Recommended: What's Second Prize?

Re my last post but one, about Afghanistan, Thomas Friedman has an excellent Op-Ed article in the June 22, 2010 New York Times entitled What's Second Prize? that seems to me to sum up pretty clearly the morass we are in in Afghanistan.

As he points out, things don't work in the Middle East (or, probably, anywhere else) if the parties at the center don't take ownership. And to date, we want peace and good governance in Afghanistan more than the Afghans apparently do. Oh, they will say they wish for peace and stability and an end to corruption, but when push comes to shove local tribal or ethnic agendas are always more important and carry more weight.

And, as he also points out, it is ludicrous for us to be "training" an Afghan army - the Afghans already know how to fight better than we do, because they have been at it for centuries. All our high-tech equipment doesn't begin to make up for the ideological and nationalistic fervor that drive Afghan fighters.