Letter from Here

From "Yes You Can" to "Yes We Did" to "Yes, but What Did We Do?"

2009-11-25T10:45:00.000-06:00

Did we elect President Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan (in a speech at West Point, of all places) and follow in the footsteps of another Democratic president who was destroyed by escalating an unwinnable war? Did we elect President Obama to deal with the economy by putting foxes in charge of the chicken coop? Did we elect him to take a hands-off approach to healthcare reform so that lobbyists could write the legislation?

Yes we did, apparently. Enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday. Looks like we're in for some interesting times afterwards.

The University Avenue Holiday Lights are back

2009-11-25T09:12:00.002-06:00

The University Avenue Holiday Lights -- making the grayness of the season a little less gray and more colorful. They seem to have been part of the Madison holiday season forever, but it was 1995 when Madison dentist Dr. Jack Kammer started illuminating the wall of 228 arborvitae trees he had planted earlier along the University Avenue railroad right of way.

Segoe and University: Personally, I think a Tarzhay would be a big improvement

2009-11-23T21:16:00.004-06:00

This is the corner of Segoe and University at Hilldale that was excavated two years ago to make way for the bold new vision of developer Joseph Freed & Associates' new Hilldale: "Shop it. Live it. Love it." New condos were going to flank a big, new Whole Foods. Then the market softened, and the condos fell through, to be replaced by a proposed hotel and office building. Then those fell through. Then Whole Foods pulled out. The hole remained.

Now Target wants to build a store here, in their new urban configuration. Some object to bringing in a Big Box. Others are tired of looking at the Big Hole. I think the novelty has worn off the hole. Sure, it added a nice backdrop of seedy urban grunge to the glitzy Hilldale scene, but eventually that gets tiresome. A Tarzhay would be a nice change of pace -- especially for downtown and near west shoppers who want to buy a pair of socks at a reasonable price without commuting to the far western burbs.

November 22 compared -- 2008 vs 2009

2009-11-22T23:53:00.000-06:00

I took this picture of Lake Wingra exactly a year ago today. This year the lake doesn't seem close to freezing, and the weather today was more like that of a warm day in early April than one in late November, except the grass was a bit greener than it usually is that early in April.

This is what it looked like during an unusually quiet moment on the Southwest Bike Path. Most of the day it looked more like the Beltline at rush hour, with bicyclists, roller-bladers, joggers and walkers all getting out to enjoy the extraordinary weather. The weatherman said the high was 58°F, but it seemed warmer -- and on the asphalt corridor warming itself in the sun, it probably was.

Start of Brett Favre late-season collapse? Not.

2009-11-22T22:53:00.000-06:00

It's late in the third quarter, the Minnesota Vikings are leading the Seattle Seahawks, but the Vikings' starting QB has come out of the game. Is Brett Favre injured? Has his 40-year-old body finally succumbed to the rigors of a long NFL season? Is this the beginning of his predicted late-season fade, expected by lots of folks based on his poor performance in the final games of last season with the NY Jets (when he was playing injured and not making a big deal of it)?

Um, not exactly. Favre was healthy enough for a personal career-high 88% passing day (also a Viking single game record), completing 22 of 25 pass attempts for 213 yards, with no interceptions and four touchdowns -- the 22nd time he has done that, breaking Dan Marino's career record for most games with four TD passes. Oh, and a not-too-shabby QB rating of 141.7.

So why did he leave the game? The coaches wanted to rest him and give Tarvaris Jackson some playing time. Maybe everything has worked out for the best with the Packers trading away Favre. The Packers really do need a young quarterback who can take a physical beating, because he has to play without the protection of an offensive line. If Favre were still in Green Bay, he'd probably be in the hospital by now, instead of resting in the fourth quarter. His new team gives this NFL legend the perfect way to extend his playing career.

There's nothing like a library on a rainy night, and if there's an art exhibit inside, so much the better

2009-11-20T01:48:00.005-06:00

Doesn't a cold, dark, rainy night make you just want to curl up with a good book? Or stop at the library on the way home to see what they have? That's what drew me to the Sequoya Branch of the Madison Public Library last night.

