Afghanistan forgotten.

It looks like Afghanistan has finally come full circle, they're expecting a bumper crop of opium this year, the Taliban is making a comeback in border areas of Pakistan, there are rumblings of a renewed insurgency, and they're holding a trial to sentence a person to death for being a Christian.

And this is the "success" story that's come out of the global war on terror. It does demonstrate, however, once again, that a poorly thought out war on a concept, employing the use of overwhelming force isn't an effective mechanism to bring about positive change. War on drugs, anyone?

Beyond my opposition to the Iraq war on it's moral and logistical basis, there lies a much bigger reason why this was the wrong war at the wrong time, and that is simply because Afghanistan needed us more. They needed us there for the long haul, the big and the small, and our attention was simply elsewhere, the media and the white house had found it's next big adventure, and Bin Laden was all but forgotten.

I think it's ironic that the poppy is widely regarded as a symbol for the bravery and sacrifice of the men and women that fought for freedom in World War 2, while these days it seems more a symbol of the futility of our current struggle to force feed democracy to the middle east at the barrel of a gun.