Congratulations you win the ACGA (Arm Chair General Award) of the day
Posted on 11/29/2006 10:09:20 AM PST by Clive
Monday morning brought news that two more Canadian soldiers had fallen in Afghanistan. A suicide bomber drove his car into a military convoy just outside Kandahar, detonating his lethal cargo alongside a Canadian armoured vehicle. Chief Warrant Officer Robert Girouard and Corporal Albert Storm were mortally wounded. Their deaths became the talk of radio and TV newscasts as the day wore on. By Tuesday, the full story reached Canada's daily papers and once again Canadians asked themselves why we have 2,300 troops stationed in the heartland of Afghanistan's terrorist insurgency, where 37 of our soldiers have died this year.
NATO officials responded to the news with suggestions that the incident underscores the need for more troops in Afghanistan -- troops who aren't encumbered by the mission limitation that hamper many of the NATO detachments currently serving in Afghanistan. But it also underscores a more urgent concern.
Such attacks earn media coverage for the Taliban insurgency. It is their best weapon against our soldiers. Beating Canadians in battle is no longer an option -- we are too strong. (In October alone, Canadian troops killed hundreds of enemy fighters in pitched battles.) The Taliban will beat us only if they break the will of the Canadian people to continue supporting the Afghan mission. On that front, unfortunately, the Taliban are winning.
In the most recent poll on Canadian attitudes toward the mission, Environics asked 2005 Canadians between Nov. 2 and Nov. 6 if they believe the Canadian mission in Afghanistan will succeed. Nearly 60% said it would not. Similar majorities said that we ought to break our commitment to the Afghan people and our allies to remain until 2009. In September, a similar poll conducted by Decima Research found that nearly 60% of respondents felt our troops "are dying for a cause we cannot win."
Populist politicians are listening. On Friday Liberal MP Keith Martin distributed a press release that declared, without evidence, that our troops "are losing" the conflict in Afghanistan.
Liberal party leadership hopefuls, with the exception of Michael Ignatieff, are lining up against a mission launched under former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin.
Bob Rae informed the Liberal caucus Thursday that he would change the Afghan mission, removing our troops from harm's way. Stephane Dion told the National Post editorial board last Wednesday that he would "change the mission in a way that will be much less dangerous for us." Gerard Kennedy also supports withdrawing our soldiers from Afghanistan's danger zones. NDP leader Jack Layton, and Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe feel likewise. All that now stands in the way of withdrawal is Stephen Harper's minority Conservative government.
Widespread support for the Afghan mission needs to be rebuilt. That can be done using simple, verifiable facts about the progress made in Afghanistan since the Taliban were defeated in November, 2001.
For example, more than four million refugees have returned to Afghanistan. GDP growth in the legitimate economy (excluding the drug trade) in 2002 was 29%, 16% in 2003, 8% in 2004, 14% in 2005, and it is estimated GDP will grow by 14% in 2006. In 2004, only 9% of Afghans had reliable medical facilities. Today, 77% do. Over 4,000 medical facilities, 661 basic health centres, 413 medical community centres, 66 district hospitals and 33 provincial hospitals have been opened since 2004.
More than 4,000 kilometres of highway projects have been built. Major power station projects are under way and more than 1-billion square metres of land has been cleared of land mines, opening up new farm land for cultivation.
In Afghanistan's September, 2005 election, close to seven million people went to the polls. The civil service is growing. There is more press freedom now than ever before, supported by five independent TV channels, one-government run TV channel and 290 newspapers. Close to six million Afghan children are in school, a six-fold increase since 2001. It should come as no surprise that most Afghans support the presence of NATO troops in their country as they rebuild their lives.
This story of success has gone untold at the price of public support for the Afghan mission in Canada. Support is also wavering in other NATO countries. The Environics poll in November showed that 60% of Canadians would support the mission in Afghanistan if they could be assured it was helping that country get back on its feet and that it guarded against a return of the Taliban. But most mistakenly believe the mission is making little progress.
Asked why more has not been done to take these successes to Canadians and other NATO countries through media campaigns, a NATO official responded "that's not our job."
It's about time it was.
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Can't be true. Musharraf just said we've lost and should surrender to the Taliban.
None of the above can be legitimately said of Iraq with the sole exception that we deposed a despot who deserved to be hanged. Anything that happened after that has become the textbook model for how not to conduct post-war operations. The list of disastrous and downright dumb policy decisions is long and has been repeated often enought that it doesn't require posting here. Our grunts, NCOs and officers in the field are good, dedicated and fight hard and well. They have been tasked to do what a force triple its size should be doing and they have been the collective victim of abject stupidity emanating from the White House and SecDef inner circle. It is now beyond remediation and cure.
