On the Afghans (Updated)

"...There is a corollary to the above criticism of the Right, though. On the Left, you can often observe a similar phenomenon -- perhaps as the result of a post-colonial education that often preaches the evils of Western interventions through the years -- in that examining a conflict like Afghanistan, or Iraq, things like agency, responsibility and vulnerability are all disproportionately assigned to the (Western) external actor at the expense of local actors. There is a sign near my home in Washington, for example, in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, which reads: "End the War in Afghanistan." The assumption behind such a sign is that the war is for U.S. and other western policy-makers to end. You saw similar signs in 2005 and 2007 exhorting President Bush to "end" the war in Iraq. As if once the United States and its allies ceased combat operations, the war would somehow end and the grievances of local actors be forgotten."
Abu Muqawama