The Penny Drops - but has Washington learned?

clipped from www.nytimes.com WASHINGTON — The nation’s top military officer pushed back Tuesday against Democrats who oppose sending additional combat troops to Afghanistan, telling Congress that success would probably require more fighting forces, and certainly much more time. What took the might of the Soviet Empire, the erudition of the British Empire a generation to learn, has taken Washington seven years. You cannot impose on the disparate and clannish Afghan people ideals and “standards” which their history has continually rejected without fundamentally changing the entire ‘psyche’ of the Afghan people. The only people to make an impact on the Afghans were the Mongols and they did it by imposing the strict code or law of the Mongol Empire that was universal under their regime. It read, 1- No gods supersede the Emperor. 2- All gods are equal under the Emperor, down to about 10 when it read 'all emissaries to the Court of the Emperor are to have safe passage under threat of death to perpetrators'. The Mongols enforced their law by recruiting the savants and mandarins from within the conquered nations, supported by the most mobile and terrifying army ever seen on Earth. For a brief period of time its' efficiency and thoroughness worked. Where were the educators, the police, the builders and the engineers behind the Army of Conquest led by the deluded halfwit Bush? In Bush’s bunker planning his next hideaway? Mongolians, however, know that their legal tradition embodies more than merely the writing of Chinggis Khaan. The Great Zasag Law, written sometime between 1206 and 1218, was for the most part a codification of the general principles of law already held by the tribes under his command. Except for the military and administrative innovations of Chinggis, it does not represent a sudden invention of the rule of law. Written and unwritten, laws had likely always played a significant role in the lives of Central Asia’s nomadic peoples, even reportedly as far back as the Third Century BC. Mongolia may not have existed as a single nation prior to its unification under Chinggis Khaan, but it did exist in the form of nomadic tribes, each of which had some form of unwritten traditional law. Chinggis Khaan had the foresight to have some of them recorded for posterity.