Not very good news reading the paper this morning.

Taleban ambush targeted newly arrived NZ troops

New Zealand troops were fortunate not to be killed in a Taleban ambush deliberately set up to unsettle them just days after their arrival in Afghanistan.

The insurgents hit the patrol convoy with rocket-propelled grenades before firing bullets into their windscreens as they reversed up a one-lane road in the mountainous Bamiyan province.

The Taleban then mounted a further attack before the New Zealanders were bailed out by two American Apache helicopter gunships.

It should be noted at this point that these are not our SAS troops. These are our normal army troops. Most people do not realise that we have troops in Afghanistan but we do, they have been there for a number of years now.

Meanwhile the editoral discusses how the whole situation is becoming another Vietnam, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10606904

According to United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the decision by presidential challenger Abdullah Abdullah not to participate in next weekend’s runoff election is not “unprecedented” and will not affect the legitimacy of the vote. David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, says most polls show Dr Abdullah would have lost anyway, “so we are going to deal with the government that is there”. Both statements represent a flight from the reality of the US being consigned to work for the next five years with a discredited, corrupt and unpopular Kabul administration. In one step, Afghanistan has begun to look much more like Vietnam.

The runoff may still be held in an attempt to manufacture a veneer of credibility for Mr Karzai’s second term. But by any yardstick a poll with just one candidate is a farce, and will be recognised as such worldwide. And that creates still bigger problems for Mr Obama as he ponders a request from General Stanley McChrystal to send an extra 40,000 troops to Afghanistan to combat an increasingly assertive Taleban. The President has insisted that such support would be provided only to a government whose legitimacy and democratic mandate was unquestioned. This condition is now unlikely to be met.

He knows parallels with the unpopular Vietnam War, during which the US propped up several illegitimate regimes, are being made increasingly. A repeat of that experience is unthinkable. A unity government in Kabul may not work and is certainly not the ideal solution in the long term. But it is now essential to deliver some legitimacy to the struggle against the Taleban.

The United States has not won a war since WWII, Iraq and Afghanistan look destined to become two more versions of Vietnam. The question now is how does the US pull out of both countries in a manner that does not have them descend into civil war, at the same time not letting terrorists rule the roost, and trying to keep some stability in the middle east? It is a hard task that I don’t think anyone has the solution to.