The Perfect Evil

"“Look, take on opium production in Afghanistan, not because you are worried about addiction in Baltimore, but because you are going to lose the war if you don’t confront the issue.” General Barry McCaffrey Listen to audio here.

Consensus is growing among experts on Afghanistan that without a sudden and sharp change in plan, the Taliban could regain control of the nation. My own observations led me to the same conclusion as General McCaffrey: we could lose the war in Afghanistan. While I was completing the research for this article, news persisted of Iraq’s slow inexorable slide into a bloody civil war, despite that two major milestones had passed in the elimination of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the election of an Iraqi central government, diminishing daily hopes of a success not defined by embarrassingly low expectations. America faces an historic first of losing two wars simultaneously; and for largely the same reasons of not investing enough resources and not insisting that civilian leadership attend to the right indicators. In both theatres, the warning signs have been apparent for years, and a growing chorus of caution has been sounding throughout 2006. "
Michael Yon