It's about the villages, stupid

I've read a lot of missives and tomes on the war in Afghanistan. Far too many of them are protected with a celluloid wrap which limits their usefulness in determining what is really going on. Written by well meaning people, each one seemed to drive off the road just as it was coming out of the curve. The telling part was that everything was just rosy. Everything. And, with no apology to those scribes, that is impossible.

Finally, from a US Army captain, comes an assessment of the mission in Afghanistan that makes sense. I wanted to find the right highlight to entice you to read it, but the whole thing is so good, so straight to the point, that it's impossible to pull one paragraph as highlighting the entire paper. So, I'll give you the pdf link, and you can read the whole thing for yourself.

If you don't read it, you'll be that much the poorer for it.

Oh yes. It's an American paper written by an American soldier. If that generates some small repulsion in your gut, perhaps making you want to move on, then I would suggest you start at Flit, a blog written by a Canadian who has just returned from a deployment on an Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.

BruceR takes the good Captain's words and adjusts them to put them in the context of his experience.

You need to read that too.

Edit: Link colours changed to blue bold. We believe even stokers and ERAs should be well informed.