Afghanistan has never been kind to foreign armies, but after thousands of years of ethnic conflict, tribal wars and botched invasions, the good generals at NATO think they might have found the secret to victory: computer simulation. NATO has issued a tender for the latest in “simulation capability” that will “be able to model the Afghanistan engagement space in the Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure and Information (PMESII) domains” and “assess and validate how specific future events or actions could impact on the current situation through the creation and simulation of a hypothetical/simulated environment.” Basically, NATO (and yes, that that includes Canada) wants to play a big game of “Sim” and see what happens. As one retired colonel puts it: “They are smoking something they shouldn’t be.”