Obama’s Afghan Plan Refuses to Embrace Victory
Obama’s Afghan Plan, Part I: A “Surge” in Soldiers and Civilians
President Obama’s ongoing “surge” in the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan has been public knowledge since its conception. In fact, the roots of the plan can actually be found in the final days of the Bush administration, which saw a greater emphasis on the Afghan front in what was then known as the global war on terror than had been placed there since before the coalition invasion of Iraq in late 2002. The initial thought, as publicly announced by Defense Secretary Robert Gates last November, was to send approximately 30,000 additional U.S. troops to augment the 38,000 already operating in the expansive, mountainous country.
Shortly after taking office, Obama ordered the number of troops deployed as part of that “surge” to be cut nearly in half, to 17,000. This combined force of soldiers and Marines will be assigned to areas of the country along the border with Pakistan, where the coalition has the least control and terrorist forces are at their strongest. They will be tasked with “preventing a return of al-Qaeda and its allies” to the area and with providing space and security for the national government to expand its hegemony into this largely warlord- and Taliban-controlled region of Afghanistan.
In addition to this 17,000-troop counterinsurgency force, Obama has assigned 7,000 more troops to Afghanistan to perform other critically important tasks. In February, the 3,000 soldiers that make up the 10th Mountain Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team (BCT) deployed to two Afghan provinces near Kabul, where they are operating out of coalition outposts in an effort to tamp down the insurgency-riddled east-central portion of the country. An additional 4,000 soldiers are now awaiting deployment to the region to serve as embedded Afghan Security Force Training Teams.
In Need of Reinforcement
There is no question that the coalition forces currently in Afghanistan, who are fewer than 30% in number than their counterparts assigned to Iraq, are in need of reinforcement. However, the size of the force being deployed to augment those already in theater is disappointingly small. Not only is the total strength of Obama’s 24,000-troop “surge” less than the number necessary to fill up half an American football stadium, but the total number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, once these deployments are completed, will stand at just over 60,000 – less than half the strength of U.S. troops in the significantly smaller and more cohesive country of Iraq before General David Petraeus’s “surge” was implemented there in 2007.
In fact, given that Afghanistan’s surface area is 120% that of Iraq with exponentially more difficult terrain (think of Iraq as California and Afghanistan as Texas plus the Hindu Kush mountain range), a “surge” of 24,000 troops is likely far too small to make any measurable difference in that country’s day-to-day development and security, even if they are employed correctly.
Further, the specialists being recruited for deployment to Afghanistan as part of Obama’s so-called ‘civilian “surge” — currently estimated at about 400 — are also likely far too small in number to accomplish what will be expected of them. If properly employed, this small number of specialists, who bring expertise in agriculture, law, and other areas to a region desperately in need of their assistance, could do a great deal of good in the few areas they can influence.
However, like the so-called “surge” of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, these specialists will need to be pushed out of the national and regional levels and into the expansive state’s agrarian, tribal localities in order to be effective — something career bureaucrats and government employees are notorious for their reluctance to do (for evidence of this, witness the revolt by bureaucrats within the State Department when faced with the mere prospect of deployment to Iraq’s secure International Zone in 2007).
Real Shift in Strategy Needed
Every bit as important to bringing about positive change within Afghanistan than the size of any troop increase is a shift in focus and tactics by those forces within the country itself. The core additional force of 17,000 soldiers and Marines will be placed where help is needed most (the largely terrorist-controlled provinces of Helmand and Kandahar) and will be presented the unenviable task of battling to wrest control of the area from entrenched enemy fighters and to forcibly shift the form of subsistence practiced there from opium poppy production to wheat cultivation (ostensibly with the assistance of some of those civilian agriculture specialists).
However, that is only one part of a necessary overall shift in Afghan strategy — something which the Obama administration, with its use of “counterinsurgency” as a largely meaningless buzzword in its strategic literature, has shown little sign of embracing.
