"An old Afghanistan hand told me about a buzzword now popular among U.S. policy wonks in Kabul and Washington: "reify." Ruefully laughing, he explained: Reify refers to a concept about being confused with reality."
"U.S. Special Operations Forces have a brand new home in Afghanistan. It's owned and operated by the security company formerly known as Blackwater, thanks to a no-bid deal worth $22 million"
Bin Laden has been dead for a year, but his strategy continues to work in Afghanistan. Well over a decade after he first formulated his economic "bleed until bankrupt" strategy, the United States continues to spend hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars in Afghanistan on generally fruitless counterinsurgency operations"