Recently, the American people have seen Secretary Gates and Secretary Rice with increased intensity traveling around the world pleading with and lobbying NATO countries to send more troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. To the vast majority of people throughout the world, it is no surprise that the U.S. is getting a cold response because the U.S. does not have a viable plan to succeed in Afghanistan. Even if lets say the U.S. were to get NATO countries to commit the extraordinary number of another 40,000 combat troops to the fight, seven years from now the world would still see a significant Taliban military force in Afghanistan threatening the Afghanistan government and people and the world would see that hundreds of NATO soldiers had died in the fight in Afghanistan over the prior seven years. Until the U.S. comes up with a plan to get Afghanistan farmers off the poppy crop which currently is a primary funding source for the Taliban militants and “severely corrupts” large portions of Afghanistan and a winning plan to build a solid education system through the university level throughout Afghanistan which will inspire and show the Afghanistan people how to build a country that is good country not a rights-deprived country which the Taliban only offer the U.S. does not have a viable plan to succeed in Afghanistan. Part of this successful plan would require that Afghanistan farmers be guaranteed a good price for their non-poppy crops and be guaranteed a good means for them to transport their non-poppy crop from their fields to the marketplace; the Bush Administration would be pursuing the right strategy in Afghanistan if they would bring this anti-poppy crop plan to fruition. One thing that is a shocking surprise about this whole Afghanistan matter is, how the United States of America’s military which has performed so extraordinarily brilliantly in Iraq (they have pursued local community reconciliation, job creation, infrastructure building, etc.) can be offering such lousy leadership on Afghanistan; the U.S. military’s leadership on Afghanistan amounts to this: essentially the only thing the Afghanistan effort needs to succeed is more soldiers to fight which is a false hope and frankly a failure to themselves and the American people, let’s hope the U.S. military’s leadership will soon start to perform at their potential on Afghanistan!