You never half-ass something and expect it to succeed...nobody in their right minds would- no matter what your political leaning is.
I would have rather our president had announced a full withdrawal of all our troops immediately than this.
The cost of our failure here will be lives- and worse yet, they will have been lost for nothing.
Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America's new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric -- and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.
We finished in Afghanistan before Obama ever got elected when we lost bin Laden's trail in my opinion.
The Taliban were already there pre-911 and we didn't care about them then and they had nothing to do with the 911 attacks directly or any knowledge of the plan they merely allowed bin Laden to hide out there and they didn't trust him any more than he trusted them.
He supposedly had some of his followers infiltrate their ranks to keep him forewarned of any attempt on their part to turn him in and it is suspected he had men in the Pakistani version of the secret service in the Musharraf administration for the same purpose. Chances are they are still there in the current government now and one of the big concerns is they could assasinate the leaders there if they compromise bin Ladens safety.
So from this day forward, all troops that die there are on Obama's shoulders. By his inept proclamation of fleeing Afghanistan in 2011, Obama simple shows he is unfit to lead this country in time of war. The sooner he gets impeached and dons his clown suit, the better.
I watched the PBS special on LBJ and Vietnam a little while back. They played most of the tapes he recorded while in office in which he discussed policy options with various friends, officials and cabinet members. He was desperately trying to decide whether or not to escalate and send more troops to Vietnam. Well, what our President is doing NOW is deja vu all over again. Obama's reasons for surging the troops in Afghanistan are damn near EXACTLY the same twisted reasons as LBJ's. They never seem learn from their mistakes.
Except TC, the surge in Iraq worked. Unfortunately, whereas McCrystal asked for 80k troops, he will only get 30k. Afghanistan is nothing like Vietnam so try not to compare the two in even broad strokes.
VietNam was a \"Policing Action\" and was fought that way. THAT is why we got our asses handed to us. We didn't dare declare \"war\" as we feared China and/or the USSR jumping in to help their communist buddies.
Afghanistan is entirely different. It's a declared war (on a group of people not a nation)
The question is, would we allow oh.. say Australia ... to come in and fight a war on our soil if a group of terrorist were pigeon holed on the Canadian or Mexican-USA border?
Substitute the words 'Taliban' or 'Al Qaeda' for 'Communists' in most of LBJ's tape transcripts and you get THE SAME REASONS Obama's mouthing for sending in more troops! Aren't we in Afghanistan to train the police and military to fight for themselves? We even have the same corrupt government the locals hate situation in both cases, although the Vietnam government turned over with coups mulitiple times. Sounds like Vietnam all over again to me. We're even bombing the nation next door, Pakistan, (Cambodia back then) against their wishes, in order to get at 'Al Qaeda' insurgents, cough 'Communists'. We sure as hell aren't in there to get Bin Laden any more. And yes, BUSH EFFED THAT ONE UP!
Yes Duper, I agree with you, we wouldn't allow that to happen in the U.S., so why are we doing it in Afghanistan? If some other nation came in weapons blazing on our soil to fight 'terrorists', all so they wouldn't have to do the dirty job within THEIR own country, they would not only have to fight the 'terrorists' they seek, but us, the U.S. citizenry, as well.
I wasn't implying that we wouldn't. I was asking for input. We might allow it. who knows.
Afghanistan is a complex situation that involves more than just the Taliban. The country is in basic economic ruin and was long before we ever showed up. In many cases, they will do what ever the highest bidder requests. If it were not so, we would have finished this when we had only 40 special ops forces in there.
Now, we are in the process of assisting building the countries infrastructure. We will probably never eradicate the Taliban. They are fueled a radical ideology and in that part of the world, that kinda thing tends to breed well. The plan, as I've heard it, is to train them and get out with minimal support. ... so they can come after us later.
Yep, the 'Domino Theory'. 'If you let them survive and rebuild, they'll just convert more countries to their way of radical thinking'. Maybe if we hadn't used and discarded the Taliban as cannon fodder (Muhajideen as we used to call them) for our own purposes, mainly to roust the Soviets from Afghanistan years back, maybe they wouldn't hate us NOW.
The Soviets kept the proverbial boot on the neck of similar people for 50+ years (serbs and croats), the Soviets in their occupation were much more abusive and violent and flat out murderous than we would ever be, when they lifted the boot those people went right back to their old conflicts and racial divisions and took up ethnic cleansing as a sport!
Why anyone thinks Afghanistan would ever be different for us is beyond me!
Even those same ruthless Soviets, when they had an interest in controlling Afghanistan, couldn't get the job done thanks to the devotion to war of the people there and our arming and fueling the struggle from the safety of the outside. The Russians are now poised to exchange roles with us if we are so stupid as to try and stay there.
The Taliban are what they are, unless we want to take the whole place permanently we should bust in, get what we want and bust out.
bin Laden there? Bust in and get him!
No? He's not there anymore? Get the F out!
The Taliban decides to go global and starts to export it's terror upon our interests the way Iran has done for years? Bust in and break the place up and bust out as quickly as possible!
That should be the only plan we have for that region and it took me all of two minutes to put it together and it's 100 to the tenth power better than Obama's or Bush's plan.
And that's where we messed up Will. Then the Afghani's sold out on us when we were within grabbing distance of Bin. We should have left rather than ship a butt load of troupes over there.
actually there are a lot of things that say failure more (and I agree Obama is one)
#1 that comes to mind are your mind-numbing contentless posts that are devoid of creative thinking and consist largely of regurgitated coffee table neo-con sean hannity blow job points. good job on being a muppet copycat sheep for life.
