Barack Obama faces a stark choice in Afghanistan: he can leave now with dignity or await the kind of humiliation that befell the Russians in Afghanistanor the Americans in Vietnam. It seems the US is fond of having a humble pie a day, every other day. We all thought we had read all that was needed to be read and said all that was needed to be said on Afghanistan. So much had been on the box on shenanigans of 'coalition of the willing over the past few years that nothing seemed a shock anymore. Yet the shock and awe of the WikiLeaks has taken our collective breath away. This is, perhaps, the biggest news story of our timeeven bigger than the work of whistle-blowers who made a name for themselves with stories like the raw video footage of US soldiers firing on a group of Iraqi civilians with gay abandon. That, by the way, included two journalists of Reuters, from the safety of their Apache gunship in the air. All three publications, The New York Times, The Guardian and Germanys Der Spiegel that got the exclusive rights to break the story after the WikiLeaks released it on web, agree that the Afghan mission of NATO is in far worse shape than admitted so far. Nine years after the cowboy coalition walked into the Afghan morass, eyes wide-shut and $300 billions of US taxpayers money spent, the mission remains impossible as ever. -SAYYID AHMAD HASSAN, Attock, July 30.