Pollsters to Afghanistan

The U.S. Army wants to find out what the people of Afghanistan think of their military, the Afghanistan National Security Forces, and to do so plans to run an Afghan Nationwide Polling Survey replete with focus groups, and "stratified random sampling".

I can save the Army the money it plans to spend on this exercise and suggest whoever hatched this loopy idea read the New York Times story on the Taliban attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul late last month which left 21 dead.

Nazir Amini, an Afghan who had his meal at that hotel brutally interrupted by that attack, told the Times, "If they give the security responsibility to the current government at 10:00 a.m., the government will collapse around 12 noon. They cannot live without foreigners."