In addition to books, I found some local art that brought back memories. Since 1977, the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission has been producing an annual poster featuring art by a local or state artist. The posters have appeared in so many places around town over the years that to see one is often to be transported to a memory of when and where you first encountered it.

Now the Cultural Affairs Commission is showing a selection of posters from over the years at Sequoya through the end of the year. If you get a chance, drop in. It might be a trip down memory lane for you. And it's also a great chance to see selected work by local and regional artists in the form of posters -- each designed by Phil Hamilton, emeritus professor of art at the UW-Madison. For more information about the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission check out their website.

Weather only an octopus could love

2009-11-18T22:16:00.003-06:00

It rained most of the day today and was generally dark and yucky. Nice weather for octopi, that's about it.

Doesn't mean a person can't sit in the car and play with the camera. This was outside Octopus Car Wash on South Park Street, Two exposures, two different lenses: One shot wide open with the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 to focus on the raindrops on the windshield and throw the background out of focus and produce the blurred highlights. The octopus was photographed with a tele-zoom at 120mm.

I combined the two images in the camera with Nikon's Image Overlay processing. You can select any two RAW images stored on the card and the camera will blend them and show you a preview. Individual gain controls for each image let you control how the images blend.

Of course, you can do all this in Photoshop with even more control. But if you don't have a computer with you or you're just sitting in the car waiting for the rain to stop, fiddling around with Image Overlay isn't a bad way to kill some time.

They say they're building the world's tallest gingerbread man in the Hilldale atrium

2009-11-17T23:55:00.001-06:00

And it towers 26 feet high right in front of Macy's. It's not just a decoration. It's in a good cause. The gingerbread man will be the centerpiece of the Gingerbread Casas for CASA event this Saturday afternoon, Nov. 21, to benefit CASA of Dane County. Madison-area companies are invited to participate in a gingerbread house or “casa” decorating competition. They were putting on the frosting tonight, buckets and buckets of it.

The Commies are coming, the Commies are coming, or worse, Dane County politicians!

2009-11-16T22:27:00.000-06:00

This alarmist flyer, covered with what look like bullet holes (apparently whoever has me in their gunsights is a terrible shot) is one of several in the same vein that arrived in our mailbox recently. And Sunday we got a robocall along the same lines. Somebody is determined to convince us that Dane County politicians are going to strip us of our property rights and trash the market value of our home -- unless people like us stop them. At first I wasn't sure what all the fuss was about. Had we become a Communist dictatorship overnight and I simply hadn't noticed? Didn't seem likely. The flyers referred me to www.danecountypropertyrights.com for more information, but that simply provided more of the same rhetoric.

Since the flyers mentioned meetings of the Dane County Lakes & Watersheds Commission, I went to the Dane County website to find out more. This press release from the Office of Lakes & Watersheds seemed to be what I was looking for.

Melissa Malott, Chair of the Dane County Lakes and Watershed Commission, announced that the Commission will hold two meetings later this month for citizens to learn about and provide input to the revised draft plan for Dane County Shoreland and Riparian Management. The Plan, which attempts to create a flexible yet effective set of recommendations to better protect Dane County’s surface waters from near-shore impacts, has been extensively revised based on earlier public input.

You'll find more background on the plan and the proposed draft at the Commission's website, including a link to a pdf Myths and Facts sheet. Here's where and when the meetings are scheduled to be held this Tuesday and Wednesday:

Tues., Nov 17 – Verona Senior Center, , 108 Paoli St, Verona, 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Wed., Nov. 18 - Sun Prairie City Office Community Room, 300 East Main St, Sun Prairie, 7:00-9:00 p.m.

In the release, Malott urged area residents to take advantage of this opportunity to get the facts.

I encourage area residents to take advantage of this opportunity to learn the facts regarding the status and applicability of the Plan, its benefits and economic impact. It’s important that the input on the Plan we receive is not clouded by misinformation about its content and purpose.

Bingo! That's exactly what the mail and phone campaign seemed to be about -- "clouding the input by misinformation." In fact, disinformation might be a better term. The sponsors of the campaign seemed to be trying to pack the meeting with angry homeowners terrified of government interference with their property rights. In other words, teabagging the meetings. I'm surprised they didn't just mail out teabags and save the expense of printing the flyers.