In fact, given his public statements about the positive shifts in Iraq, it appears the new president has joined a large portion of the American populace in falling prey to the idea that the early 2007 “surge” in American troops deployed to that country was the bromide that squelched the terrorist resistance there and gave the Iraqi people the time, the resources, and the will to pull their ailing country together.
This meme, which was pushed by a mainstream media that sold the comprehensive strategic overhaul brought to the table by General David Petraeus and okayed by then-President Bush as being nothing more than a shipping-out of a few thousand more soldiers, was and remains an absurdly simplistic description of the massive changes made in order to provide the Iraqi people with both the security and the incentive to make the giant strides they have in the last two years.
Unfortunately, many conservative commentators desirous of aiding the rebuilding effort fell into this trap as well, adding to the overall perception by referring to the implementation of a brilliantly-executed counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) simply as “surge” — something which did little to disabuse the simplistic public belief that little actually changed on the ground in Iraq other than the uniformed U.S. headcount.
Halfhearted Approach Means Failure
If his senior military commanders, along with the mercurial Gates, cannot disabuse the new president of this notion and convince him to conduct a full strategic review and overhaul of the Afghan effort, Obama’s “surge” will be the antithesis of his predecessor’s, achieving few if any strategic or tactical gains and instead sending 20,000 more moving targets to this eastern combat zone.
If Obama’s “surge”ends up being less than an overwhelming success, even if it is due to a failure to implement a new, winning strategy for those troops to deploy in support of, it is likely that the calls for a mass withdrawal from the war-torn area and the key front in the war on terror will escalate.
A significant portion of the stated rationale for this renewed call for surrender will likely be the claim that the U.S. exactly repeated the strategy utilized in Iraq to such great success, and the fact that it didn’t work in Afghanistan proves that war to be “unwinnable.” Unfortunately, this claim’s extreme distance from the truth will likely be lost in translation and ignored in future messaging from an administration that has shown itself to be unwilling to endure either negative news or negative press.
‘However, while his predecessor, George W. Bush, had at least put forth a rudimentary concept of what success in Iraq — his focus in the GWOT — would look like (a nation that is “at peace with its neighbors, with a representative government that respects the rights of all Iraqis, and security forces sufficient to maintain domestic order and deny Iraq as a safe haven to terrorists”), Obama has repeatedly stopped short of defining success or victory as he sees it in his favored area of the war on terror.’
What’s amazing about this sentence is that it appears right after this one:
‘At a March press conference, Obama said his administration intended “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.”’
Sounds like a definition of success to me.
Nothing brings out the cognitive dissonance in right wingers quite as much as the Afghanistan operation: if Bush had shown this type of aggression against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, especially in chasing them down in Pakistan, the response would have been along the lines of “Finally!!! F*cking A!!!!” But Obama doing it only brings out wimpy, foot-shuffling comments along the lines of “Well…he’s not doing it right.”
And never mind how all this fits in with the screaming earlier charges of Obama supposedly being a weak appeaser (and it’s downright amusing how he and his people then so quickly transformed into “thugs” in dealing with the usual numbnutted shenanigans of the right wing over Obama’s domestic proposals, especially health care.)
Obama is falling into the same trap Lyndon Johnson fell into in Vietnam. Johnson always believed that if he threw enough men, equipment, and training into the war, then the Vietnamese would eventually come around and support the democratic cause. Problem is, it’s almost impossible to maintain democracy in a country that has never had it, or even come close to it. And it only worked in Germany and Japan because they unconditionally surrendered to us and because we never left. We’re still there over 60 years after the end of World War II. Think about that.
Afghanistan has been and will always be a fundamentalist Muslim tribal nation. Trying to change that will be like trying to stop the sun from shining. Even if we stay a hundred years, Americans and NATO troops will always be considered hated foreign infidels and will never be trusted. It is just the plain truth, America. Kabul will never be Los Angeles, no matter how hard we try.
