But Not Both

Less Tea, More Flash - By Mark Steyn - The Corner - National Review Online: "I wrote here yesterday about the accelerating campaign of “green-on-blue” violence — that’s to say, NATO-trained, NATO-paid Afghans turning on their western “allies” and killing them. A handful of readers reminded me of this passage from George MacDonald Fraser’s very first Flashman novel, set 170 years ago in the First Anglo-Afghan War:

This I will say for the Afghan – he is a treacherous, evil brute when he wants to be, but while he is your friend he is a first-rate fellow. The point is, you must judge to a second when he is going to cease to be friendly. There is seldom any warning."

And the finale:

The phony-baloney Three Cups Of Tea is handed out at American grade schools and by the Pentagon to ‘Stan-bound officers. I take it as read that it would be a hate crime to read Flashman in an American schoolhouse, and probably affront the diversity-celebrators at the Pentagon, too. In the end you can be politically correct or you can be a great power — but not both.

Yup.