Back during my senior year in a small town Iowa high school, I participated in Model U.N.  One of the countries we represented was Afghanistan.

At the time (April 1988) the issue before the security committee was for the USSR to pull out of Afghanistan.  I decided to do research (in the age before the Internet on the Mujahadin.  I also had the good fortune to meet with a photographer from Waterloo, Iowa who served in the peace corps in Afghanastan.

He informed me of what he knew of the 7 major factions of the mujahadin (not to mention the countless other minor warlords) as well as something about their guerilla tactics, the Soviet casualties since their invasion in 1979 etc. etc. the 900 year history and legacy of the Crusades... And determination of patriotic muslims to wear out the Soviets.

What gets me is that this was all occuring during the Reagan administration when Rumsfeld and Cheney should have been (or maybe actually were) paying attention.

[fast forward remember the summer of 2001 when the potential for nuclear war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir was the biggest news before 911?)

Fast forward to 2002.  The US ousts the Taliban (I had no real problem with that effort).  But then, perhaps to ease tensions between India (the worlds largest democracy and home to America’s Financial Business Helplines) and Pakistan, the Bush admin decides to ease up in Afghanistan and invades Iraq.

The offensive part to all of this is that I knew, as a small town Iowa farmboy in the ages before the Internet, that this was going to be a LONG war probably longer than the 9 year Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, maybe even as long as the American presence in South Korea.

Yet the administration acted as if we would be in for a year at most.

SO Either the Bush Administration knew full well that this was going to be an unconventional war with a 50+ year occupation at the start (and lied to the US population,

OR they were totally incompetent on essential matters of foreign policy.