Iraq may also not be much better off. True, the country is barely holding together right now, but talk to me in 10 years after the Americans leave. Iraq will probably fall back into its tribal warfare, with Sunnis killing Shias and the Kurds getting killed by both sides. Iraq was created after World War I and it never was supposed to be a nation. To expect three distinct tribal groups that have been killing each other for almost 2,000 years to suddenly stop and become one united nation is a stretch at best. The Iraqis will humor us as long as we’re there, then they’ll go back to their tribal warfare once we leave.
What we should be doing in Afghanistan is killing as many al Qaeda members as possible and then leave. Yes, leave. We should be following the model of Great Britain’s Lord Roberts of Kandahar, one of the few Western generals who actually tamed the tribes in Afghanistan. I know they’re out of vogue today, but Roberts mounted what was called a “Punitive Expedition” against the Afghans and defeated them. But once the tribes were defeated, he left, believing that the point was made. Anyone attacking Great Britain or British interests in the area ever again would face the same punishment as before, so the Afghan tribes basically left the British alone (not totally, but enough the make the situation in the area tolerable). Basically, Roberts went in, defeated his enemy on the battlefield, made a crushing military point, and then left. Some major authors (such as Ralph Peters and Michael Scheuer) support this view and I agree with them. We will never change the Afghans, the tribes that live in Afghanistan, or the way the Afghans live. But we can throw the fear of Allah into them and convince them that if they ever threaten the United States or its people again, we will come back and totally decimate their country. Sounds too harsh? Absolutely. That’s the point. But this close-knit tribal society steeped in Islam is never going to trust outsiders like us and they surely would never convert to Christianity. We have been in Afghanistan now for about eight years and I really think that the Afghans believe that we’ve overstayed our welcome. If they really supported NATO and believed in what we are trying to do, they would not tolerate the Taliban, they would turn against them, they would actively take up arms against them, and they would be their mortal enemies. But are the Afghans doing this? No, they’re not, and the Afghans who openly support America are definitely in the minority. The Afghans in the national Army are probably there for the money and the police force is probably as corrupt as the Taliban.
If we left wouldn’t the Taliban just take over again? Maybe, but who cares? So long as they don’t threaten the United States, do we really care what happens to Afghanistan? Freedom is not free and it doesn’t come cheap. If the Afghans don’t want the Taliban to come back into power, they won’t let them. If the let the Taliban come back, then they get what they deserve since they already know what life would be like under the Taliban. Either way, it’s not our responsibility to convert Afghans into community organizers from Chicago (although you could probably make the case that the ones from Chicago are more violent). We should simply tell the tribal leaders, “This is your country and do with it what you will. But if you ever threaten the United States again or if an attack is launched from your territory against the United States, then we’ll return and kill you all.” I think they will get the point.
To Libertyship46: Actually I’m in some agreement with you — the whole point of attacking Afghanistan in the first place was because the Taliban were protecting their “guest” Bin Laden and his people, and would not give them up. Ballsy, but it made them fair game for a punishing attack at the very least.
While this still makes them fair game as long we have good reason to believe they are still allied with and supporting al-Qaeda, this business with Pakistan puts a twist on matters. I had no idea how embedded both al-Qaeda and the Taliban were in Pakistan, a nuclear power, outside of the Afghan border area. I agree that trying to reform the Afghan political situation would likely be a tough and ultimately thankless job, and the task at hand should be all about taking out al-Qaeda, punishing its allies, and hunting for Bin Laden. That should be all about military considerations aside from minimizing civilian casualties. But Pakistan….I’m wondering about how really vulnerable are Pakistan’s nuclear facilities to attack and to Islamic fundamentalists coming into power in general, even regionally….
I don’t care. Just stop sending our people over there. These people know nothing but war. There will never be peace in the middel east. War is their life blood.
