
You bet they are. They're ugly here too. They won't start looking up until someone stands in front of the bulldozers.
