Winning the Afghanistan War via Spaghetti Junction?

Is it any wonder that things are going badly in the Afghanistan War?

The madness of PowerPoint as confronted by the US military....

The Australian [from a piece in The Times] reports:

"Winston Churchill knew where the enemy was by looking at the pieces on his "sand-table" mock-up and watching as his staff moved them around to adjust to the latest intelligence.

US General Stanley McChrystal, in charge of the war in Afghanistan, has to peer at a PowerPoint slide that is so complex it makes Spaghetti Junction look like a minor road network.

The latest computer-generated presentation of the security landscape in Afghanistan, delivered in a conference room at the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, was so tangled in arrows and lines that General McChrystal remarked, to guffaws from the assembled audience: "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war."

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Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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