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Garrison Keillor asks the President to "lets start making our way out of Afghanistan," in his own inimitable style. He also quotes U.S. Marine Officer Matthew Hoh, who resigned his Foreign Service post- "American families must be reassured their dead have sascrificed for apurpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more." And Keillor summarizes Hoh's reasons and does it so well- that our presence among the Pastun people, the people in the villages, the rural religious people, is only wosening the conflict, the role of the Taliban and Al Quaeda is not the main thing here, the real issues are tribal and cultural. The last phrase deserves repetition- the real issues are tribal and cultural, which no foreign nation can overcome.

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The Soviet experience in Afghanistan and the documents now in the hands of Ameican and Russian scholars from the archives. These documents show the commander of Soviet forces in Afghanistan Akhromeyev sent amessage similiar to General McChrystal's to the Soviet Politburo on November 13, 1996. It asked for more troops just as the soviets were in the seventh year of their nine year long Afghan conflict, with 110,000 troops unable to do more than control the provincial centers. With the rest of the country in the political control of the mujahideen. He told his commander in chief; To occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such avast land where the insurgents can just diappear into the hills." Victor Sebestyen points out that the scenes of the soviet's fighting were in places like Knadahar and Helmand provinces where the Americans are seeing the heavist fighting, in the south and eastern parts of Afghanistan. He also points out that the Soviet Defence Staff chief Ogarkov actually advised against the Soviet invasion from the beginning saying: "it will align the entire Islamic East against us, and mire us in unfamiliar, difficult conditions. But he was overruled by Brezhnev and cutoff in midsentence with the reply, "focus on military maters and leave the policy making to us." ...

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Kristof compares Pakistan to Bangladesh. Bangladesh he says has more girls in high school than boys, and compares this with only 3% of women in the Pakistan tribal areas who are literate. He points out that this may well be why Al Quaeda is in Pakistan and not Bangladesh. He asks if its so hard to build schools, then how is it that Greg Mortenson has built 39 schools in Afghanistan and 92 in Pakistan- and not one has been burned or closed down. The Afghan Institute for Learning he adds has 32 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with noen closed by the Taliban. Afghnistan needs nutritional support, irrigation, schools, education, healtcare just as badly as the rest of South Asia where one report says about 48% of the children under age of 48 are malnourished, just more desperately so.

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Wessel summarizes the existing thinking of the administration and its critics on ways to prevent the next banking crisis. The Shultz-Mervyn King School which says breakup the largest banks into smaller banks so they are not too big to fail. The Volcker school which says separate utility banking from thre risk taking banking of the trading desks of investment banks. And the Geithner-Frank school of avoiding these tough choices in the face of intense lobbying by the banks by glossing over the problem, their latest proposal suggesting that Treasury collect the bill of abank bailout from the remaining weakened banks in afinancial crisis of the future. But the Geithner -Frank solution still has Treasury, meaning the government footing the bill, as collecting the bailout from remaining banks that are weak in such a financial crisis may not be feasible. and it would further worsen the government's finances, raising questions about these proposals which may amount to doing a little better than nothing. In effect avoiding the tough choices of breaking up the larger banks or separating utility banking from trading desks of investment banks....

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55% of Chrysler cars went to corporate and rental fleets in Septemeber and incentives are higher than ever, both warning signs for Chrysler. New Fiat models are not due for another 2 years.

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WSJ's Amol Sharma and Paul Beckett interview Chandrasekharan of Tata Consultancy Services. TCS underwent a reorganization to be customer centric and to listen closely to customers. It sees opportunities in financial services as banks berge, in retail and in pharmaceuticals for knowledge intensive work such as analysis of clincial trial data. His vision is to expand development centers around the world, to meet the global tech needs of customers. He also wants to develop a complete suite of services so it can sell end to end offerings, covering software application outsourcing to infrastructure management to consulting and products. He says he can't serve aBrazilian company or a Chinese sompany from India, there are language, cost and culture issues. TCS plans are to pick a strategic location and then scale it up, with some like Mexico scaling faster than China.