Heckuva Job

I know conservatives find Robert Fisk distasteful. Undoubtedly because he's so right so often -- and they can't have that.

The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands – all but a square mile at the centre of the city – and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul. Hamid Karzai's deeply corrupted government is almost as powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad's "Green Zone"; lorry drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country.

It's starting to sound like we've built ourselves another Generalissimo Chang on sixty years after the fall of the last one. And we've built a few in between.