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View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan
A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.

The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.

The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001...  

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html?no_interstitial  (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html?no_interstitial)

I read a bunch of those today.  They were very depressing.

I don't even have to read that report since I pay attention and retain information in my mind about past wars. Looks just like Vietnam really. The people we fight are poor, they live there without a central government that seems to work, they live off the land, and they have nothing to lose but their lives.

We have more to lose. We don't live anywhere near there so we have to ship our troops across the globe to fight there. We have to pay incredible amounts of money (billions every week) to keep the army there while our economy tanks and our money becomes more valueless around the world.

Our soldiers are probably trying to get money for college and wind up getting killed by poor insurgents. Families over here are separated for too long and are broken up by divorce and estrangement that makes the military money not worth it. Soldiers come back with bad psychological problems from being in a war zone for years.

The insurgents are not going to meet the U.S. on a battlefield because it's much more effective to bomb a marketplace and kill unarmed civilians to show that the American army I was misled to believe was invincible by G.I.Joe and such are quite ineffective. So we sent our army to fight a hidden enemy that operates out of the shadows in secret. I saw a news report where they were training Afghan soldiers and making them wear a U.S.-type uniform. Might as well have put a bullseye on it as well.

And at the end of it all no one seems to realize the most simple fact of all. No one would ever take our freedom away but us. All that Al Queda can do is kill me, but my freedom can not be taken away except by my government that puts cameras everywhere, can listen in on my phone calls, and can just do the things they want by changing the laws when they want.
Time to learn to live with more divides and scars from this war when it reaches its very bitter end. Maybe next time people will pay attention to history and remember something...