Obama’s Delay Is Turning Afghanistan Into A Quagmire

Young Gun Conservative ^ | Gribbit

[YoungGunConservativeRadio]

Barack Obama we are told is a smart man. He attended Columbia University and Harvard Law. He lectured Constitutional law at the University of Chicago, but does any of this qualify him to be Commander-in-Chief?

On the campaign trail, candidate Obama famously called Afghanistan the “good war”. But the truth of the matter, Afghanistan was the stagnant war. The enemy shifted its focus to Iraq because that is where we chose to fight. The Taliban and al Qaeda where chased out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan and needed to be regrouped. So they called on Islamic “freedom fighters” to engage the mean old United States in its war against Islam in Iraq. Iraq for all the left’s bitching was the front line of the Global War on Terrorism...

[Huck]

We’re going on 7 years now, and it’s just becoming a quagmire?

[Frantzie]

He is bowing to his Saudi masters to humiliate the U.S. military for his Islamic overlords.

Judge David Carter are you listening? The military needs to demand proof and a BC. The next move is gays in the military.

These people are evil.

[TomasUSMC]

The next move is gays in the military

//////////////
You know with the current HEARTS AND MINDS campaign in Assistan, how will our generals explain to the religion of peace that we have infidel open homosexuality in our Army serving on their holy moslem turf?

Seems like it would go against obambi’s moslem teachings.

[piytar]

Yes. We’ve lost less than 900 troops in Afghanistan in those 7 (actually 8) years. While each loss is horrific, we’ve lost far more troops to on and off duty accidents and disease over that same time. However, if zero follows the Vietnam model, which he is doing by ignoring the military experts and making no decisions, we’ll lose FAR more than that over the next year. I’d say that qualifies as a quagmire...

[o-n-money]

Ted predicted this.

[TomasUSMC]

YOUR RIGHT

These new ROEs are killing OUR troops instead of the enemy. General McCucoo is kissing obambi’s butt ......

NO CLOSE AIR SUPPORT
NO ARTY
NO ATTACKING MOSQUES
NO ENTERING HOMES

[nathanbedford]

This article is crap.

It's Historical allusions to both Truman and Johnson are nonsense:

Examples – Harry Truman’s inability to win in Korea led to years of stalemate and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded because the President couldn’t pull the trigger.

Pull what trigger? Nuclear trigger? Invasion of China? The illusion is so wide of the mark that it undermines the author's entire position on Afghanistan. Far from being unable to pull the trigger, Truman had the courage, for whatever reason, to go to the defense of South Korea when he had not the resources properly to do so. He pulled the trigger all right with this decision in the teeth of much Congressional opposition especially from his own party.

LBJ’s micro-managing of Vietnam led to hundreds of thousands of names on a granite wall in Arlington, Virginia.

This assertion is so preposterous it requires no comment whatsoever.

The author might have considered whether engaging in door-to-door combat in Iraq or mountain fighting in Afghanistan, and exposing our boys to IED's in both places, are exactly the kind of conflicts in which a terrorist organization such as Al Qaeda would wish to engage us. The author might ask if trading body counts with 1.6 billion potential terrorists is a way for us to fight an asymmetrical war.

US forces are now needed in mass in Afghanistan or all will be lost.

All of what will be lost? What is a strategic objective? If we left Iraq prematurely as the author implies, does that mean that terrorists will filter back into Iraq because Americans left? What does that mean after we "win" in Afghanistan? Can we "win" in Afghanistan without winning in Pakistan? How in the hell do you propose to "win" in the mountain vastness of Waziristan?

It is well and good to bash Obama for his shortcomings as commander-in-chief and for his shameful elevating of politics over national security on this issue. But please, please let us not present ourselves to any independent who might be reading this thread as a bunch of mindless, reactive, troglodytes who accept crap for rational thinking and historical reality.

There is an argument to be made for a surge in Afghanistan but for God's sake let us not endorse crap.

[matthew fuller]

"LBJ’s micro-managing of Vietnam led to hundreds of thousands of names on a granite wall in Arlington, Virginia. "

Gribbitt was off by several thousand here, but otherwise, a very good and correct analysis of our idiot de facto president.

[Huck]

Is troop loss the way to measure a quagmire? I wasn't even thinking along those lines. We lost hundreds of thousands in WW2, and that was not a quagmire.

As I see it, a quagmire is when you get bogged down in a fight with no clear path to victory, no clear definition of victory, with tepid support politically, lacking the will to win, and lacking the will to leave. And so it muddles on, with no end in sight, costing lives and money we don't have, indefinitely. That to me is a quagmire.

[nathanbedford]

As I see it, a quagmire is when you get bogged down in a fight with no clear path to victory, no clear definition of victory, with tepid support politically, lacking the will to win, and lacking the will to leave. And so it muddles on, with no end in sight, costing lives and money we don't have, indefinitely. That to me is a quagmire.

That bears repeating, so I did.

The commander-in-chief does have a role. His role is to identify victory, that is to define it. He must adopt a strategy to attain victory, usually crafted by our professional military. He must articulate the vision of victory and the path to victory to the people so that they support the effort enough to sustain casualties and costs through to the end.

