Here is an interesting, much footnoted and rather less upbeat take on Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan by Brendan O'Neill on Sp!ked, a site I find useful and maddening in equal measure.

There is also an interesting article (also by O'Neill) about the domestic political mess that the hapless Karzai is presiding over called When nation-building destroys. However this last article rather misses a major point: firstly regardless of the occasional ill-advised propaganda blurb by the Americans, they are not there to 'nation build' other than en passant... they are there to kill the people responsible for September 11^th. If Afghans insist on killing each other, that is primarily a problem for the Afghans. However it does highlight the madness of getting too deeply involved in Afghanistan's domestic woes as both Dale Amon and I pointed out quite some time ago.