Defeat in Afghanistan

Yesterday a right wing Republican questioned what the hell the USA was doing in Afghanistan when, "No foreign army has won their for a thousand years". Meanwhile the British announced that they would be getting out of Sangin and leaving it to the Americans. The PR machine has been working tirelessly since to tell us that this was not of course a defeat but a strategic withdrawal.
Doubtless , as is intended in Iraq, the coalition forces will one day withdraw and say they have left a democratic government in control and dress it up as a triumph. Meanwhile the bombings will continue and the deep seated corruption, that surrounds these dubiously installed puppet governments, will flourish.
This is a tragedy for those who have lost loved ones but the blame must lay four square at the feet of the US and UK governments who have the arrogance to rush off all over the world to impose their alien values and dodgy principles in countries where they do not belong.
As for the British I remember Dean Rusk, the US Secretary of State in the 1960's saying that, "Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a role". Too right but, no wrong, for the British government still pathetically believe that we are a super power when we can't even feed our poor and run a decent rail system.
Matthew Arnold wrote this a century or two back. Why don't they listen:-

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.


Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Gordelpus