Nothing brings out the cognitive dissonance in right wingers quite as much as the Afghanistan operation: if Bush had shown this type of aggression against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, especially in chasing them down in Pakistan, the response would have been along the lines of “Finally!!! F*cking A!!!!” But Obama doing it only brings out wimpy, foot-shuffling comments along the lines of “Well…he’s not doing it right.”
Actually it brings out someone like me to point out that you are a clueless partisan. Obama is not doing anything different in hunting al Qaeda in Pakistan than Bush was doing.
If the war in Afghanistan could be won by America – and it can’t- it certainly can’t be won by a President and party so clueless that they were willing to concede oil rich Iraq to al Qaeda and Iran.
The war in Afghanistan can’t be won by America for two reasons. The only winning strategy is to stand down as Afghans stand up and in the meantime kill as many terrorists as you can. The problem is that Afghans aren’t standing up and America won’t wait until they do.
Iraq with a population of 25 million has security forces – army and police – totaling around 800,000. Afghanistan, with a population of 32 million has less than 100,000 security forces. And the Afghanis had a 16 month head start. America gave Bush all of three years to win in Iraq and then turned upon him with a vengeance when he failed to put down the insurgency as quickly as he should have – in the opinion of the grossly uninformed.
The suggestion that America will hang around in Afghanistan long enough to defeat al Qaeda is laughable.
The further we get from 9/11 the more it will be perceived (wrongly) as a one off.
We are engaged in classic COIN ops in Afghanistan – and unfortunately these types of ops are almost always long and drawn out. The failure of Bush and his neo-con advisers to recognize the strategic need for both COIN ops from 2002 – 2006 in Iraq and Afghanistan and to provide the man-power and material to support these ops basically means we are starting almost from scratch in these areas when we did make the appropriate adjustments. The use of local forces (similar to the Awakening movement in Iraq) is a good idea, but it will only work if there is a cohesive central government and army for them to work with. Otherwise we are simply arming another faction (or factions) that will help rip the country apart.
To Libertyship46 – Afghanistan is not Vietnam and what people seem to forget is that the US & ARVN won the counter-insurgency war in S Vietnam. It took massive, conventional campaigns launched from N Vietnam in ’72 and ’74 to take over S. Vietnam – with equipment and advisers liberally supplied by their super-power backers (the USSR and China). The Afghan army needs both size and quality – and frankly it is easier to address the size issue in the short term. Quality is a much harder target to achieve but on-going operations by the ANA will help address this as troops gain experience.
To BC – So we walk away and trust that the Taleban wont resume hosting and supporting terrorists? Any rational analysis of the attack plans from 9-11 would have shown that the US would respond with force in a massive way, but it didn’t stop the Terrorists then. Why would they act differently should they come back to power?
So we started a war in response to September 11 2001 with Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. However lately after retreating to Pakistan and border regions of Afghanistan they have merged with the Taliban and increased their strength and influence in those regions and are now attacking back with a vengeance.
We are not looking for a victory according to Obama, then I ask what are we looking for in this battle? This is not a game of chess we are playing it is a war! I am not surprised by someone who thinks that words will make a change in the world.
Wishing the enemy away will not stop what their objective is and that is to kill or convert our country to their ways. So we must simply eliminate their thought process and ways by elimination and Victory would be overwhelming force and destruction of them and their institutions (even if they are mud huts or caves). Let them know that any action will be met with such force that they will be destroyed with no questions asked. Not only that but we will hunt down all family members and remove them also. It is after all war and if war is what they wish then real war is what they will get.
“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” George S. Patton
Two things Mr. Obama and policymakers must remember:
First, no matter how many troops we deploy to the country, success will only come if we have an ultimate goal and a strategy to achieve it. A surge is meaningless if the people sent there have no clue of the strategy.