Personally. I sort of like our Dane County lakes and rivers, and I like the idea of trying to to protect them from runoff and other development impacts. If I have to choose between the Lakes & Watershed Commission and the sponsors of the anti-shoreland zoning camapign (Madison Area Builders Association, REALTORS® Association of South Central Wisconsin, Smart Growth Madison, Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce and the Wisconsin Homeowners Alliance), the latter are going to have to come up with a lot more than scare tactics to convince me.

Might be a bit early for the holiday lights, but it reminds us winter parking rules started Sunday

2009-11-16T00:39:00.001-06:00

They turned on the 21st annual Holiday Fantasy in Lights in Olin-Turville Park Saturday. The lights are all energy-saving LEDs this year. While I applaud the green intentions, I sort of miss the old incandescents. To my eye, the new bulbs look too cool and a bit unnatural in comparison. Our human visual perception did not evolve in the presence of light-emitting diodes. The spectral characteristics of incandescent lighting seem to better match the nighttime glow of a campfire that our species grew up with and finds satisfying. Still, I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually -- and the new lights do use a hell of a lot less energy.

It seems a bit early to put up the holiday lights, given how unseasonably warm it's been lately, not to mention that there's no snow on the ground yet. But it's a good wake-up call to remind us that winter parking rules went into effect yesterday. For those of us who have to do the alternate-side parking thing for the next four months (till March 15), this is the tricky part of the year. With no snow on the ground, it's easy to forget -- and wake up to a sizable parking ticket. They range from $20 and $30 to $60 -- depending on what zone you're in and whether there's a snow emergency.

So when you go to bed tonight, ask yourself if you know where your car is parked.

November: The wind blows and the sun dies

2009-11-14T03:48:00.002-06:00

Some November moodiness for all the Scorpios with birthdays this dark and gloomy month when it starts to seem that the sun will never return.

The audio is Art of Noise's "Opus 4." The lyrics are drawn from the 1844 poem, "No!," by Thomas Hood. They stripped away some of the 19th century ornateness. Here's what they kept:

No sun - no moon!
No morn - no noon -
No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member -
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! -
November!

The "no bees" gets me every time.

A simple, commonsense word for a commonsense Afghanistan policy

2009-11-13T00:00:00.002-06:00

President Obama's ambassador to Afghanistan seems to think so, too.

In a leaked cable to Washington sent last week, the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl W Eikenberry, argued that it would be a mistake to send reinforcements until the government of Hamid Karzai demonstrates that it will act against corruption and mismanagement. Mr Eikenberry knows what he is talking about because he has long experience of Afghanistan. A recently retired three-star general, he was responsible for training the Afghan security forces from 2002 to 2003 and was top US commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007.

Patrick Cockburn, writing in The Independent, explains why the word "corruption" is a major understatement when it comes to the Afghan government, and why the U.S. and Britain should not continue to support that government militarily.

Maybe the New York Times will never die but just slowly fade away into "media partnerships"

2009-11-12T01:06:00.000-06:00

I was skimming the business section of the NYT yesterday to see what the banksters and other malefactors of great wealth were up to, when I came across this piece analyzing the wages of American workers. It said they were out of balance. In what way? Turns out that American wages are out of balance with the rest of the world because they are way too high.

The big trade deficit is another sign of excessive pay for Americans. One explanation for the attractive prices of imported goods is that American workers are paid too much relative to their foreign peers.

Global wage convergence is great for the poor but tough on the overpaid. It's possible to run the numbers to show that American manufacturing workers should take average real wage cuts of as much as 20 percent to get into global balance.

Say what?

It wasn't the analysis that startled me. It was standard blame-the-victim, race-to-the-bottom, free-market rhetoric about how American workers (not Wall Street financiers, mind you, but workers) need to learn to live on the same ample wages as their counterparts in China and other parts of the developing world.

No, what startled me wasn't what I read, but where I read it. This isn't the way the New York Times usually talks about working people, at least not openly, on its news pages (granted, in the business section, the boundaries between news, analysis and opinion are somewhat fuzzy). That's when I took another look at what I was reading. I had assumed "breakingviews.com," punny title and all, was just another of their new business sections. Yes and no. It's a relatively new department that started this year, but it's not produced by the NYT.

