[Alberta's Child]

NATO is engaged in Afghanistan because a NATO member was attacked by a terrorist organization harbored by Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. That is totally within the NATO charter. That was the whole purpose of the alliance.

That's true, but I also think it's more of a formality than anything else -- since NATO has also been used in ways that have nothing to do with the mutual defense of its member nations. I've always viewed NATO as little more than a legal/diplomatic mechanism under which the U.S. has basically been given carte blanche to conduct a benign military occupation of Europe for its own interests. There's nothing wrong with that, but it makes no sense to pretend NATO is something other than what it really is.

[LSUfan]

You must have slept through that whole “Cold War” thing.