Afghanistan

            Coming down the King’s Canyon trail near Tucson, I found myself thinking of a line from Kipling: “And you may hear a breech-bolt snick, though never a man is seen.” That canyon, aside from its saguaro and prickly pear, probably looks a good deal like some of the terrain in Afghanistan. I was thinking what a shame that we didn’t learn anything from the British experience there, or the Russian. Even supposing we had to eliminate the Al-Qaeda camps and destabilize the Taliban for a while, we could have hit them hard, chased them up into the high mountains for a while, and used what time we had to train ten thousand Afghans to be drill sergeants, and then GOT THE HELL OUT, leaving a trail of money behind us, and sending more unless and until the Taliban took over again. Ten years. Alas. With the number of dead, limbless, or brain-damaged only a small part of the ongoing cost of mental derangement and suicide. When I got home I looked up “The Ballad of East and West” and found that I’d had the line almost right. It’s really: “And ye may hear a breech-bolt snick where never a man is seen.” Those poor guys are still being ambushed, even after they get back to the States from their third or fourth deployment.