Breakingviews.com is a London-based subscription-based financial analysis service that's now a media partner of the NYT and certain other major news organizations around the globe. The NYT runs free content from breakingviews.com in the business section under its own heading, and is also starting to syndicate the content to other news organizations through the New York Times News Service.

These kinds of content partnership are springing up throughout American journalism, replacing some of the editorial staff news organizations are shedding as they strive to cope with their various financial disasters. In trade publishing, where content partnerships have been going on longer and are even more widespread, the resulting content has often been mediocre and/or has a hidden agenda. In addition, brands get eroded, as readers become confused about who's actually providing the news they read.

The downside to content partnership is you get what you pay for, and if you're determined to pay less, you'll generally get less. So do your readers. Eventually they may get tired of it, find you irrelevant and simply walk away. It's not as if there aren't a lot of new media competing for their attention with their own distinctive voices.

Why not put a community garden on the roof of that new downtown public library?

2009-11-10T22:32:00.008-06:00

Urban roof gardens are catching on in other cities, but nobody seems to have done it with a library yet. Now that the City Council has approved the new downtown library, we have a rare opportunity to become the first city in the world with a community garden on the roof of its public library, according to Downtown Madison Community Gardens. The group supported the budget amendment that also passed last night, directing city staff to study the possibility. But I should let them speak for themselves: Check out the video I shot before the Council meeting last night of supporters Alex Richter, left, and Sue Rosa, right, discussing the measure.

Also at the meeting was one of the group's organizers, Jane Anne Morris. She was recently quoted in an Eat. Drink. Better. post about the proposal and urban rooftop gardens in general.

The push for more community garden space in downtown Madison started last spring after organizers started talking to residents at the weekly farmers market. After some discussion of space, someone suggested looking to the rooftops as a place for gardens to go.

“Once you think of rooftop gardens, your eyes look up and you see the city differently,” Jane Anne Morris, one of the group organizers, said.

From there, it was only a few suggestions to get to the idea of a public garden on the roof of the library.

Makes sense to me.

If this was a trial balloon, I hope we can all help shoot it down

2009-11-10T12:11:00.004-06:00

This jumped out at me from the screen last night. I sure hope that it's just a trial balloon, and that Barack Obama hasn't actually made up his mind to morph into LBJ, who also was the peace candidate, once (against Barry Goldwater), before he escalated the Vietnam war and needlessly destroyed not only his presidency but all too many lives.

It could happen again in Afghanistan, "the graveyard of empires." Adding 40,000 troops now just makes it that much harder to pull them out, and all the more likely we'll be adding a lot more. Presidents need to stop thinking that having a large, powerful military at their disposal means they should routinely use it to try to achieve political and diplomatic objectives around the world. Our track record in that regard hasn't been all that great lately. Let the White House know you'd like to try something different.

I used to be skeptical about these crosswalk flags, but I'm starting to change my mind

2009-11-10T00:45:00.001-06:00

You find these wild and wacky red crosswalk flags in several places around Madison. These were placed at some crosswalks on Monroe Street by the Dudgeon-Monroe Neighborhood Association to help pedestrians navigate the 35-mph-plus traffic stream and get across in one piece. I used to be a skeptic, but am less so since street work forced me to park on the other side of Monroe Street and make frequent crossings.

I used to think the flags might confuse some motorists (slow down and proceed with caution? slam on the brakes?) and might make some pedestrians recklessly overconfident, enocuraging them to dart out in front of cars with a sense of false security. And what if one car stops and other cars speed around it in another lane? It seemed like a real recipe for accidents.

But there don't seem to have been many mishaps. Meanwhile, I've had a chance to test Monroe Street traffic myself, with and without the flags. Flagless, with only my exposed flesh between myself and the onrushing cars, it's definitely a challenge. Few people ever slow down, and I'm on my own. The law may say cars have to stop for pedestrians in crosswalks, but many drivers seem to disagree with the law and some express their disagreement by simply speeding up. But walk out with one of those goofy flags and traffic almost magically comes to a halt (you can actually hear the traffic sounds quieting down on the video clip).

People apparently are conditioned to respond to red. Many drivers, on the other hand, just seem to "see red" when they see pedestrians. Or they just don't see them at all.

