"We Will Not Let Them Fail" - At Least Not Yet

British general Bob Bruce, commander of Task Force Helmand, says now's the perfect time to let Afghan army troops take over the job of battling the Taliban.   General Bob added, "We will not let them fail. When they really need us, we will intervene."

What went unsaid was the caveat, "this year anyway, next year we'll be out of this hellhole and they're on their own."

Brigadier Bob also said something that you weren't likely to hear from guys like Sideshow Steve Harper or Rick "Big Cod" Hillier.

"This is their problem. This is their insurgency. We know for a fact there is no military solution to the insurgency; there is no way the military is going to win a counter-insurgency [war] because it is essentially a political issue. It is a battle of offers: the offer the government makes to the people and the offer the insurgents make to the people." 

Fortunately for the, Canadians seem to have a weak recollection of the nonsense spewed from the mouths of the Conservative leadership and the top ranks of Canada's military when it served their purposes to hype this hopeless war.   Remember how they promised we were going to drive the Talibs out of Afghanistan, whip their asses, and make the country safe for democracy and human rights under the Karzai government?  I suppose they might have been sufficiently incompetent to actually believe that back then but chances are they knew better and were just lying through their teeth.