Futility in Afghanistan

When the anti-Islamist writer Irshad Manji finally concludes what many of us have been saying all along--that the war in Afghanistan has no discernible point--it's time to face reality. That's a rough and rocky place, one in which things can't always get fixed, and truth, beauty and justice don't always prevail. Especially at gunpoint.

Our Taliban versus the other Taliban. And without NATO troops in there to "prop up" the Hamid Karzai regime--as junior hawk Raphael Alexander puts it--the fundamentalist mind-meld would swiftly be complete.

But Mark Collins, over at The Torch, hasn't received the memo. Go on over and have a look: he always sees light at the end of that-there tunnel. Or is it a will-o'-the-wisp?

(One point of clarification: I did not mean to suggest, in the piece of mine to which Collins refers, that he and others are "puppets" of anyone--rather that, like puppetmasters, they have been dangling good and evil caricatures before us in their current version of an ancient tradition--the morality play. A more realistic performance would not, alas, end with salvation.)