Viewing the stunning new Lake Wingra Dam on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon in November

2009-11-09T00:25:00.003-06:00

The construction that has been going on the last few months in Vilas Park at the Lake Wingra outlet to Wingra Creek is finished, and the resulting new Lake Wingra Dam is a real beauty. In the place of the former dumpy little structure built a century ago, the new dam arcs around in a graceful concrete semicircle. As you can see in the little video clip, the dam creates a natural amphitheater that seems to amplify the sound of rushing water for observers on the sleekly geometric observation deck and fishing platform. The concrete lip of the dam has been rounded to make it easier for spawning muskies to leap over, and it should be quite a sight -- with a much better angle of view for observers -- next spring. The City Engineering website has more information about the dam, its history, planning and design.

These runners were looking it over Sunday afternoon. The weekend was a great time to view the new structure. The construction fences are finally gone. And as the runners' gear attests, the high temperature both Saturday and Sunday was 71°F. The weather was absolutely surreal. As T said, it was like stolen time. Everywhere you went this weekend, people flashed each other mischievous, conspiratorial smiles. We all knew we were getting away with something we weren't really entitled to.

Are we nearing the end of moviegoing as a shared social experience and does it matter?

2009-11-06T23:55:00.001-06:00

I took this photo this afternoon in front of Blockbusters store on West Washington. It's just one location, but the fact is, everything is gonna move to the internets. I'm no great fan of Blockbuster, but I'll miss video rental stores when they're gone. Movies will increasingly be delivered online (Blockbuster is scrambling to catch up with NetFlix in the emerging online market). One more step toward our withdrawing from even the minimal social contact found in theaters, and even to some extent, video stores. Instead, we'll retreat even further into our own homes, our individual cocoons, wrapped up ever more snugly in our own solipsism. Or so it seems sometimes. What's really bad is when you start to think, "So?"

It's all about the framing

2009-11-06T00:22:00.002-06:00

Poster in the window of Rainbow Bookstore. Nice commentary about a major issue in an age of corporate visual media. Communication, especially if it's primarily visual, is in large part about framing. It's always a good question to ask as a consumer of news. What's in the frame? What's outside? Why?

The good news is that the parking lot is almost always jammed with cars in every available space

2009-11-04T11:20:00.003-06:00

It means that the Sequoya Branch of the Madison Public Library has been a big hit since it reopened about a year ago in its new quarters in Sequoya Commons. There's more space, more computers for people to use, and a lot more traffic than at their cramped older quarters. (Presumably there will be more parking space when Phase II of the Sequoya Commons development is finished.)

The bad news is the parking lot is almost always full, and cars have to circle and wait for someone else to leave the busy parking lot -- making it an interesting laboratory for studying human nature and how it affects parking behavior. The question is, how much parking hassle will people put up with in order to park slightly closer to the library -- that is, how much will they sacrifice in the hopes of saving a few steps?

Quite a bit, it seems. Most of the traffic coming into and out of the parking lot come in through the Caromar Dr. entrance, often passing a vacant space or two on the street. You can pull into one of those, walk across and be in the library before most of the people in cars ever get parked. But you usually have to parallel park and walk a few extra steps (basically, across the street) to get there.

Lured by the dream of saving a bit of effort and a few footsteps, most drive right by the on-street parking and pull into the parking lot, only to join the lines of cars circling to try to find a space. The feeling seems to be, hey, I might get lucky and find a space right away, right next to the front door. It's a fascinating example of the human tendency to give up that perfectly good bird in the hand and go after the two in the bush. And to rely on that automotive dream that our car will give us a door-to-door ride to wherever we want to go, even if it usually doesn't.

I go to Sequoya a lot. So where do I park? I can't help myself -- I do what everyone else is doing, pull into the parking lot, often passing up a perfectly good space on the street. The parking lot just seems to be the place to be, filled with bibliophiles looking for a place to park.

Note: Although the sign on the door says "Closed Sunday," that's not true in fall and winter -- the branch is open Sundays, 1:00-5:00, until spring.

Why can't the richest country on earth afford healthcare? Well, actually, it can.

