Burned in Afghanistan

Secretary of Defense R. Gates has declared that pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan is not an option.

But it should be. In fact, they should never have been sent in there in the first place, and I told the Bush birds that.

One of the great blues artists [I'll look it up the first chance I get] has a song that features the line, "I'll never get out of these blues alive." I don't think it's Lightning Hopkins. It's that other guy, I think also from Texas. Er... Er....

Anyway the same can be said for any foreign power that ventures into Afghanistan. But people in power -- especially in the usually rational U.K. -- always and ridiculously think that they know better.

What is needed in this towering mess that B. Obama inherited from the previous administation is a concerted effort by U.S. scientists to come up with a way by which extrication from the noxious clutches of Afghanistan can be accomplished with all bases sufficiently covered.

This will clearly be a monumental task and well beyond the talents of any politicians, civil servants, military men, and the like. And if it can be done, then a raft of Nobel prizes should be instantly in order.

Maybe China could be tempted into following Great Britain, Russia, and now the U.S. into taking its turn in getting burned in Afghanistan. Maybe the idea could be sold to them as an initiation rite before a country can truly be considered to be a certifiable Great Power. The lure could be the promise of the nice, fat oil pipelines that once were hoped to be laid across Afghanistan.

But Tibet has proved to be such an indigestible morsel that maybe China would wonder why it should bother with other imperial ventures. Otherwise it hasn't shown much interest in expanding its borders in recent history. Instead sometimes its over-large population seems to have turned it into a sort of human Black Hole, with such a powerful inward-directed gravitation that not much already within it can resist its pull.