Posted on 03/29/2015 7:30:20 AM PDT by Kaslin
If you're looking for gratitude from the Afghans, President Ashraf Ghani is your man. When he appeared before Congress Wednesday, he expressed thanks to American troops, their families, Congress, Barack Obama and "ordinary Americans whose hard-earned taxes have over the years built the partnership" between the United States and Afghanistan.
He couldn't have laid it on any thicker if he'd been using a trowel. Americans in uniform, he attested, "have come to know our snowcapped mountains, our verdant valleys, our windswept deserts, our parched fields, our unharnessed, flowing rivers, and our plains of waving wheat." He said, "Veterans will always be welcome in Afghanistan."
It may be a tad early to sell his country as a tourist destination. And I'm guessing that when veterans think back to their time there, it's not the amber waves of grain that will be uppermost in their minds.
Still, after nearly a trillion U.S. dollars spent on the war, it's nice to hear someone on the other end of the money pipeline acknowledge our sacrifices. It's definitely a change from Ghani's predecessor.
Though his government survived financially only through Western aid, Hamid Karzai was never happy. He accused the U.S. of carrying out terrorist attacks that it blamed on the enemy. He complained that we didn't provide modern weapons. He refused to sign the bilateral security agreement he had negotiated, providing a basis for U.S. forces to remain in the country. He even threatened to join the Taliban.
Karzai often brought to mind the 19th-century Austrian statesman Felix Schwarzenberg. When warned of the dangers of incurring a debt to the Russian czar, legend has it, he replied that his country would "astonish the world with the magnitude of her ingratitude."
Not that the Afghan president was congenitally incapable of expressing thanks. "They do give us bags of money -- yes, yes, it is done, we are grateful to the Iranians for this," he announced unabashedly in 2010.
He acknowledged getting bundles of cash from the CIA, too. Where Iran's money and ours went is an open question. Karzai and his family apparently managed to get rich during our time there. Last year Transparency International ranked Afghanistan the fourth most corrupt country on Earth.
Ghani's cooperative stance may be one reason President Barack Obama has decided to hold off the withdrawal of more than 4,000 troops that were supposed to come home by the end of this year.
But other reasons predominate. No one believes the Afghan are quite ready to take full responsibility for their own security. Having seen Iraq go from bad to worse following the U.S. departure, Obama is not willing to take that chance in Afghanistan. "We want to make sure that we're doing everything we can to help Afghan security forces succeed, so we don't have to go back," he said at a news conference with Ghani.
It's probably too much to think the postponement will change the ultimate outcome. But if Afghanistan is going to fall into even greater chaos and violence when we leave, Obama may prefer to let his successor take responsibility for the failure.
He is careful to minimize the shift in policy. "His plan to reduce the American military presence to about 1,000 by the time he leaves office in 2017 remains unchanged," reported The Wall Street Journal. If you believe that, I've got some oceanfront property in Kandahar to sell you.
The administration has gone far beyond what could reasonably have been expected of the U.S. Early in his presidency, Obama more than tripled the number of American troops there.
The troop surge was intended to break the back of the Taliban, give the Kabul government time to achieve self-sufficiency and establish enough stability for us to make a quiet exit. Yet here we are, five years later, still waiting for that turnaround.
In his memoir, "Duty," Obama's defense secretary Robert Gates said he favored the surge, which was accompanied by a plan to withdraw by the end of 2014. "I was convinced that we could dramatically weaken the Taliban and strengthen the Afghan army during that period -- and if not, then we probably never could." What part of "never" does the president not understand?
It was George W. Bush's war, but 75 percent of the U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan have died under Obama. That figure will rise before we are done, if we are ever done.
Obama said that Iraq was the wrong war and that Afghanistan was the right was.
This is Obama's war at this point (all though in his state of the union speech this year, Obama blamed it on Boosh and didn't discuss his own war in Libya or his demands for war in Syria or any of his other wars...).
It’s all about money now. We’ve committed billions.
If you're looking for gratitude from the Afghans, President Ashraf Ghani is your man. When he appeared before Congress Wednesday, he expressed thanks to American troops, their families, Congress, Barack Obama and "ordinary Americans whose hard-earned taxes have over the years built the partnership" between the United States and Afghanistan.
Afghan groups whom we support routinely practice the vilest sort of homosexual child molestation
Of course, Sodomy normalization is to destroy Christianity and Western Civilization. It is the total transformation of the USA.
When you force a vile, dehumanizing, irrational worldview on children (homosexual “marriage”) you destroy Virtue and warp the Reality of children-—the same as the minds of the young boys in the harems of Afghanistan).
Ideas matter and without Virtue there can be no Freedom. Afghanistan will never be “Free”-—it is sick and Satanic and the children’s minds are rotted-—like the minds of our children in public schools and glued to “Glee” TV with the programming of the proper “emotions” of the sodomites of Hollywood into our young boys—— to destroy Virtue and the possibility of Mature Masculinity in our children by normalize Vice-—just like in Afghanistan.
You have as many masters as you have vices. (St. Augustine). The purpose of obama has always been to make homosexuality into a Virtue which will transform 2000 years of “Justice”-—to the tribal, pagan systems where Slavery is Freedom and Vice is Virtue. Christian Worldview created the Age of Reason and the most perfect, free cultures in the history of the world.
Sodomy is using other human beings in vile, dehumaninzing ways which destroys the Soul and maturity and Virtue. Without Virtue in the people, there is no “Freedom” ever.
Ashraf Ghani is a capable man who understands what is needed to properly advance the nation. I knew him as Minister of Finance in 2003 and then President of Kabul University. His thanks are genuine as he understands what is required.
Thanks. My post was a single sentence from the original article, and had already appeared on the page.
IMHO this part of the world will, no matter how we attempt to interact with it, do nothing but take our money, spill the blood of soldiers or contractors or diplomats, and turn us right around to our comfortable 21st century digs. There is no clean end of the mideast turd we can pick up. We might have learnt that lesson from the Soviets in 1979, or Napolean in the early 1800’s.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.