blackascoal
The Force is With Me
Wow rare that I do this, but you are so wrong here. Sometimes war can't be helped. When we first entered Afghanistan we kicked the shit out of the Taliban, then SF and Damo's president dropped the ball and went to a country that had nothing to do with 9-11.We have to go back in and we have to crush the taliban. The Afghan people don't like them even more than they don't like us. When we left Karzi (sp) alone he had to soften his stance toward the Taliban and now they are back. It is sad that war kills civilians, but I think that lots of peace advocates think that Soldiers don't feel that. Speaking as a former soldier, they do, very deeply. Leaving the Afghan people to the harsh treatment of the Taliban is on par with what we did to the Kurds after the first Gulf War. I helped train a company of Kurdish fighters prior to that and I know that most of them probably died because of our abandoning them after we promised to help them. Maybe we shouldn't have gone there but we did, and as the sign in the antique store says, "You break it, you buy it." We have a moral obligation to the people of Afghanistan to gut this out and finish the job.
Replace "Afghanistan" with "Iraq" .. same speech .. and headed to the exact same consequences.
Lowering Expectations for the War in Afghanistan
Time was kind to the U.S. over its invasion of Iraq: the Bush Administration was able to waste four years pursuing misguided strategies there before finally getting things right last year and turning the situation around. But the new U.S. military approach to winning the war in Afghanistan is likely to take years, if not decades, to bear fruit, and there are growing signs that America's patience is fraying. On July 23, Vice President Joe Biden acknowledged that a lot more sacrifice would be required of Americans, but he insisted that it was worth the price to "straighten out" the Afghan-Pakistan border region because of the terrorism threat it potentially represents to Europe and the U.S. Still, American officials are lowering expectations after nearly eight years of fighting in Afghanistan, insisting that progress rather than victory is the best that can be achieved over the coming year.
"We've seen the security for the Afghan people deteriorate over the last three years," Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told troops during a visit to southern Afghanistan on July 17. "We have to start to turn that tide over the next 12 to 18 months." Even as Mullen was hoping for a year and a half to turn things around, Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged on the same day that the U.S. public is war-weary and that progress must come quickly. "After the Iraq experience, nobody is prepared to have a long slog where it is not apparent we are making headway," Gates told the Los Angeles Times. "The troops are tired; the American people are pretty tired."
Gates and Mullen face a raft of festering problems in Afghanistan: the Taliban and its allies are growing stronger, and they have killed 35 U.S. troops in the first three weeks of July — more than in any month since the U.S. invaded in October 2001. The Afghan government is salted with corruption, while its prisons are hellholes that turn citizens against their government. Pakistan remains a safe haven for launching attacks against U.S. and NATO troops in eastern Afghanistan, and despite the Obama Administration's strenuous efforts at persuasion, Islamabad shows little interest in extending its campaign against domestic extremism into a fight against the Afghan insurgency.
... a report released on July 22 by the independent Center for Strategic and International Studies says much more needs to be done. This Washington-based think tank is no bunch of liberal do-gooders; it's run by John Hamre, a former Pentagon deputy secretary who also serves as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, which advises Gates on national-security issues.
The author of the report, military expert Anthony Cordesman, pulls no punches. "It's very clear we haven't put the money in to win, we haven't put the troops in to win, and we haven't given the Afghan security forces the resources to win," Cordesman told TIME on July 22. His 28-page study, titled "The Afghanistan Campaign: Can We Win?," raises strong doubts about Washington's willingness to do what he thinks is needed to prevail. Its conclusion is bleak: "The odds of success are not yet good, and failure is all too real a possibility." And Cordesman isn't some ivory-tower critic — he recently returned from a month in Afghanistan, where he served as a member of McChrystal's strategic-assessment group.
The Afghan army — now 86,000 strong with a goal of fielding 134,000 — actually needs 240,000 troopsk, and the 82,000-strong Afghan national police force needs to grow to 160,000, Cordesman says. And time is running out. "The situation has deteriorated into a crisis where the Taliban and other jihadist movements are now winning," he writes. "The steady deterioration of security has now reached the crisis level."
more at link --
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1912483,00.html
Rising Casualties Raise Doubts Among U.S. Allies About Afghanistan War
http://cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=51527
What we're going to end up with is another American war that the rest of the world wants no part of and the Afghani people cheering the needless deaths of more young American soldiers.
This is not a Hollywood movie where the calvary rides in .. this is real and there are real people dying .. for profit.
