NahnCee said:
We keep being told that Al-Q sunk their own ship in Iraq because the citizens there got tired of their barbarity and turned to the Americans to partner with to drive them out of the country.

Why, then, haven’t the Afghans managed to do the same thing?

Perhaps the problem is cultural.

One can look all through history and, while there is brutality, naked conquest, and imperialism all through the Arab world, one also finds hospitality toward strangers and even chivalry on the battlefield.

Reading accounts of the Afghans involving the Greeks and British, as well as the Russians (especially Oleg Yermankov’s Afghan Tales: Stories from Russia’s Vietnam) I have seen no mention of Afghan hospitality yet. There are plenty of accounts of Afghan tenaciousness and brutality, however. Anything I’ve read by the Brits makes the Afghans out to be nothing but petty bands of highway killers, scattered in the mountains, as opposed to an actual people with a sense of culture.

Of course someone who has spent time in Afghanistan may show up here and say I’m dead wrong, but until then I think the Afghans don’t rise up against Al Qaeda the way the Arabs do because harsh punishment, fundamentalism, and violence have been the norm there.