Death in the Khyber Philip Hensher says that British experience shows that an invasion of Afghanistan could lead to another Vietnam

Currently reading 'The Three Roosevelts'

Shelby Steele's Home page

The West must stop apologizing.

Greetings, America. My Name is Osama bin Laden.

The First Anglo-Afghan War

Disastrous start to the Great Game and massacre on the retreat from Kabul, Afghanistan, 1842

The "enemy" we barely know

A writer who has traveled extensively in Afghanistan talks about how little we understand its people, how dangerous it is to underestimate them and why they have cause to resent the U.S.
Salon

Refusal to Mourn

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

Lest We Forget

The tumult and the shouting dies;

The Captains and the Kings depart:

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget lest we forget!