"The News"

'Where have all the young men gone
Long time passing,
Where have all the young men gone
Long time ago,"

They have all to combat gone, 
Gone to combat everyone

"When will they ever learn,
When will they ever learn."

"They" being the operative word, the bold italicized words are mine, they're not the words in the original song. 
I guess what I'm wanting to say is that what comes goes around, comes around.  We've gone full circle now in Afghanistan.  Back in the '70's I was in a unit that I believe is still under a classified status, so I'll only say that we helped train the Taliban on the use of the weapons we provided for them to fight the Soviets. We learned a lot about them, during those training missions, we learned their strengths and their weaknesses as well as personal characteristics of their various leaders -- we learned how to kill them in order to learn how to survive with them.  All of these knowledge went into our After Action Reports, and yet, this knowledge seems to have been filed away in the darkest hole that the Department of the Army has.
We learned that in order to get anything done, one must first court their leadership, their Imams, their village chieftains.  Theirs is a paternalistic society.  They must, to survive, have one leader to whom they all have an allegiance.  They are not dissimilar to ants, cut off the leadership and they scatter until they find a new one, and like ants, they eventually do find a new one.  The only way I can describe their culture is by referring to the quintessential Viet Nam epic flick, "Apocalypse Now."  The movie was basically a lot of bullshit, but it made a good point in that the Operation Phoenix goal was to kill the leadership and replace it with our own hand-picked leaders.  In the move, Colonel Kurtz went rogue and placed himself as the leader, the warlord, of a guerilla militia. 
The Taliban, at the time we were there, operated in that manner, and that little matter seems lost to our current leadership.  They are intent on cutting off the heads willy-nilly without putting a warlord that is sympathetic, or at the very least, amenable to our advances.  The idea that we would be meddling in their internal affairs seems to be their reasoning, however, lost to them is that by killing off their leadership, we are meddling in their internal affairs, and if we're going to meddle, we need to meddle in our favor.  Meanwhile, we're spending the lives of our young men like we're spending our grandchildren's, our great-grandchildren's, and our great-great-grandchildren's futures, and putting them forever in debt to finance our own current laziness -- but that's another story for another day.