"That Sinking Feeling"

[amborin]

....about the Obama deployment to Afghanistan — which gives me a very bad feeling. Look, none of us can be sure what is going to happen. Afghanistan is unpredictable, as are wars in general. But the folks I know who have spent the most time with Pashtuns are mostly of the view that the result will be a backlash that will undermine security rather than enhance it.

snip

..... the economic tradeoffs, but they are startling. For example, the Obama administration hasn’t been able to fully fund various nuclear control efforts — securing foreign nuclear sites, protecting ports through which nuclear weapons might be smuggled, and so on. The gaps are mostly in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and the potential savings could not be greater — yet we don’t spend that money, while we are going to devote $100 billion to Afghanistan per year! That’s more than any country’s military budget, although some people think that China’s off-budget military spending would add to a total higher than that (nobody knows for sure).

Or think of education. There are about 75 million to 100 million primary school age children who are not in school. It would cost $16 billion to get all of them in school — and yet that’s unimaginable. But in contrast to the Afghan spending, it might have a last impact on the security of the world.

UPDATE: A friend with long experience in rural Afghanistan writes: “For what its worth, my 8.5 years of experience working in Afghanistan fully endorse the points you have made in today’s column.
When American’s set up a military camp in or near an Afghan village, the Afghans are not thankful for the “security”. They are terrified at the additional security threat which can come either from American accidents, or from insurgents drawn into the area to target the new American base. I am quite confident that Afghan public opinion no longer supports a large foreign military presence; that that presence generates more hostility than it can control; and that the great surge in troops just announced will have a tragic legacy, both in Afghanistan and in the US…

by Nicholas Kristoff

<http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/troops-in-afghanistan-and-a-sinking-feeling/?scp=15&sq=china%20afghanistan%20u.s.&st=cse>

[Blue Owl]

1. Yes, a sinking feeling indeed...

That's exactly how it feels to me.

I'm trying to think of some examples where pouring more gas on the fire helps extinguish it -- but I seem to be coming up short...