Posted on 09/23/2011 10:28:59 AM PDT by Eyes Unclouded
Pakistan can and will say whatever it wants to to preserve the handouts it is getting from the American taxpayer. The problem is, in Islam, the Lie is a matter of state policy. It is perfectly legitimate to lie to infidels if it helps Islam to dominate them in the end....
They think we must comply with "the status quo" because they have nukes. In which case they are guilty of extortion....
There must be a better way to deal with the Pakistani nukes problem — most of which, in all probability, have "Destination India" written all over them.... But you never know.
I'm sick of this. I think it's time to stop sending American money to liars who are extorting from us and trying to undermine us in the process. It seems to me we can start by defunding Pakistan and the Palestinian Authority.
A pox on both their houses!
While we're at it, it may be time to defund the UN — which is nothing but a pack of anti-American vipers in our midst, guests of our nation....
JMHO, FWIW.
Thanks, Jeff, for your excellent essay/post!
Musharrif helped keep that under control and walked the tight line better in our interests. Now we have urged and helped him to be set out of power (sort of like we did in Egypt) and are witnessing the terrorists making bolder and bolder moves.
I believe we should take out the Pak nukes and cut all funding to them. They will dscend into civil war if we do...but at least, if God in Heaven continues to watch over us, they would do so without the nuclear threat should the islamic extreme jihadist come to power. If they do, I believe INdia will take a hand in it as well.
We should have been courting India much more aggressively all of these years in any case. Their interests are much nearer our own IMHO.
We are in for some hard years...probably harder than we have already seen as a result of these types of things on the foreign front. I pray the American people will continue to come back to their fundamental values and elect leaders who are strong, firmly roots in fundamental principle, and there for the right reasons so we can support them through the turmoil.
2012 will be absolutely critical in that regards...not to mention our own economy and internal problems as well.
Not fighting? Where have you been? Oh, watching CNN or MSNBC.
Carson troops say violence down at their posts in Afghanistan
September 25, 2011 11:26 AM
TOM ROEDER
THE GAZETTE
Fort Carson soldiers say they have seen a dramatic decrease in violence in one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous cities.
Violence in Kandahar, where the post’s 2nd Brigade Combat team has been on patrol since June, was down 70 percent in August compared to the same month a year ago, and followed a 38 percent drop in July.
“We are seeing it truly flourish here,” the brigade’s commander, Col. John Kolasheski, said in a telephone interview last week from his headquarters in Kandahar.
Kolasheski gives most of the credit to another unit of Fort Carson troops that helped quell the Taliban before 2nd Brigade arrived. But his soldiers, too, are going on daily missions to track down insurgents alongside Afghan government troops.
The reduction in violence during the “Fighting Season”, the hottest summer months when Afghans since the 1980s have left their farms to battle among themselves or fight foreigners in their mountainous nation, is a sign that the whole country could be turning a corner, the colonel said.
“Things here in Kandahar mark a course for the nation as a whole,” he said.
Kolasheski’s brigade replaced Fort Carson’s 1st Brigade Combat Team in Kandahar.
The bulk of the 3,800-soldier brigade is at work in the city and its surrounding provinces. Another contingent is working with NATO troops to train Afghan forces in the nation’s western provinces.
Soldiers in 2nd Brigade are battling the elements as well as the Taliban. Temperatures in the region remain in 100s this month after topping out above 120 degrees in August.
Troops are living in outposts alongside Afghan forces who are increasingly playing a role in security missions, Kolasheski said.
He said there are good signs that Afghans are warming to the American presence as the increased security allows normalcy to return to the war-torn city.
The first sign, he said, is the Afghans are increasingly willing to tip off Americans and their local counterparts to security threats. The brigade received 55 tips last month that helped them track down insurgent leaders and find roadside bombs before they detonated.
The unit has also seen a sharp drop in the willingness of the Taliban to engage in combat.
Last month the brigade had no significant fire fights with the Taliban, and saw no mortar attacks.
Bombings continue, Kolasheski said, but Afghan forces are becoming adept at finding the bombs and the number of bombings appears to be on the decline.
And locals are taking to the road in numbers that haven’t been seen for years in the region.
“I have been struck in traffic jams for an hour,” Kolasheski said. “People out shopping, out picnicking and visiting with friends and family.”
Make no mistake — Afghanistan remains a dangerous place and Taliban attacks in recent days have taken a heavy toll on the Afghan government.
