The Wounded Shark: ‘Good War’ Lost, But the Imperial Project Goes On
By Chris Floyd

Don’t tell Obama and McCain, but the war they are both counting on to make their bones as commander-in-chief — the “good war” in Afghanistan, which both men have pledged to expand — is already lost. Their joint strategy of pouring more troops, tanks, missiles and planes into the roaring fire — not to mention their intention to spread the war into Pakistan — will only lead to disaster.

Who says so? America’s biggest ally in the Afghan adventure: Great Britain. This week, two top figures in the British effort in Afghanistan — Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, UK ambassador to Kabul, and Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the senior British military commander in Afghanistan — both said that the war was “unwinnable,” and that continuing the current level of military operations there, much less expanding it, was a strategy “doomed to fail.”

The biggest headlines went to the comments by Cowper-Coles, whose frank assessment was quoted in a secret French diplomatic cable that was published by a muckraking French magazine last week. Cowper-Coles put it plainly:

The current situation is bad, the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption, and the government has lost all trust….The presence of the coalition, in particular its military presence, is part of the problem, not part of its solution. Foreign forces are the lifeline of a regime that would rapidly collapse without them. As such, they slow down and complicate a possible emergence from the crisis.

Link to con.