General Stanley McPoodle Can't See the Jihadi Forest for the 'Hearts 'n' Minds' Trees

A big kaboom in Kabul, where just under two dozen submissionaries blew themselves up for Allah in a coordinated, media-saavy attack the other day, prompts Ralph Peters to draw an unwanted--but obvious--comparision:

Our self-delusion stinks of the early years in Vietnam, when Gen. Paul Harkins, our man in Saigon, claimed (in 1963) that the Vietnamese army was doing a great job, the war was being won and our troops would be home by 1965.

Recently, I read a report by an official US visitor to Afghanistan calling Karzai "brave" and describing him as the leader Afghanistan needs. Good God -- he's hiding in his presidential palace, afraid to visit the front lines and see what kind of shape his country's really in. Yesterday, the war came to him.

Our insistence on propping up Karzai is so uncanny a replay of our support for South Vietnam's incompetent Diem regime five decades ago that the similarity's unnerving.

We saw what we wanted to see then. And we see what we want to see now.

The problem is not our troops: They're doing everything we ask and more.

But they're pit bulls led by miniature poodles. Senior military leaders refuse to see our enemies for what they are -- religious fanatics with a durable tribal base -- and insist on treating them as 20th-century ideological insurgents.

Earth to Gen. Stan McChrystal: Those suicide bombers yesterday weren't Sandinistas.

Earth to Gen. McChrystal? Great idea! Alas, the gen's off on some other planet, trying to endear his troops to Afghanis such that all the concerted "niceness" will incline them to side with infidels over true believers.

Or, to paraphrase the title of that once wildly popular self-help book, jihadis are from Mars; Gen. McChrystal's from Venus (the looove planet).