Congratulations you win the ACGA (Arm Chair General Award) of the day
Canada is still occupying Quebecois two hundred years later and still hasn't rid it of all the loonies.
Canada should throw in the towel and re-deploy from Quebec.
That makes about as much sense as anything else it might do.
According to alot of recent coverage, Afghanistan is now being lost.. Resurgent Taliban, wobbly allies, wobbly US, it all depends on whose spin you listen to.
One does not, indeed cannot, simply forget or ignore his life's work and the learning and experience that came with it. My adult life from age 23 to 55 was spent doing those things that deal with the operational, planning and analysis of combat operations and geopolitical relations. Thus, yes, I am now an arm-chair general but with a sufficient background, training and experience to know something about which I opine. Accept it, reject it, ignore it or contradict it with an alternative, I really don't give a tinker's damn. The reality is that the observation is: (1) not mine alone but is an accepted conventional analysis of other of similar background and experience; (2) too obvious to be denied by all but the most ideologically fervent who are willing to accept whatever their favorite administration official tells them; and,(3) demonstrates the lesson of Groucho Marx as he challenged his wife when she caught him in flagranto delicto with another women in bed. He infamously asked the question that many ardent admirers of the president and Rumsfeld have already answered for themselves: ''Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?'' As with an ever decreasing few, you have apparently chosen not to believe your eyes, common sense and other sensory perceptors.
OK. We lost Iraq Occupation #1.
Announce Iraq Occupation #2, and start from scratch.
There's no reason to do that and, even if there were, it cannot be accomplished, the genie is out of the bottle and the bottle is broken and shattered.
Do you honestly think that this country could field a force of sufficient size to do that? We are over committed with what we can recruit now and we are running our reserves into the ground and driving too many good people out of the military due to excessive deployment and family separation.
The bottom line is that we never should have invaded a country that did not attack us and was not directly involved in the 9/11 operation. Especially because this required a nation building endeavor such as those which Clinton kept trying to get us into and which is not our job. Also, if Vietnam taught us nothing else we should have learned the lesson not to get into wars that the majority of citizens of this country will not support over a long period of time. "Oh but it is the liberal media's fault" - when was the liberal media's influence not apparent? If you want to wage an aggressive war which may take several years to tidy up, then you must expect the liberal media to oppose that and very soon, the majority of the American people will oppose it also. This Iraq war is degrading our military big time; it has cost us immensely in international relationships; it has aggravated the war on terror; we are defraying the cost to our grandchildren; it cost the republicans control of congress (which they deserved) and it turned what could have been a fairly successful presidency into a disaster. Anyone reading this who thinks I have no right to criticize might want to read my bio.
I correspond with other old intelligence and war planner types who are also out to pasture as well as a few of the retired generals who have voiced their dissent now that they too are able to do so. We learned nothing from our recent history as we rationalized those experiences as Cold War necessities.
I recently attended a reunion of a AF major headquarters command in which I served as asst. deputy chief of staff for contingency planning and later as deputy for intelligence. Without exception every retired senior officer with whom I spoke over that fun weekend indicated his agreement with the opinions I voiced in my post and which you share.
Every conversation revolved around the group's wonderment of the ignorance and arrogance displayed by the SecDef office and the meek submission of the JCS and its staff to the progressive and continuing illustration of proof that the SecDef's Pentagon ring of sanctum sanctorum isolation had become something so foreign to that which we knew not all that many years ago.
Even if we find a way to extricate ourselves from this morass with some degree of our international status, strength and integrity intact, the irreparable damage done will not be repaired in our lifetime; and likely not that of our children. The legacy every president so eagerly seeks for his years in The White House will, in this instance, always be overshadowed by the shambles he created and left in the historically unstable and combative Middle East. With our post war (after the deposing of the tyrant) ineptness and incompetence we have delivered no favor to our ally Israel and have created an environment where an excessive amount of our treasure and other resources will necessarily be devoted to the country that we broke (the Pottery Barn Rule--already more than $600 billion) and to thwart the cabal of tyrants in the region seeking to exploit our missteps and misdeeds from the pulling down of that statue forward.
The inevitable corollary is that our finite resources cannot be beneficially applied in other regions or to improve the life and economic health, military and diplomatic power or well-being of the American people.
"Anyone reading this who thinks I have no right to criticize might want to read my bio."
I did. Cool, you get to fly RC planes for a living!
So how are the Afghans doing fighting the Taliban?
It should come as no surprise that most Afghans support the presence of NATO troops in their country as they rebuild their lives.
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