Second, battlefield victory does not in itself ensure strategic succeess, especially in a counter-insurgency operation. I highly recommend Andrew Krepinevich’s The Army and Vietnam. Krepinevich explains why the U.S. Army failed to win in Vietnam even with such a high rate of battlefield victory. We must remember that in non-conventional warfare the most important battlefield is the population not necessarily the traditional battlefield.
#7 Marzipan – The Summer’s thesis was discredited long ago. Only in a few areas was counterinsurgency operations even tried successfully in Vietnam. The U.S. Army brass thought it wasn’t worth the time or the effort. They only paid lip-service to it.
#3 Libertyship46 – Lord Roberts! I love it. Kudos!
The failure of Bush and his neo-con advisers to recognize the strategic need for both COIN ops from 2002 – 2006 in Iraq and Afghanistan and to provide the man-power and material to support these ops basically means we are starting almost from scratch in these areas when we did make the appropriate adjustments
This is moronic babble. Bush took the advice of his Generals. The Surge would not have succeeded without the Anbar Awakening. It normally takes longer than 5 years to put down an insurgency.
There is no Awakening in Afghanistan. There never will be. Afstans are not standing up.
You are a liberal. You let ideology rather than facts inform your opinion. You know nothing.
To Terry Gain: please, there is no resemblance at all between Bush’s dopey, short attention span effort in Afghanistan and Obama’s. Bush and his people, especially Rumsfeld, basically enacted a bombing campaign that only scattered the forces of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but lacked any serious follow-up — especially in regards to the strongholds in Pakistan — since, well, Bush was chomping at the bit to go after Hussein. It was the Taliban who were protecting Bin Laden, and not Hussein. If that sorry, bloody clusterf*ck of a war in Iraq wasn’t bad enough in and of itself, it gave respite to our real enemies — the ones behind 9/11. All we needed to was keep our eye on the ball, but….no.
And analogies to Russia don’t quite work since they had to deal with the slight complication of us supplying covertly the Afghan mujahideen massive quantities of advanced weaponry like Stinger missiles,
BC
Read my first post. The war in Afghanistan cannot be won unless Afghanis stand up. They aren’t. It isn’t Bush’s fault and it won’t be Obama’s fault when he admits this war cannot be won.
Everything you say is untrue. The Taliban didn’t protect al Qaeda. They merely allowed them to operate. The 2001 bombimg campaign chased both the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan.
The Taliban have come back in because the Afghanis have not tried to keep them out.
Al Qaeda decided to concentrate their efforts in Iraq – where they took a shit kicking at the hands of Americans and Iraqis fighting side by side. Leftists are so blinded by their ignorant hatred of Bush they don’t want to acknowledge the humiliating defeat suffered by al Qaeda in Iraq.
You know nothing.
BC
Read my first post and learn something. The war in Afghanistan is not being won because Afstans aren’t standing up. That wasn’t Bush’s fault and it won’t be Obama’s fault when things don’t improve under his predidency.
What you refer to as taking his eye off the ball resulted in the humiliating defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq and not just at the hands of Americans but of Americans and Iraqis fighting side by side. Some clustef**k – for you leftists who said that war was a diversion.
Some diversion alright. Saddam diverted from his plans for a nuclear Iraq. Libya diverted too. Not to mention the dismantling and diversion of the Khan network
American leftists like you are so power hungry you oppose your own country unless it’s led by your party. It colors everything you think, which is why you have no clue on Afstan or Iraq.
The fact you wanted to concentrate on Afghanistan when al Qaeda was in Iraq tells us all we need to know about you.
To Terry Gain: someone doesn’t seem to remember that al-Qaeda entered Iraq *after* we had invaded and *after* we let civil order went to hell. It *was* and *is* a clusterf*ck as far as:the BS reasons we gave to invade; the sectarian chaos we allowed to develop; how Iraq’s rival, Iran, lost their mortal enemy Hussein and gained a foothold in Iraq; and the insane amount of death and destruction the Iraqi civilians were subjected to, which included all sorts of outsiders like al-Qaeda coming in to join in on the fun. Hussein was basically just twiddling his thumbs at the time, and the only terrorists he ever supported were the Palestinians. He was no threat to us whatsoever and he was mostly concerned with Iran. That Bush apparently knew all this didn’t matter — he used 9/11 as a broad excuse to execute this stupid, standing PNAC proposal to remove Hussein. There is nothing “leftist” in pointing out lies and incompetence.
