The so-called war in Afghanistan will apparently never end.
Just when one thinks there’s a light at the end of the IED-blasted tunnel, it turns out the flicker is just military commanders flicking their Bics.

UK’s Defense Chief Gen. Sir David Richards stoked the never-ending war fires last week, invoking a conflict that could last “generations:”

“Nato now needs to plan for a 30 or 40 year role to help the Afghan armed forces hold their country against the militants,” according to the Daily Mail, though he “stuck to the government’s plans to withdraw combat troops by 2014 but made clear that thousands of troops will be needed long after that date.”
In an interview on November 14, Richards said, “Everyone is clear that we will have to remains [sic] a lot longer than” four to five years.
“The plans,” he added, “are now in place to do that” and will be made “rather clearer” at the upcoming NATO summit in Lisbon.
Richards correctly argued that the Taliban and al-Qaeda cannot be defeated militarily and that victory cannot be declared by “marching into another nation’s capital,” as in conventional warfare.
These organizations, after all, are loosely organized and have no command center that can be neutralized. However, he contended, victory over Islamic terrorism in the traditional sense “is unnecessary and would never be achieved.
But we can [sic] contain it to the point that our lives and our children’s lives are led securely?
I think we can.”

Might be that’s what you get for thinking, Sir David.
Nevertheless, the good general then waxed ironic about the conflict with the Taliban: “We are hammering them at the moment. They are feeling it,”  he said. “We are at the early stages of a mutual understanding that we can’t go on doing this forever.”
WTF did you just say?

One quickly remembers Bob Woodward’s Gen. ‘King’ David Petraeus nasty little quote: “You have to recognize also that I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. It’s a little bit like Iraq, actually. . . . Yes, there has been enormous progress in Iraq. But there are still horrific attacks in Iraq, and you have to stay vigilant. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”
Easy for you to say, asshole.

Another UK warmonger, Mark Sedwill, NATO’s civilian envoy to Afghanistan, came up with an atrocious bit of word play to describe the country in the near future: “Our expectation is that there still would be a certain level of violence, probably levels of violence that are by Western standards pretty eye-watering, around parts of the country. Some of it labelled as insurgency, but much of it probably criminal.
“The issue then will be, will the Afghan forces be able to deal with that?” he added.
We all know the answer to that — an ear-splitting NO!
Angelina Jolie is eye watering, maybe Naomi Watts, but for damn sure it’s not a beheading or an IED exploding in the midst of an US marine patrol — damn Brits can really mix them metaphors.

And right next door, Pakistan is apparently falling apart — beaten by floods this past summer from the famously ‘Bibical proportions’ category, enduring insurgency strikes (a shoot-out at a mosque yesterday injured 18) and generally having a hell of a time keeping a straight face in a shitstorm of problems, now comes anarchy in the country’s biggest city, Karachi.
From McClatchy:

In Karachi, most of the violence is clan-based, and the killers operate as criminal gangs, engaged in a turf war.
The Shershah market traders are largely “Mohajirs” who came here decades ago from northern India, while the assailants were believed to be ethnic Baloch, originally from the Pakistani province of Balochistan.
The gang war, which kicked off a year ago and claims several victims a day, had mostly involved the Mohajirs and the city’s huge ethnic Pashtun population, but the Shershah killings confirm that the Baloch are now a third major player.
Periodically, the bloodshed flares up into a multi-day killing frenzy. Elsewhere in Pakistan, Islamic extremists are blamed for the mayhem. But in Karachi, it’s mobsters with political cover.
“It would only take one small thing for outright civil war to erupt in Karachi,” said a Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
“The question is whether there is going to be a tipping point.”
What makes it intractable, and able to veer out of control, according to police, is that the principal gangs are linked to political parties — not just any parties, but those sharing in the civilian-led coalition that governs Pakistan.

(h/t antiwar.com)

And to complete the horrible irony: George Jr.’s “Mission Accomplished” banner might be be displayed at Mr. 43’s new and most-wonderful library where the young Bush-mouth and The Dick broke ground yesterday.
And the shit-faced The Dick, himself standing on the cusp of his own grave, blubbered: “This may be the only shovel-ready project in America.”

The world is up to their collective ass in mega-ugly sarcastic shit.