If you have an opportunity check out these articles and interview about Afghanistan via cursor.org: "With Afghanistan reported to be 'Unraveling,' "Democracy Now!" interviews journalist Ahmed Rashid about his 'terrifying' new book, "Descent into Chaos."

It gives a clear and frightening picture of the tenuous situation in a country rapidly coming apart while the US is caught in the unraveling.

A few excerpts:

This from Spencer Ackerman at The Washington Independent reporting on the increase in American military casualties in Afghanistan: "Yet beneath the optimistic veneer of Bush's visit is a country and a war effort that, more than six years after the initial U.S. invasion, Afghanistan watchers say, is seriously unraveling. They say that Washington is without clear goals for what it desires from Afghanistan, and, accordingly, has no clear strategy for achieving them. Security in Afghanistan has deteriorated as regional acrimony with neighboring Pakistan -- and a resurgent Al Qaeda -- has plagued the benighted South Asian country. Making matters worse, for the first time in seven years, Washington is unsure if its handpicked leader, President Hamid Karzai, is up to the challenge of managing Afghanistan.

" 'We can't win, can't lose and can't leave,' said a former CIA official with experience in the region, who requested anonymity. 'We're stuck. It will be too unthinkably humiliating if we leave.'

"In January, an assessment of the war effort, spearheaded by Gen. Jim Jones, a former NATO commander, and Amb. Thomas Pickering, a senior State Dept. official in the Clinton administration, portrayed a country in crisis. The report, assembled by a team of foreign-policy eminences, claims that the Bush administration had practically no policy toward Afghanistan, despite the presence of tens of thousands of U.S. troops there."

A review of the Ahmed Rashid's book, "Descent Into Chaos" says: "In 2000, when Ahmed Rashid published "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia," few Americans gave Afghanistan much thought. Though Bill Clinton had launched cruise missiles at Osama bin Laden's Afghanistan headquarters in 1998, by 2000 the issue had been so forgotten that in the foreign policy debate between Al Gore and George Bush, neither the Taliban nor al Qaeda were mentioned by the questioners or the candidates.

"Rashid's ominous book fell on deaf ears. Americans weren't much interes ted in Afghanistan's toxic mixture of Pakistani foreign politics (Pakistan's secret police more or less created the Taliban) and Islamicist extremism. Even al Qaeda's October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole did little to disturb Americans, much less the presidential election that took place three weeks later.

"Then came 9/11 and, supposedly, everything was going to be different....

"The strong narrative theme is that the United States, Pakistan and Afghanistan — each led by a stubborn man trapped in his own bubble — have strategized with little regard for each other in pursuit of incongruous goals. The Bush administration, after December 2001, wanted nothing more than to put Afghanistan on the back burner as it ramped up to invade Iraq. The people of Afghanistan, after suffering under the Taliban for years, wanted freedom, but they also wanted to make a living — and the only Afghani export product that has a real international demand is heroin. Pakistan, under General Pervez Musharraf, was playing the deepest game; its real concern is always to stymie its perceived rival, India.

"And so, for seven years, these nations, ostensibly friendly, have double-crossed each other and sent conflicting messages. Meanwhile, the Taliban, which regrouped in Pakistan just over the border from Afghanistan, has regained power as the U.S. loses interest.

"Finally, Rashid gives us an account of the Afghanistan government that mirrors his disappointment with his friend, Hamid Karzai. Karzai, who was elected with such hopes, has turned out to be a feckless leader, unable to outmaneuver Pakistan and doubly unable to understand democracy. Karzai associates political parties with the Communist Party in Afghanistan of the '80s, and would prefer that Afghanistan not have any. A democracy without parties is either a dictatorship or an oligarchy. Afghanistan tends towards the latter. Karzai relies on tribal leaders and, increasingly, warlords.

"The U.S. has proclaimed, over and over again, that our great ally in the war is Pakistan. And we have poured a lot of money into Pakistan — $10 billion in overt aid, and an equal amount, Rashid estimates, in secret aid.

"In return, Pakistan allowed the U.S. to use its ports to disembark military goods, a vital logistics advantage in 2001. And, when really pushed, Musharraf has used his military against the Islamicist guerrillas operating within Pakistan. This has always led to disaster. Time after time, the military has been either defeated or stymied by the guerrillas. The reason, Rashid suggests, is rooted in the secret part of Musharraf's strategy: Far from cutting links with the Taliban and al Qaeda's guerilla allies, the ISI has supplied them with intelligence and money.

"Why didn't this cause an uproar in D.C.? There are two important reasons. First, Musharraf carefully cultivated Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who believed that the general was standing between order and chaos in nuclear-powered Pakistan. Second, Rumsfeld, who took responsibility for Afghanistan away from the State Department, was averse to nation building. For him, it was better to say the war was over than that it had barely begun.

The unraveling of Afghanistan is due in large part to this Bush administration whose ignorance, arrogance, myopia, and delusion were the foundation for its complete ineptitude in its terribly flawed foreign policy towards Pakistan and Afghanistan which has caused inestimable damage to the US.

And impeachment is still off the table.