2009-11-02T10:44:00.004-06:00

There was a great Op-Ed in yesterday's LA Times about the California deficit crisis by Rebecca Solnit, subtitled The state has plenty of money and resources. What we've been lacking is a real-world discussion about how we distribute them, and she's not just talking about California, although that's her starting point.

Americans usually have fantastic visions of where our resources come from and go. A lot of Americans seem to believe that the federal government spends tons of money, rather than a small percentage of the federal budget, on the arts and foreign aid; but in fact, about half of discretionary spending goes to the military -- the largest and most expensive military the world has ever seen, one that costs nearly as much as all the other militaries put together.

In discussing the national financial crisis, the military was never really on the chopping block, even though its budget could, with a little paring, provide healthcare, education, environmental restoration, some cool climate-change adaptation and all the other pieces of a good society and a great nation. Do we really need several hundred military bases in more than 125 countries? And all those expensive toys? And the research programs to do things like weaponize insects? Do we need them more than we need to keep children healthy?

Thanks to Jim Johnson, who has a post about Solnit in his blog (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography.

4 is for 40 and still having fun after all these years

2009-11-01T23:52:00.000-06:00

And for four TD passes. Brett Favre tied Dan Marino's record of 21 games with four or more TD passes on his return to Lambeau Field, throwing for 244 yards on 17 of 28 passing and no interceptions, helping the Vikings improve to 7-1 on the season. Not bad for a senior citizen in football years.

Weird beyond belief: It's Halloween night and electronic ghosts are playing baseball on my teevee

2009-10-31T23:57:00.000-05:00

They say it's the World Series, and that the Yankees and the Phillies are playing in Philadelphia, but I find that hard to believe. This isn't the World Series that I grew up with. The Boys of Summer used to play their encore in the golden light of early October afternoons. Then they added games to the schedule, lights, playoff games, one thing and another, and then this year they start the Series even later than usual, so it runs into November. That's how they found themselves playing Game 3 on Halloween Night and after a rain delay the game ran past midnight EST, into the early morning rain of November 1. Weird.

When A-Rod hits his home run by bouncing his long line drive off a TV camera, it seems the perfect symbol of how our former national pastime has been transformed into a pure television spectacle, torn from its roots in the real world. After all, without the TV cameras, they wouldn't even be here, playing baseball in the cold rain of a Philadelphia night this time of year.

There was a new greeter in the corner drugstore and he really was sort of strange

2009-10-29T22:39:00.004-05:00

Sure, it was nice to be offered an h'ors d'oeuvre on the way in, but the more he talked, the creepier he seemed. Something just didn't seem right. There was something ghoulish about him and the food he was offering. I passed.

A general speaks out on the Afghanistan war

2009-10-29T14:38:00.002-05:00

Here's what the highly decorated general told his commander in chief.

“There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another,” he said. “Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize.

“Our soldiers are not to blame. They’ve fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills.”

No, this wasn't Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, although like McChrystal, he requested more troops. This report was given nearly 23 years ago.

It was the seventh year of the Soviet Union's disastrous adventure in Afghanistan, the general's name was Sergei Akhromeyev, the commander of the Soviet armed forces, and he was reporting to the Soviet Union’s Politburo on Nov. 13, 1986.

This is from today's NYT Op-Ed by Victor Sebestyen, author of “Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire.” He explains that the minutes of the meeting with the Politburo were recently found by American and Russian scholars of the cold war, and that these and other materials substantially expand our knowledge of the Soviet Union’s disastrous campaign.

The new information documents in greater detail the reluctance of politicians to face facts and their desire to keep looking for face-saving ways to avoid defeat while more people die. The Brezhnev Politburo stumbled into the war and just dug themselves in more deeply. Michael Gorbachev took office in 1985, saying that ending the conflict was his highest priority. But it was nearly four years before the last Russians left Afghanistan, after nine years of fighting. By then it was way too late, and their leaving was perceived as a humiliating defeat that helped contribute to the loss of the rest of the Soviet empire, and eventually, the fall of the Soviet Union itself.

Unless the U.S. changes direction, we'll soon have been in Afghanistan longer than the Russians, with no certainty of success. Unless something changes soon, we'll just be tragically reinventing a wheel that was broken to begin with.