Obama has the enthusiasm to do this for healthcare. In that effort he has obviously been inept. He has obviously not the enthusiasm to do this for Afghanistan. And this is where he has failed his office and the people.

[Huck]

You’re right about Obama. Even where it’s something he cares about, he’s a failure as a leader. But when it comes to Afghanistan, it seems to me it’s been a quagmire in the making from the start.

[GloriaJane]

[nathanbedford]

I agree with that sentiment entirely and for the reasons expressed in this post some time ago:

There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and we cannot kill all of them. The way to deal with any Islamic (Islamicist) movement is to enlist the sane Muzzies to liquidate the insane Muzzies because we have convinced the sane ones that if they do not police the crazies in their midst, we will kill them if the crazies do not. Even if we could kill them all, the mothers of America will never tolerate the kind of casualties required to do so unless you want to go nuclear in which case we in America will not be able to tolerate ourselves..

It’s time to get down to the business of thinking about America's strategic interests. What do we want to accomplish in Afghanistan? Obviously, we want to leave a country in place which does not support terrorism. That would be nice, but does it make us any safer? No. Because, so long as Waziristan provides a sanctuary for terrorism, it doesn't matter whether the terrorists also have Afghanistan. The problem compounds, if you want to leave Afghanistan a place which is not safe for terrorists you must also convert northwestern Pakistan into a place which is not safe for terrorists. If one of these places is not permanently "pacified" the other will equally not be pacified.

How do we propose to do that, with American boots on the ground? With 50% of America against the war in Afghanistan, what percentage of America do you judge will support putting troops into Pakistan? Assuming you can get public support for putting troops into Pakistan, can you be sure that the Pakistani government will not oppose our troops? Can you be sure that the Pakistani government will not threaten to use nuclear weapons against our troops? Even if such a threat were hollow when made, can we afford to disregard it? Can you see an end game to the pacification of Waziristan? I cannot. Neither could Winston Churchill more than a century ago.

Could it be done with drones and conventional air power working in close alliance with the Pakistani government and with some tribes in Waziristan? I do not know. As in every war America fights, we are in a foot race between our own casualty count and the enemy. Some might argue that the Serbs were pacified by air power alone, but is Afghanistan the same as Yugoslavia? Does not history teach us that "pacification" unavoidably means occupation? Have we figured out how to do that in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan without unacceptable casualty counts?

If casualty counts are not problematic enough, do we have the money? How broke are we? Is the debt growing to $11 trillion? Will the entitlements inexorably carry us to $26 million, as recently reported? It has now become a real question whether we can finance such a war.

While we are exercising our vision about how to pacify Waziristan, can we be sure that our efforts will not radicalize the reasonably sane portion of the Muslim population of Pakistan further against America? Will it turn the military against us? The Secret Police? What about those people who control the nukes? How much would take for people like A. Q. Khan who sold nuclear secrets to turn over some nukes to the Taliban or other terrorists in retaliation?

Would an American invasion with ground forces into the Northwest of Pakistan make that more or less likely? How do you know? But can we conduct our foreign policy out of fear or should we simply pursue our own best interests and let the chips fall where they may? According to Michael Scheuer, ex-of the CIA and responsible for watching bin Laden, we are not acting and have not been acting in pursuit of our own interests for years. He says that's why we are fighting these wars in the first place.

So we come back to my initial premise which is we must enlist the sane Muzzies to fight our war for us. We cannot win it alone. The way we enlist support from Muzzies is to show them who is boss. They respect power and they despise appeasement.

But let us not deceive ourselves. It required only 19 Muzzies to bring down the World Trade Center and kill 3000 Americans. We can kill all the Muzzies in Afghanistan, and they will still be able to scrape up from somewhere among the godforsaken corners of the world another 19 Muzzies to deliver what this time might be a weapon of mass destruction. And that weapon might just come from Pakistan. We cannot hope to conquer and hold every square inch of territory between the Atlantic coast of Africa and the western border of China in order to stop the formation of a terrorist squad only nineteen men (or women) strong.

So the war is primarily a war of intelligence. After we wring all the benefits we can out of our listening devices, we need indispensable local knowledge. Human intelligence must primarily come from the Muslim world because they have the language, the culture, and the tribal affiliation which we could never hope to penetrate. But we can hope to suborn them, turn one tribe against another, as the French did in North America and the British did so successfully in India and Pakistan. But conquering and holding territory is not the answer; it is probably not even the means to the answer.

A war of intelligence is primarily a war of alliances.

So when we do our strategic thinking about what the interests of America are in places like Afghanistan, we ought to consider what our goals are there and how we can accomplish them. Putting boots on the turf and holding it as an end in itself is worse than useless, I fear it is self-defeating.

Putting boots on the ground and fighting only to a stalemate is the equivalent of defeat because it unnerves our allies, encourages our enemies, and dispirits our grieving mothers. Rather than intimidating Muslim governments to cooperate with us, it encourages them to pander to their street. Intelligence suffers. When intelligence suffers it actually makes us more vulnerable, not less.

Whatever we do, must be done decisively and successfully or not at all.

