Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Rachel Maddow's thesis is elegantly simple: the Founding Fathers feared that the President of the United States and commander in chief of the armed forces needed to be constrained, lest the power to deploy troops be taken too lightly. To prevent a President from ordering the military into war too easily, the founders invested Congress with the requirement to approve the initiation and funding of any war. Moreover, Maddow argues, the Founding Fathers constructed the army of citizen soldiers thereby making the decision to launch a war one that would necessarily involve a national debate. Everyone would be related to a soldier and everyone would have to decide if his life was worth risking. Drift  describes the post WWII slide into wars and proxy wars led by Presidents circumventing Congress and in recent years even side-stepping the U.S. Army altogether. America has fought in Grenada, Panama, and Bosnia without declarations of war. It has fought in Afghanistan and Iraq for dec...

Look at Afghanistan's neighbors and you will begin to understand its historical importance.  Iran, to its immediate west captured Afghanistan when Persians ruled most of this part of the world, but they were not the first.  Coming from the west Alexander the Great Hellenized central Asia before the Persian Empire ever existed.  Afghanistan has also been conquered by Mongolia (Genghis Khan), China, Russia, Great Britain, the United States, and the Taliban. Which is why Steven Tanner's military history is an interesting lens with which to focus upon a country surrounded by towering, cave-riddled mountains, impassable deserts, and Siberian winters.  For all its rich detail, however, the overriding observation is one which most of us already know:  Afghans are tribal.  Their origins are in isolated mountain villages, their interactions with one another rare, and with the outside world rarer still.  They unify only to disperse invaders and then retrea...