How Long, General Petraeus, How long?

In the Sunday, 4 March 2012 Washington Post, Army Special forces Major Fernando M. Lugar posed the following question: "How to get Afghans to trust us once again?"

I chose to take this question as rhetorical. After all, we've been at this war in Afghanistan for 10 years. Why should we still have to prove ourselves?

Answer that, Gerneral Petraeus. If we were winning to the degree to which you always claimed, how is it that a simple error in judgment by five soldiers can cause such a furor, not to mention the cold-blooded murder of four military personnel?

These people are what they are. They are not civilized by the standard to which we apply that adjective. They are most primitive. They follow a religion that requires a father to slit his daughter's throat for being seen on the streets with a man who is not a relative.

First, it was an author whose work was deemed to be insulting to the prophet. A fatwa required his death and, as a result, a number of otherwise innocents were murdered. Then it was a series of murders following the publication of cartoons deemed insulting to the prophet. Now it's the inadvertent burning of some copies of the Qur'an that has resulted in cries for the death penalty from the Afghan people.

And these are the people we have protected from the Taliban and al Qaeda. These are the people for whom we have built schools. These are the people on whose behalf we have put up with corruption on a scale that would make Chicago blush. These are the people on whose behalf so much American blood has been shed.

Shame on them! Unfortunately, in their culture, this is meaningless. They are completely without shame.