Afghanistan is a gaunt, thorny bush, subsisting on little more than sips of humidity from the dry air. We imagined that we could make the bush into a tree, as if straw could be spun into gold or rocks transmuted to flowers. If we continue to imagine that we can turn the thorny bush into a tree, eventually we will realize the truth, but only after much toil, blood and gold are laid under the bush, as if such fertilizer would turn a bush into a tree. We did not make Afghanistan what it is. Afghanistan has existed for thousands of years. It grows the way it grows because the bush drops seeds that make more bushes, never trees.
Michael Yon has been held up by neo-con types as the response to "defeatist, anti-Bush, liberal biased media." He is a blogger who took it on his own to travel to Iraq, Afghanistan and other trouble spots in the middle east. He is very pro-military. Until this post I have never heard him question the mission itself. If this guy is speaking out against it, things are really bad. You can tell it troubled him to write that because he's speaking in metaphor, rather than his usual straight up style.
You can see some folks in the comment section of his piece are having a hard time grasping what he's saying.
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