To Anonymous: The Taliban received and is likely still receiving lots of funding from al-Qaeda. FYI.
To Terry Gain: someone doesn’t seem to remember that al-Qaeda entered Iraq *after* we had invaded and *after* we let civil order went to hell.
That al Qaeda entered Iraq after the invasion is all the more reason why the United States had a duty – both moral and strategic to stay and defeat them. ( Typical of Democrats to vote for a war and then have no compunctions about leaving a mess rather than finishing the job.)
And Iraq is not a clusterf**k. You are repeating long discredited Democratic talking points.
Afghanistan is a land locked country where we have to fly and truck supplies in. The more troops, the more supplies. We don’t have enough transport to support more troops. Rookies talk about number of troops, professionals talk about logistics.
We went into Iraq to kill people. You see, the Jihadi believes they can win against a modern army cause God is on their side. The problem is even the most hard core Jihadi knows it’s hard to get to Afghanistan.
But Iraq is reachable by planes trains and automobiles. Most of the Jihadis that came died, those that didn’t and made it home weren’t so sure about God being on their side. We didn’t pacify Germany or Japan through love and kindness, it’s because we killed the majority of the hardcore believers in the process. What was left weren’t so hard core no more. Only the meek shall inherit the earth cause all the brave bastards died prior.
To Terry Gain: so you agree that our invasion caused massive civil chaos, including allowing incursion by al-Qaeda, but that this wasn’t a clusterf*ck because we stayed to fight them. So if I read this correctly, you’re saying that removing Hussein was job one and that anything beyond that was optional, therefore making us the good guys since we stayed behind to fight al-Qaeda, the Sunni’s and everyone else who had a beef with us, and *really* mess up Iraq.
Hmmm…forgive me if I’m not exactly convinced of the soundness of the logic and reasoning here.
I could win this war. Seriously. I could.
The problem is the focus on top-down strategy. The answer is to not take what you can’t hold. Start focussing on the villages. Get guys from their own villages to be part of the security force for their locality. Team them up with a couple Amis. The Amis stay there. The people get to know them. They don’t roam far afield. Think point defense. Think Germany’s hedgehog defense before Moscow in Winter ’41. It is very effective against an enemy who lacks large-scale battle capability.
We need to stop thinking in terms of brigades and divisions, and start thinking in terms of garrisons. Lots of skilled infantry backed by some heavy fire support to deny the enemy the ability to mass for an attack. A fire-team of infantry is more vakuable than a tank in these situations, because of the nature of the terrain, but also because of the need to interact with the locals.
Do this for a region at a time. That region will be pacified. It will also show progress, so people will continue to support the war effort. It would also allow us to affect the local culture by introducing some exposure to Western mentality. The greatest diplomats we have are our grunts. The courage, discipline, and humanity they demonstrate will go a long way, if the Afghanis are exposed to them long-term.
At the same time, we develop the economies of the region. Think micro-businesses. Doing all this wins the hearts and minds. It also restricts our casualties and multiplies the effectiveness of the few troops we can place there by augmenting them with more locals. It gives us better battlefield intel, because the locals know who the locals are, and so, eventually, will our troops.
The thing is to understand that the higher the level of command (government), the worse they get at running things. Government is the problem, not the solution.
Call it a checkerboard strategy. One square at a time. Take it. Hold it. Map out the whole country this way, starting with the road networks. Laughingly, we could say, “It takes a village.”
I could win this war. Seriously. I could.
Only Afghanis can win this war. We can only help them. What make you think you can get them to sign on? No one else has been able to.
