Oh it's Taliban here and Taliban there. . .

Oh the winds do blow cold
Through Kabul I’m told
So you keep a half-pint in your pocket
For there isn’t a bar
North of Kandahar
That hasn’t been hit by a rocket

Our quest to replace the Taliban with a US friendly pseudodemocracy led by another ex-oil man has to be counted as less than successful even by those who, as I did, supported the attempt. Events continue to argue that it’s much easier to kill people than to kill a belief. Of course we don’t have a large enough presence in Afghanistan to really control the country and we haven’t done much to stimulate a non opium based economy that might eventually build a nation strong enough to deal with the roving bands of Godbastards that oppose with violence anything resembling progress.

As bad as it is for our troops in Iraq, it’s got to be hard for the occupiers of Afghanistan to fight off despair.

When you stop a course of antibiotics prematurely, you risk the return of a stronger infection. If we had not been diverted in our mission to eliminate those who trained, aided and abetted al Qaeda, perhaps we could have eliminated the Taliban – perhaps. At any rate, the Taliban are still there, still a danger to that long suffering country and recently took over two towns in the south.

"The Taliban extremists have taken control of the areas of Garmser and Naway-i-Barakzayi, however, coalition forces do have them under observation," said a military spokesman to CNN. The fighting continues, coalition forces are still being killed, suicide bombers are still blowing up government officials and the optimistic smiles of the Administration are starting to look strained.

Then too, I read in The Independent that the Karzai government has approved a plan to re-introduce the Department for Promotion of Virtue and Pervention of Vice, a group we will remember as the guys with bats who went around beating hell out of the guys with short beards and women who acted as though they were human beings. Sharia of course is part of the constitutional government George Bush likes to compare with ours.

Now your life can be brief
In Mazur i Shariff
And the women keep knives in their shoes
So you stay in the camp
And fight off the damp
With your contraband bottle of booze