LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Afghanistan: Wars
built 657 days ago
As Afghanistan works to build order after decades of war, its future will rest on institutions including the police, the courts and the national army. Afghan courts are beset by a massive backlog and a shortage of qualified judges.
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The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.
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Critics of the war in Afghanistan were not just wrong, they were harmful because they made the cause seem hopeless, Rumsfeld said. The millions of Afghan citizens who turned out to vote proved them wrong, and terrorists weren't able to affect the elections, he said.
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Unfortunately Jones uses part of her book to rehearse the recent history of Afghanistan. She has not talked to the politicians and revolutionary leaders who made much of this history and has to rely on printed sources which make her account reminiscent of other Western histories of the region. Jones ... indulges in a long diatribe against what she sees as the warlike, misogynist character of Afghan society, and the Western journalists who failed to criticize it. "Afghans are famous fighters," she writes. "Fierce, implacable, ruthless, bold, savage, brutal—these are the adjectives attached to them in history books." She is particularly critical of Western journalists such as the foreign correspondent Robert Kaplan, who in the 1980s and early 1990s celebrated the heroism of Mujahideen fighters. Their reportage, she writes,
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The Soviets had estimated Afghanistan's proven and probable natural gas reserves at up to 5 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) in the 1970s. Afghan natural gas production reached 275 million cubic feet per day (Mmcf/d) in the mid-1970s. The Djarquduk field was brought online during that period boosted Afghan natural gas output to a peak of 385 Mmcf/d by 1978-79. After the Soviet pullout and subsequent Afghan civil war, most gas wells at Sheberghan area fields were shut in due to technical problems and the lack of an export market in the former Soviet Union.
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President Bush calls Afghanistan "the first victory in the war on terror" – which raises the question: if this is victory, then what would defeat look like? Bush's triumphalism rings particularly hollow in light of the news that, in spite of pleas from the local military commander, the central government isn't going to bother re-taking the town:
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