Pech Valley

"Ultimately, the decision to withdraw reflected a stark — and controversial — internal assessment by the military that it would have been better served by not having entered the high valley in the first place."

“What we figured out is that people in the Pech really aren’t anti-U.S. or anti-anything; they just want to be left alone,” said one American military official familiar with the decision. “Our presence is what’s destabilizing this area.” - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/world/asia/25afghanistan.html?_r=1

This has to be on of the most confusing things to ever be released in the news. Every once in a while one of these tidbits gets out and you have to wonder if anyone is paying attention if they can publish this after 10 years of saying the completely opposite thing.

It really gives me pause to think of how history has evolved over the past hundred years. In 1911 one didn't have to even pretend to justify military action in Asia or Africa, white supremacy was the philosophy of the day and Imperialism was its natural expression. Nowadays the maze of logic that gets extrapolated to explain the Empire employs a mental slight of hand that I am beginning to believe no one on earth is capable of actually defining in comprehensible language.

Perhaps this is the truth of the whole modern mentality- any accurate description is impossible. It is just a pile of people doing and saying things that has long since lost any means of being perceived in rational terms. I guess when you have 7 billion people populating a planet whose social structure is one of cannibalistic capitalism, trying to look for a way in which to write about it that is both understandable and factual is a fool's errand.