'The Unbearable Idiocy of Certain American "Foreign Policy" Wonks'

Terry Glavin uses all the barrels in his GAU-8 Avenger Gatling pen:

Have a glance at Conn Hallinan's "Afghanistan: Not a Good War" in Foreign Policy in Focus and you will be subjected to an almost pornographic illustration of the craven, shallow and moronic habits of mind that prevail within what passes for the intellectual content of American "anti-war" polemics.

All in aid of the case for abandoning the Afghan people by simply assembling the more powerful nation-state powers in the region and cutting a deal with the Taliban, the column begins with a revisionist straw man, ends with a silly and meaningless platitude, and in between, almost every paragraph contains a non-sequitur, a logical fallacy, or an embarrassing, transparent error. It's simply so bad, so shallow, so wrong and so stupid, one wonders where to start...

Read on. I might add that, contrary to what Mr Hallinan writes, the Taliban did not exist when the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989 and the US had nothing to do with their creation. The Taliban only emerged, in Pakistan with ISI help, in the early 90s during the Afghan civil war, in which the US had very little involvement. Moreover the US had no direct links with bin Laden (see Ghost Wars, Steve Coll). While the Taliban did not attack the US, they allowed bin Laden to do so, and several times: the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam embassy bombings, the USS Cole, 9/11.

Then there's the unconquerable Afghan myth . Tripe indeed.