Anyone for Kipling?

Nine long years into the war to prop up Hamid Karzai's dodgy kleptocracy, the one with the sharia-based constitution, a top U.S. military official is warning that things are about to get a whole lot bloodier for NATO forces. This on the heels of a report that the Taliban have abducted two U.S. serviceman, killing one of them.

Rudyard Kipling would certainly have understood what's afoot here. Back in the days when the sun never set on the British empire he wrote:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

La plus ca change, eh?