The breadth of disagreement is startling: Some say that nation-building is a mistake; others believe that it is the only way to defeat the Taliban-led insurgency. One U.S. official told me that we should stop trying to push democratic institutions on a country with such a strong tribal culture, while an equally savvy Afghan American insisted just the opposite. Women’s rights activists begged for our support, saying that they feared for their lives, but tribal leaders demanded that they be left alone to deal with their women as they see fit. “We are tribal people, and we don’t need your women’s programs,” one declared. Unlike Iraqis and Bosnians, Afghans can’t even agree on whether ethnic divisions still exist in their country or whether they are the invention of ferangi — meddlesome foreigners.

Beyond that, many government officials lack even the most basic skills. An Afghan aid worker told me that 90 percent of local leaders in Kandahar province can’t read, and a U.S. official said that she often saw thumbprints instead of signatures on important documents. Many of these officials don’t venture out into their own districts because they’re afraid of being attacked; others just can’t be bothered to ever leave their offices.

We in America and the West have neither the will nor the moral rectitude to do what really needs to be done, nor any assurance that if we did our efforts will have been worth it in the end.

The more we do for them, the more they play us for suckers.

30,000 more hostages won’t fix this mess.

Remember what we came for. Everything else is mission creep.

Our objective in Afghanistan is to deny Taliban/AQ a victory. That is something far short of nation building but good enough for now.

The word “victory” is slippery. Let’s keep our eye on the primary, driving objective: to deny the use of Afghanistan to the Taliban and similar organizations.

I am not saying it cannot be done, I just do not see how they do it.

Contractions in exports does not signal the creation of an internal market, and remember this has to be for the most part created. Typically export lead economies swing out from internal markets, China is odd in this case of being the other way around.

The “weaning” may just be a singal if a collapse of demand. note that imports are down 25% too.

If it what you say is true than maybe we should launch our stimulus package after all, for this is the only thing driving and internal market in a China that is seeing massive layoffs. That bailout if ppp adjusted is pretty large, but not large enough to great some sort of long term internal market, and again, it is mostly aimed at “infrastructure”. The point here is to just placate enough of the newly unemployed industrial workers to avoid massive riots in the street. So this whole business seems to me more like analysts painting pictures for themselves to me that any real understanding of the markets over there. Again, this did not seem to wrk for japan. A real contraction in China will expose a large asset bubble there too, that are way over invested in capacity.

Besides, must of the big profitable firms are the multinationals anyway.

The key is to see it in terms of a break down of the current order altogether. Then these sorts of things matter less. They would just put those rice bowl losers in the front lines, whipped on by the young bachelors in search of their dreams.

Quite a wave.

The West has done it before. Perhaps a good propaganda tool would be a few million photographs dropped from aircraft. The date on the photos? August 6, 1945.

A ton of environmental pollution…

An endless list of Iron-Rice-Bowl state funded losers…

Which will completely suck the guts out of China’s exchange reserves.