the wanderers

General McChrystal, late supreme commander in Afghanistan, on how we came to be there:

I felt like we were high-school students who had wandered into a mafia-owned bar.

Comments

[ajay]

I have noticed before that "basically nice kids wander into an ancient land of which they know nothing, get equipped with high-tech weaponry, plunge into the middle of a civil war, kill thousands, and somehow end up staying there for decades trying to run the country as things get more and more complicated" is the plot of both the Afghan War and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

[Chris Williams]

I've not read the whole book, so I might be taking this out of context, but it seems that the phrase "after bricking the windows, clubbing the bouncers, and putting a gun to the barman's head," is unaccountably absent from the analogy.