Of course, a policy of ‘retreat’ only applies to our presence in other countries.
Illegals entering our borders, do so with a phalanx of laws/lawyers to shield them from those who attempt to protect us from our representatives.
We’re spending billions of dollars to eradicate poppy crops in Afganishan while drug lords are growing drugs crops in our national forests.
Should read:
This week, prominent FORMER conservative pundit George Will wrote a column advocating the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
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Its 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
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 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 can accomplish and at what cost, we are just spending blood and treasure without purpose.
It is not right for our troops to die for that.
To this day I still don't get why we insisted on putting into place a government that is based on Islam, which is exactly what the Taliban regime was, when a secular government would have been far more appropriate. I can understand that there would have been a lot of opposition for doing this, but when you are at war, you have to erradicate your opposition, not try to play nice with it.
Or is victory achieved when we finally usher this primitive tribal culture, with its violent warlords and religious extremism, from the eighth century all the way to modernity? If so, we're on course for a centuries-long enterprise of nation building and baby-sitting, not a war.
Couldn't have said it any better.
The Obama administration has ordered an end to use of the phrase “Global War on Terror,” a label adopted by the Bush administration shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
In a memo sent this week from the Defense Department’s office of security to Pentagon staffers, members were told, “this administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ [GWOT.] Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.’”
A spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget, from whom the direction reportedly came, told the Post there was no guidance given from the agency and that it was merely the “opinion of a career civil servant.”
A Pentagon spokesman said there was no memo or specific directive instructing officials to stop using the ‘Global War on Terror’ phrase but acknowledged that the department has officially adopted ‘Overseas Contingency Operation’ as the new term for the war.
How does the president get any funding from the congress for an overseas contingency operation?
Is it in the constitution for the president to fund a overseas contingency operation?
If it is no longer a war, why are our troops overseas at all? Is this an undeclared war that the left used to rip GWB over?
If there is no war on terror, what are we fighting for? Obama’s ego?
I believe George Will is right for this reason;
I don’t trust Obama as CIC and I think he will sink the military into a quagmire to tie it up and decimate it’s ranks through low morale. He and his cronies will strap the military with unreasonable rules of engagement ,as in Vietnam! The POS president would love to see the US lose this war in disgrace. Afganistan is a extremely difficult theater of operation as the Soviets learned in it’s total defeat. Afganistan can be isolated.
Having said this, I believe the enemy has got to be confronted but our troops need to have a CIC that understands what it means to fight to win. What they don’t need is to needlessly die in a war that is being fought on two fronts, in Afganistan and at home.
I stopped reading George Will long ago. Never trust a man who wears a bowtie.
AMEN!
We don't have the assets to easily find the bad guys and those rare times when we do we're afraid to act on it. Meanwhile we're pissing away American lives for no positive outcome.
By overreaching and not having realistic war aims we got ourselves into something we can't get out of. Killing bad guys who mean us harm is good war aim. Trying to build a western-style democracy in that God-forsaken place is a joke.
I'd dearly love to lay blame for this one on the Messiah, but GWB was president for the first six or so years of this absurdity.
But while strict Shariah law is acceptable-— NO ITS NOT.
most of us agree that America has no business foisting its notions of wrong and right on other cultures-— NO, I DON’T.
it’s going to take that long for American troops to find a puppet Islamic state that pretends to value any enduring freedoms. -— THATS BECAUSE YOU CAN NOT ALLOW ISLAM TO CONTINUE AS THE OFFICIAL RELIGION AFTER YOU “WIN THE WAR”.
ISLAM is a Terrorist Organization ISLAM IS THE ENEMY.