"Stop This War!"

The Drudge Headline, set beneath side by side pictures of SecState Clinton and the late Ambassador Holbrooke, is "HOLBROOKE LAST WORDS:  STOP THIS WAR!".  I would assume from that positioning that Ambassador Holbrooke was speaking to SecState and the US President.♠

However, it turns out that he was talking to his Pakistani born surgeon.  For me that puts a totally different spin on the story.  He was talking to a person whose nation of birth is quietly sponsoring the Taliban and harboring their fighters and their planners.

We are now with Prince Metternick, wondering to ourselves, "I wonder what he meant by that?"♥

Here is what we should know.  The United States cannot "end this war".  It can only make one possible outcome more likely.  If we withdraw and Hamid Karzai decides to soldier on, the war will continue, at least for a while, and supported, perhaps, by Iran or India or Russia.  If Pakistan withdraws its support from the Taliban the war will continue, although at a reduced intensity, perhaps supported by China or Saudi Arabia.

If you are a young teenage woman in Kabul and you like going to school, will you be happy for the Taliban to take over and shut down your school, and maybe punish you?  If you are a Tabiban man will you willingly put down your assault rifle to serve under this "western oriented" government?

War is easy to get into and hard to get out of and while it is easy to say "Stop this war", the actual execution of such an idea is much harder.  Just ask President Lyndon Baines Johnson.  When you are at war you are riding a tiger. 

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  At this point, when I am cleaning up the blog post, the headline remains, but it has moved and the juxtapositioning has changed.  It still links to this Washington Post article.
♥  Daniel Finkelstein, writing in sports section of The Times, 23 April 2005, said:  "ON HEARING of the death of a Turkish ambassador, the great French revolutionary diplomat, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, is supposed to have said: “I wonder what he meant by that.” Others argue that this was a response by Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, the Austrian diplomat, to the death of Talleyrand."