Rahm Emanuel is laughing his ass off - it's too easy!
Posted on 10/02/2009 3:48:02 AM PDT by angkor
Deep down, national-security conservatives know President Obama will not wage a decisive war against America’s enemies in Afghanistan. They also know that the young men and women we already have there are sitting ducks. Ralph Peters notes that our commanders, obsessed with avoiding civilian casualties, have imposed mind-boggling rules of engagement (ROE) on our forces, compelling them to retreat from contact with the enemy and denying them resort to overwhelming force — including the denial of artillery and air cover when they are under siege. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York recently reported, even some Afghans are telling our commanders to “stop being so fussy . . . and kill the enemy.”
Yet the national-security Right is urging that we up the ante and put another 40,000 American lives at risk in this hostile theater, under this commander in chief and the same military leadership that dreamed up the ROE. Why? To attempt, under the rubric of “counterinsurgency,” the unlikeliest of social-engineering experiments: bringing big, modern, collectivist, secular government to a segmented, corrupt, tribal Islamic society — a society that has been at war with itself for three dozen years, which is to say, since the first futile effort to impose big, modern, collectivist, secular government ran smack into Afghanistan’s tribal Islamic ways.
Many on the right who urge the troop escalation want no part of the experiment. But they are hallucinating, too. They have convinced themselves that just because they would take the fight to our enemies, Barack Obama also is inclined to do so: the same Barack Obama who has decried American “militarism” since he was a Columbia undergrad, whose top foreign-policy priority has been to make nice with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, and who would have to overcome every fiber of his blame-America-first being to wage the war that needs to be waged. It is foolish to believe that, and it would be much worse than foolish to put American lives at risk based on that belief.
Obama plainly does not want to deploy more troops. He has boxed himself in, though, by following the Democratic practice of politicizing our national security. Though it is doubtful that Obama would see any military action in pursuit of American interests as righteous, his campaign hyped Afghanistan as the good war, the “war of necessity”— the better to denigrate Iraq as the bad war, the “war of choice.” He compounded the problem in March when, in the course of adding 21,000 troops to the Afghanistan mission, he couldn’t resist sniping at his predecessor, saying President Bush had turned a deaf ear to our commanders, who had been “clear about the resources they need.” So now Obama finds himself presiding over the good war of necessity with a commander — the commander he chose — who is quite clear that he needs 40,000 more troops.
That commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is a highly decorated veteran with impressive combat-command experience. He is also a progressive big-thinker on geopolitics, having been a military fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard’s Kennedy School. One perceives more of the academic than the warrior in his startling white paper proposal for what is labeled a “counterinsurgency” campaign.
More at link:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWQ3Y2U2NjNlYTAyMjI3MTAxZjYyOWZhNTU0Mzg3MzQ=&w=MA==
In addition to all the nation-building exercises McCarthy finds in McChrystal's report/press release, there's also a lot of warm and fuzzy but completely untenable sociology.
Personally I was able to locate in the McChrystal report/press release exactly 1 (one) paragraph mentioning Pakistan - which is the latter-day Laos/Cambodia/ho Chi Minh Trail for the Taliban et al - and nothing, zero, nada about Afghanistan's status as the source supplier of 90 percent of the world's illicit opium and thus heroin (largely through Pakistan in the east and Iran in the west).
Let's see: ignore Pakistan, ignore the opium, and let's do some nation building. Even Michael Yon called Afghanistan a 100-year commitment.
Sounds like an idea, yes?
KILL THE ENEMY! Yes! Why is that so hard to figure out? We've been there for eight years now and the Narcissist-in-chief has to have strategic meetings to determine our goals in Afghanistan? Either make a commitment to kick ass or get the heck out and deal with terrorist camps there by bombing the hell out of them (not that I think the Obama admin would even do that).
The choice should be Kille the Enemy, or Get the Hell out.
There isnt any in between.
Why do we spend money on clusters when we don’t use them?
Absolutely....
This is an excellent article and I urge everyone to read all 3 pages of it. It’s not that long and goes pretty fast.
My reaction to reading it is this: with Obama as President, it’s not worth it to put our troops on the line in Afghanistan. This general is an idiot and doesn’t care if his own men and women needlessly die. Bring the troops home. Keep them alive for the day when there’s an actual American in the White House.
Rahm Emanuel is laughing his ass off - it's too easy!
I'm not sure there is a solution here, other than having a truly Machiavellian approach to playing the tribal groups off against each other in order to maintain a base of operations from which to pick off Taliban and al Qaeda thugs. But I don't see Obambi having anywhere near the stones to even consider such an approach, let alone pull it off.
Yes... KILL THEM ALL!
LLS
Like our current central government does that.
bflr
The soviets lost because their goal was to occupy it. Read the last two paragraphs to get a strategy insight that would be key to tempeering the region. Go in, kick ass and leave with the promise that if it gets out of control again, “We’ll be bock” to kick ass again.
exactly right
well said.
Need to bring em’ home, and turn them loose on the radical Muslims and their enablers in the White House and DC...
God help our poor BOHICA’d troops in Afghanistan, under this C-in-C and these ROE.
This dreamy-eyed social experiment is doomed, and we will just be sacrificing troops for NOTHING.
Great article, especially the third page.
Please read the entire linked article.
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