Jay Leno's wife: "Crush this government with pressure" (about Afghanistan)

[bigtree]

Leno is frustrated with the Bush administration's inability to do what "Americans are notorious for not doing -- lengthen our attention span for once."

"The tragedy is knowing what could so easily have been," she said. "Don't go into Iraq. Concentrate our efforts on helping the new government really entrench itself, really root out warlords and drug lords and human trafficking jerks, and the people now swallowing the country back up.

"It is not my belief that our current government had any particular interest in seeing Afghanistan slide. If only they had stayed in and helped the current Afghan government overpower these people and establish sovereignty and an infrastructure of roads and communications systems that would allow communities to be less isolated and less likely to be controlled by some tinpot dictator."

Playing the "if only" game may be cathartic, but the question for Leno was what Americans can do to change the situation.

"Crush this government with pressure to acknowledge that things are going from bad to worse in Afghanistan," she said. "This administration desperately needs to point at an international situation that they have been involved in that is going well. They can still do that with Afghanistan. Rather than pound sand down a rat hole in Iraq -- a situation that won't look good on anybody's résumé or get them re-elected in a million years -- they still have a chance to turn around a situation they have been involved in from the beginning."

full article: http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/14224531p-15049147c.html