The Iron Lady of Britain gives an advice to a superpower:

In many respects the challenge of Islamic terror is unique, hence the difficulty Western intelligence services encountered trying to predict and prevent its onslaughts. The enemy is not, of course, a religion — most Muslims deplore what has occurred. Nor is it a single state, though this form of terrorism needs the support of states to give it succor. Perhaps the best parallel is with early Communism. Islamic extremism today, like Bolshevism in the past, is an armed doctrine. It is an aggressive ideology promoted by fanatical, well-armed devotees. And, like Communism, it requires an all-embracing long-term strategy to defeat it.

The more important lesson is that the West failed to act early and strongly enough against Al Qaeda and the regime that harbored it. And because there is always a choice in where you concentrate international efforts, it is best that the United States, as the only global military superpower, deploy its energies militarily rather than on social work. Trying to promote civil society and democratic institutions in Afghanistan is best left to others — and since those "others" now include the British, I only hope that we, too, are going to be realistic about what can (and cannot) be achieved.

No matter how much I would like to think that colonial imperialism disappeared with the booting out of the American bases here in the early 90s, something like this comes along and proves how hard it is to get out of our colonial past.