Half Baked Analysis Superficial analysis at Boston.com:

While the Karzai government is a vast improvement over its Taliban predecessors and communist stooges running the country two decades ago, it has only a tenuous grip on power. It lacks control over the Afghan countryside and has only a minimal hold over its own capital. Indeed, Russian observers have noted that the United States is at roughly the same stage where they were in 1981, supporting a weak central government, faced with a bubbling opposition. A coalition is now building, made up of Taliban remnants, Al Qaeda fighters, and extremist Pashtuns attached to the former warlord and radical Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In a pointed reference to the war against the Soviets, they have entitled themselves ''the Sons of the Mujahideen,'' and are adapting many of the same tactics that eventually wore down the Red Army.

There's one huge point that these guys are missing: there is no equivalent of the US supplying the Mujahideen with Stinger missiles and intelligence. The original Mujahideen would *never* have beaten the Soviets without US assistance, and neither will these Sons...