Last week, a suicide bomber killed Burhanuddin Rabbani, the nation’s former president and the man who was leading a process to broker peace between Taliban fighters and the government.
Days before Rabbani died, he had been in Kandahar for a peace conference, Kolasheski said.
“It started the drumbeat about trying to get some of these fighters to lay down their arms,” he said.
Kolasheski said his soldiers are doing what they can to build tight bonds with the Afghan counterparts, noting that a stronger relationship will help thwart any Taliban resurgence.
One of the best tools to improve that relationship has been the volleyball. Kolasheski said the soldiers are living with Afghans on small compounds that aren’t large enough for big sports fields. The Americans put up volleyball courts, where they take on the Afghans in daily friendly combat.
“The Afghans are crazy for volleyball,” he said.
Through all the work, the colonel said, his soldiers have been too busy to really notice a huge Pentagon policy change that took hold last week that allows openly gay troops to serve in the military.
“Some soldiers will choose to disclose and some will not,” Kolasheski said. “It has not been a topic of discussion that I am aware of.”
—
Read more: http://www.gazette.com/articles/carson-125615-say-afghanistan.html#ixzz1Z4OMz2P1
From your lips to God's ear, Jeff!
Thank you so much for your excellent analysis — with which I totally agree.
Here’s another:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/09/26/international/i072853D27.DTL&feed=rss.news_world
SFGate
US Marines find rewards in Afghanistan
By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA, Associated Press
Monday, September 26, 2011
In this Sept. 24, 2011 photo, nearing the end of his unit... In this Sept. 13, 2011 photo, U.S. Marine Cpl. Robert Col...
An American in uniform stands near a landing zone at about 2 a.m., moonlight framing his features, and talks about dead and maimed men he knows. His flight out isn’t until next month, and he is counting the days.
Then he says he will miss Afghanistan.
“It’s just life or death: the simplicity of it,” said Cpl. Robert Cole of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, which ends a seven-month deployment in the southern region of Sangin in October. “It’s also kind of nice in some ways because you don’t have to worry about anything else in the world.”
The dominant narrative about war in a foreign land says its practitioners yearn for home, for the families, the comforts, and the luxury of no longer worrying about imminent death or injury. It applies to young American troops in Afghan combat zones, but it’s not the whole truth.
Combat can deliver a sense of urgency, meaning, order and belonging. There is the adrenaline-fueled elation of a firefight, and the horror of rescuing a comrade wounded by a bomb on patrol. It is magnified, instantaneous experience. An existence boiled down to the essentials mocks the mundane detritus, the quibbles and bill-paying and anonymity, of life back home.
Building on the costly inroads of a previous unit, the Marine battalion has seen a decline in Taliban attacks in Sangin, a southern Afghan area where the insurgency battled British forces to a stalemate for years. Now the troops have more time to build bridges and sluice gates, and sit cross-legged at meetings with Afghan elders in hopes of stripping the insurgency of popular support.
Early on, the going was hard. Cole said his platoon suffered close to 30 percent casualties, mostly from bombs hidden around its patrol base.
He described how one Marine on patrol triggered a bomb that severed his legs. Another Marine rushed forward to apply tourniquets, knowing his friend would bleed to death if he methodically checked, as training dictated, for more boobytraps in his path. The second Marine started dragging the first toward safety when he set off another bomb, severing his own legs, according to Cole. But he saved his comrade in the process.
“He didn’t lose his legs for his country, he lost his legs for his brother,” Cole, of Klamath Falls, Oregon, said bluntly. He gestured to another Marine in the dark at the landing zone at Forward Operating Base Jackson, the battalion’s headquarters.
“The only shred of sanity that keeps us going out here is that I have to protect his ass and he has to protect my ass,” said Cole, who is confined to the base after suffering concussions in two explosions.
Cole, 22, is not bitter. He treasures the fierce loyalty, born of bloodshed. Politics, the debate about the wisdom of the decade-long U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, the plan to withdraw international combat forces by the end of 2014, seem irrelevant to young Marines.
When they talk about friends with amputated limbs under treatment in the United States, they often stick to the line, “he’s doing really good right now,” even if they know that isn’t true.
“Get some!” is a Marine slogan, reflecting the U.S. military branch’s traditional taste for expeditionary action. On the night of Sept. 11, possibly to mark the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks in the United States, insurgents fired on guard posts at the Jackson camp. It was harassment, not a major attack. Marines returned fire in great volume, red tracer rounds plunging into the darkness.