—–
So if I read this correctly, you’re saying that removing Hussein was job one and that anything beyond that was optional, therefore making us the good guys since we stayed behind to fight al-Qaeda, the Sunni’s and everyone else who had a beef with us, and *really* mess up Iraq.
You have reading comprehension problems. I said that because al Qaeda had gone into Iraq (to create mayhem and derail the nascent democracy being created with the help of the United States) America had a moral obligation to stay and defeat Iraq – which we did, with the support of Iraq.
The beef you refer to was not just with us but with the establishment of a democracy. Al Qaeda announced it was going to create a new caliphate in Iraq. Instead it suffered a humiliating defeat and, because it tried to drive America out of Iraq by killing innocent Iraqis, al Qaeda’s reputation among Muslims was significantly damaged. There are several Pew Research polls which confirm this.
Hmmm…forgive me if I’m not exactly convinced of the soundness of the logic and reasoning here.
You’re forgiven. You’ve been educated (brainwashed ) by liberals and haven’t yet started thinking for yourself- as is evident by the fact you mouth brain dead Democrat Party talking points.
BC
As for your mess fantasy argument the war to liberate Iraq saved lives even as it was being fought.
Malone’s about the only one who seems to understand things. Folks talk about going in to kill AQ and then get out, but alas, you have to have intel on where they are. You only get that from locals and they have to trust you to talk to you. Get the soldiers into the villages and towns, back them up with QRFs and air support. Getting the men into the towns and villages means developing relationships with locals and seeing what things the locals need fixed(developement aid). From my readings(Michael Yon, Afghanistanshrugged.com, free range international) the army isn’t among the people, they are being micro-managed by lt. col., and the taliban are only really strong in a few areas. From my readings, the taliban will never regain control of the whole country without serious outside assistance. Lastly, McChrystal seems to have a clue, but COIN is a highly decentralized thing, and I question the folks lower down on the totem pole. I thing we have a lot of Cols. who would rather not lose guys than win the population over by being out amongst them permanently, hence the army sits in it’s FOBs and doesn’t engage the locals effectively.
We’ve lost a fair number of folks in afghanistan, if we don’t think we can create a functioning country out of it, then we should leave now, otherwise, we need to do this right. And clearly logistical concerns are numerous as Flesh points out.
On the issue of Afghan security forces. The ANP are not reliable and are often crooks. The ANF is better, but too few. In order to get the 350,000 to 400,000 men under arms that are needed, afghanistan will need billions of dollars a year to fund it. They aren’t wealthy enough to fund the number of forces needed to police and defend the country. They’ll have to rely on village militias and then create their own QRFs. Village militias are easy, as almost everyone in Afghanistan has guns.
Obama’s verbiage means nothing; Watch what he does, not what he says. His so called battle against terrorists is window dressing to make it look as if he really is against this incursion. He has sent a message to the Taliban by way of the statement refusing to use the words “victory” or “success”, that he will not fight them with lethal force. Therefore; the Taliban just needs to maintain the status quo on the surface, and reinforce their base covertly. The U.S. and NATO are supplying the Taliban with more training for future conflicts with the Great Satan.
Safe haven country nearby? Lackadaisical allies? Indecisive Democratic President? Spineless Democratic Congress? Military sent in not to win, but to not lose? Why, it sounds like Vietnam all over again! Our so-called Commander in Chief has obviously lost interest, since he foreclosed any possibility of victory. And Harry and Nancy never had any affection for the military anyhow. So, if the Vietnam model holds, we can expect the Democrats to cut off funding to the Afghans and our troops, sooner rather than later. At least we haven’t lost so many fine military personnel as we did in the Nam.
#21 Peter Montbriand – Thanks for the acknowledgment. They’re nice to get, time to time. I’ve had a few lately. Guess I’m on a roll.
Anytime Malone;). Were you military or are a civilian who studies?