Until we're able to answer fundamental questions and articulate exactly what troops there in Afghanistan can accomplish and at what cost, we are just spending blood and treasure without purpose.

[PhilDragoo]

Yes, he has appeared on many shows, done any number of primetime speeches for his healthcare project.

He's rebuffed his general and instituted crippling rules of engagement.

Although he thinks he's keeping a low profile in that theater, he's telling the opposition fighters to keep fighting.

Osama in his 1998 ABC interview explained his fighters were heartened by the rapid retreat from Mogadishu.

There may be something of a parallel with the comfort which Colonel Bui Tin took from the growing opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Obama has removed the phrase War on Terror from the lexicon.

Napolitano speaks of man-caused disaster.

Does Obama see any need to be in Afghanistan.

In March he expressed interest in negotiating with the Taliban.

His major foreign policy figures Brzezinski and Gates coauthored the 2004 CFR paper Iran: Time for a New Approach calling for negotiations.

He has received the Nobel Prize for Peace because he defined himself as a Citizen of the World.

I posit his desire is to finesse the matter with nonmilitary means, as he is antimilitary in his thinking.

In my view he is also antiAmerican, denigrating American interest at every opportunity.

He has also expressed a distaste for the concept of victory.

What in his psyche can make the deck of the Missouri sixty-four years ago so awful.

At present it appears there is greater likelihood that homosexuals in the military will be allowed to self-identify than the tens of thousands of additional forces will be provided.

Obama does not surprise.

He has told us in fifty-two seconds what he will do.

It has much to do with renouncing leadership, cancelling weapons programs, pursuing diplomacy with America's avowed enemies.

It has nothing to do with victory for any given American endeavor.

In the ever more uncertain world, we may rely upon Obama's steadfast pursuit of American decline.

[mkjessup]

Excellent points you've made.

The fact is, Truman chose to allow U.S. forces to defend South Korea under the flag of the United Nations for the first time, and we can see the results of that train wreck.

Truman knew something that MacArthur did not, when the General was pushing for expanding the war, and that was the fact that the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal at that time consisted of 13 and only 13 atomic bombs of the Nagasaki 'Fat Man' design. If America had used those weapons on the ChiComs and/or North Korea, it would have given a green light to the Soviets to over run the rest of Europe.

Mac wasn't able to get behind the policy of the President, and that is why he was fired. A great General? Absolutely, but he painted his President into a corner and left Truman with only two choices; fire MacArthur or leave the Presidency permanently weakened for not exercising the Commander-in-Chief's authority when necessary.

As for Johnson? All he had to do was listen to General Curtis E. LeMay, who said in May 1964 "Tell the Vietnamese they've got to draw in their horns or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age."

LeMay knew how to win a war, it was that goddamned Robert McNamara who knew only how to LOSE one.

[nathanbedford]

I am sporadically dipping into a biography of Mao which argues persuasively that Mao precipitated, or at least lobbied Moscow to authorize, the invasion of South Korea precisely in order to create a quagmire which would drain American lives and resources. The trade-off for North Korea or China in lives was a matter of moral and political insignificance to the communists involved.

Without judging the firing of MacArthur one way or the other, it is accurate to say that the war settled into a war of attrition after his departure in which we were fortunate to find Ridgway who managed to stabilize the situation and bring the war to a stalemate along the geographical lines on which it had begun. In that sense, Truman's war aim-to deny an invader the fruits of its crime- succeeded. But so did Mao's.

The real and true failure of Truman was to permit the United States military atrophy to the point where it could not even field a couple of divisions and some United States Marines in Korea in a reasonable time.

There is strong evidence that Lyndon Johnson committed the nation to the war in Vietnam under a twin set of false premises: first, there is evidence that he knew that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a fraud; further, he was motivated to engage in a war that he thought might be a quagmire of the political fear of being labeled the president who lost Southeast Asia in the wake of the Democrat president who lost China.

In any event, the largest failure of the Vietnam War was the failure to coordinate aims with strategy and strategy with tactics. Because the initial strategy, to defend South Vietnam by means which would not offend Russia, China, the United Nations, or liberals at home and abroad, the war aims were probably unwinnable. Tactics, such as full throttle bombing of the North, were always made hostage to a false strategy. One cannot wage war conditioned upon the subjective reaction of your enemy's allies because the enemy's allies will simply modify their reaction to defeat your tactics. It is akin to defining hate speech by the reaction of the NAACP.

It is this failure to define victory and contrive strategy and tactics to accomplish it, that make the danger of quagmire in Afghanistan with this president as commander-in-chief real in the extreme.

[myknowledge]

Close air support with A-10s, and along with O-1 Bird Dogs as AFACs (to prevent civvy casualties).

[justa-hairyape]

We’ve lost less than 900 troops in Afghanistan in those 7 (actually 8) years

According to Wikipedia the Soviets lost 14,453 in about 9 years. So with poor management, Afghanistan can potentially become extremely problematic.

[mkjessup]

If you should ever offer an online class in geopolitical history, it is my intention to sign up. I learn something new every time I read one of your posts.

Thank you for that!

Best,

MKJ