The long goodbye; why can't we admit Afghanistan is a dead end?

Obama's remarks at the conclusion of the NATO blabfest in Chicago don't  offer much hope that anything has been learned in this decade plus debacle.

There's still that streak of wishful thinking that wants to believe at any cost that something has been accomplished.

Something... anything.

Well, we got bin Laden, didn't we?

That could and would have happened whether or not we'd spent a trillion dollars and thousands of lives turning the Afghans against us over these past ten years.

But at least the Taliban are on the ropes.

Not so much on the ropes as in the wings, waiting for their time to come again, as eventually it must.

While Obama and General John Allen and of course the hapless Karzai are still making reassuring noises, the rest of the coalition has said "we're outa there and we're not coming back".

They will however send money to assuage their troubled consciences.

Which is another way of avoiding the inevitable, of prolonging the goodbye, of denying that this is a dead end.

The 350,000 strong armed forces we're building up will cost over four billion dollars a year to maintain.

I have before me a graph showing Afghanistan's GDP for the past fifty years. At the time of the US invasion Afghanistan had a Gross Domestic Product of $2.6 billion. Since then it has spiraled steadily upward due to the infusion of both military and reconstruction spending.

Absent that foreign money infusion, it is reasonable to expect that the GDP will again settle in that range. Afghanistan will then be in the position of having a military that costs more than 100% of its GDP to maintain.

That can't be done, not by the Afghans.

Not by anybody. Every cent of that military spending will have to come from other countries. Every year. In perpetuity.

It won't, of course. Soon enough there'll be new priorities. Afghanistan will fall into the memory hole.

Goodbye Karzai... welcome back Mulla Omar.