“Watch your sectors!” warned a company captain as some Marines, adrenaline unleashed, broadened their sweep of fire from defensive berms. After a while, the shooting subsided. One Marine was asked: Is it over?
“I have no clue,” he laughed. “They can fire at us all night if they want, as long as nobody gets hurt.”
At Patrol Base Fulod, about a 15-minute ride in an armored vehicle from the Jackson camp, Cpl. Ernest Tubbs is something special among his peers. He has discovered three-dozen hidden bombs on this deployment. A smooth talker who radiates confidence, he remembered the first time he uncovered an IED, or improvised explosive device, “heart racing, so many emotions at one time.”
Tubbs, 22, of Parsonsburg, Maryland, leads patrols with a metal detector, potentially the most dangerous job in the lineup. In a small victory celebration, he smokes a cigarette whenever he finds an IED; he smoked two in a row after one very hazardous experience.
He is desperate to return to his wife and newborn son, and become a civilian, but he won’t forget what it is like to be a kind of savior, to know men depend on him for their lives.
“The feeling of when things happen out here, it’s a feeling that you’ll never get rid of. But it’s a feeling that will always belong to you,” he said. “There’s no more adrenaline rush in the world than finding an IED. I’m going to miss that a bunch.”
For families in the United States, there are no such thrills, only the grind of not knowing. Tubbs’ wife, Hannah, gave birth to a boy, Gabe, last month. Her husband’s oldest brother cut the umbilical cord. In an e-mail to The Associated Press, she wrote:
“Even when I was still pregnant with him I would tell him that his daddy loves him and can’t wait to meet him. I tell him who his daddy is and all about him. Being pregnant for most of the deployment didn’t help the emotional part of it all. It was hard getting ready for the baby without him. It was even harder to hear about guys who had been hurt or even killed knowing they did the same job as my son’s father.”
She continued: “His best friend is a triple amp (amputee) and another lost his life, he had not even been married a year. We kept in touch with his wife and she plans on being at the homecoming. There are no words that describe what families go through during a deployment. The days drag on when there is no phone call and your heart drops when there is an unexpected knock on the door.”
Some transitions to home are the hardest of all.
Walking past cornfields on a patrol, 1st Lt. Richard Marcantonio of Corpus Christi, Texas, talked about a Marine who lost three limbs in a bombing and was transferred to a military hospital in the United States. One day, his father walked in and handed his son’s baby to him as he lay in bed.
According to Marcantonio, the father said something like: “Here’s your child. I’m not going to bring her up, so you better do it.”
And, this story of tough love goes, the Marine is doing just that.
Some who come from rural areas in the United States feel a curious affinity with Afghanistan and its web of sparsely populated villages and farmland. Capt. Brian Huysman of Delphos, Ohio — “Good luck finding Delphos on the map,” he said — sees parallels between the “small town mentality” and rivalries back home and the jostling for advantage among local leaders in southern Afghan settlements.
“It’s very eerie,” said Huysman, Weapons Company commander for the battalion.
When these men are retired veterans, many will look back on Afghanistan as a place of loss, but also a place that made them better than they were, whether the U.S. military succeeds in its long-term goals or not. The cult of sacrifice finds expression in a shrine to the missing in action of past wars in the dining hall at Camp Leatherneck, the main Marine base in southern Afghanistan.
There, an empty chair sits in front of a table laid with white cloth and a place setting for one. On the bread plate, a notice says, a slice of lemon symbolizes their “bitter fate,” and salt stands for families’ tears. There are dog tags and an inverted drinking glass.
Cole, the corporal at the landing zone, said that in his time in Sangin, he had seen Taliban fighters only once, in a treeline hundreds of yards (meters) away, too far to fire on them accurately. Marines called for an air strike, but it was denied because there were children in the area. International forces have “rules of engagement” designed to avoid civilian casualties.
As Cole talked, the dark mass of an Osprey aircraft rumbled inward, its lights off to make it less of a target for insurgents. The back ramp was open, a tethered gunner at the edge with a mounted machine gun.
Dust and wind swirled, tossed up by churning rotors. The courteous corporal pulled a departing passenger into a half-embrace.
“Thank you for listening,” he said.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/09/26/international/i072853D27.DTL
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