This NY Times article reports how the Taliban has taken over another area of Pakistan with little or no resistance from the Pakistani government. This is an illustration of the Monkey Head Theory I describe in my book. If you force me to have a Monkey Head on my car, rather than giving me an option to have one, then you better have a damn good reason for making me have that Monkey Head. When you have a group of people using violence to enforce their mandatory Monkey Head on something clearly optional, then the only resolution (if you can't make that group of people agree to choice) is to confront them and deny them the ability to force their choice on you.

There are damn few choices left in Pakistan or Afghanistan--and none of them are good. This is what we get for taking our eye off the ball and going to Iraq. Just yesterday, we have a car bomb killing 80. This country was mortified when the Virginia Tech shooter killed 30.

This is why self sufficiency in energy and so many other things is so important to the continuation of our independence and sovereignty. The hell with whether there's global warming or not or whether or not there is truly dependence on foreign oil. We need to figure a way not to be sucked into wars we don't want to be involved in.

On the other hand, understand that much of the way we do our foreign policy is a result of our lesson learned from WWII. Better to kill a snake when it's a small snake. The cost of killing the snake when it gets big may be much too much.

That's what we're trying to sort through.

Here is the link to the article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/world/asia/24pstan.html?th&emc=th