Setting aside the justifications (and morality) of the Afghan and Iraq adventures of Team America, the problem Obama inherited from Bush was Donald Rumsfeld’s belief that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could be fought on the cheap (new improved war-lite!).

Rumsfeld willingly fell hook line and sinker for the fantasises of various right wing, Beltway think-tanks and he dragged the Pentagon (by turns screaming or grovelling) and the White House (fervently or idiotically) after him.

It was (and is) the ultimate exercise of ultimate American capitalism – newer, faster, leaner, better. New weapons, new technologies, new training meant less soldiers, less gun, less tanks, less planes. And what didn’t absolutely need or require professional military forces could be tendered out to “contract security companies” (i.e. mercenary-based businesses from the US, UK, South Africa, Russia, etc.). And apparently, in the White House’s eyes, quiet a lot didn’t absolutely need or require trained professional military forces.

Unfortunately for the Americans and their Coalition of the Willing (oh dear…) in Afghanistan and Iraq people did things rather more traditionally – and refused to enter the brave new age of super-lite, free market warfare
New weapons, new technologies, new training meant very little to barefoot 17 year old kids from dusty, one street villages wiling to strap high explosive belts to themselves and blew themselves and anyone standing close by to bits in the middle of market squares.
Newer, faster, leaner, better was all fine and dandy out in the blue-sky training grounds of New Mexico or Nevada – take it to the heat and dust and dirt of Afghanistan and Iraq, with bullets and rockets whizzing past your head, bombs going off beneath your feet (or wheels) and distraught mothers shaking their bullet-dismembered children at you, it all just seemed to fall apart.
And war by hired, responsibility-free “security contractors” left you with gangs of ex-soldiers, criminals, fantasists and outright amateurs running around, killing, murdering, kidnapping, torturing, raping, stealing, dealing and getting wasted at every opportunity all in the name of Uncle Sam free market free enterprise – LA gang culture exported to the Middle East..

Obama has realised the mistakes of the past. But it’s too late. The kitty is all but dry. The world has changed and the Chinese are fed up buying up America’s debt. So once again, it is Team America war-lite. Not the 50,000 (or more likely 80,000 thousand) estimated as needed by the US military but 30,000.
The bare minimum to cover the bare minimum - and for what?

The most likely scenario we are looking at is not the defeat of the Taliban, and the warlords and druglords and tribal leaders and adventurers who hide under that umbrella, but the US and their NATO allies putting the lid on the boiling pot, taking it down to a bubbling simmer and then getting the hell out of there, with claims of “victory” and “honour” intact.

Now where else have we seen that strategy implemented and playing out? Oh yeah – Iraq…