Posted on 11/19/2013 9:34:53 AM PST by sunmars
KABUL – While many Americans have been led to believe the war in Afghanistan will soon be over, a draft of a key US-Afghan security deal obtained by NBC NEWS shows the United States is prepared to maintain military outposts in Afghanistan for many years to come, and pay to support hundreds of thousands of Afghan security forces.
The wide-ranging document, still unsigned by the United States and Afghanistan, has the potential to commit thousands of American troops to Afghanistan and spend billions of US taxpayer dollars.
The document outlines what appears to be the start of a new, open-ended military commitment in Afghanistan in the name of training and continuing to fight al-Qaeda. The war in Afghanistan doesn’t seem to be ending, but renewed under new, scaled-down US-Afghan terms. Advertise | AdChoices
“The Parties acknowledge that continued US military operations to defeat al-Qaeda and its affiliates may be appropriate and agree to continue their close cooperation and coordination toward that end,” the draft states.
The 25-page “Security and Defense Cooperation Agreement Between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan” is a sweeping document, vague in places, highly specific in others, defining everything from the types of future missions US troops would be allowed to conduct in Afghanistan, to the use of radios and the taxation of American soldiers and contractors.
The bilateral security agreement will be debated this week in Kabul by around 2,500 village elders, academics and officials in a traditional Loya Jirga. While the Loya Jirga is strictly consultative, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said he won’t sign it without the Jirga’s approval.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnews.nbcnews.com ...
Looks like Bozo’s gonna do some apologizing in some letter that Carney won’t admit to..gee, which part of the time in Afghanistan might The One apologize for??? I despise this POS fraud.
For a time I led a UN project office in Afghanistan. The oldest and wisest white-haired Afghan once told me "We'll always need an international to lead us, other wise we will fight among ourselves." Sure enough, several years after I left an Afghan stayed a coup, driving out the internationals, leading to corruption and the eventual dismantling of the organization.
Keep in mind that the present predicament of the US goes back to the British, who deliberately created national borders that split the Pashtuns between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and hobbled together opposing ethnicities to cause strife and weakness. The US could have begun fixing this problem by splitting Afghanistan in multiple nations, however, it's also easier for the US to exercise influence over a piecemeal weak nation, than several stronger nations of unified ethnicity.
The dollars involved aren't huge. We're spending about $80b on Afghanistan sustaining close to 65K troops there, combined with aid packages. Taking it down to 8K troops, combined with Afghan aid, might take it down to $20b a year. Which is a rounding error (0.1%) as a % of national output. Obamacare alone will probably cost $300b a year due to the massive Medicaid expansion and the subsidies for low income households. Our problem with military spending has always been related to concurrent increases in welfare state spending. The Europeans have avoided this problem because by slashing defense to the bone. But even they are running out of defense budget to cut.
Afghanistan pre-existed the Brits. The reason Pashtuns are split between Afghanistan and Pakistan is because the Brits never mustered the force to both overrun and administer the place. They overran local forces several times, but it was an expensive proposition to garrison the place and there was not enough government revenue from trade to justify placing a large permanent force there. Afghans will give you all kinds of conspiracy theories, but they are given to conspiracy theories. The reality is - way before the Brits showed up - the Pashtuns built an unwieldy empire of Tajiks, Pashtuns, Uzbeks and Hazaras but can't control it because they've repeatedly run into the same problem as the Brits - the country is composed of vast swathes of wasteland that can't provide enough revenues to keep the empire together.
I’m shocked! No, not that Obama was lying about pulling out of Afghanistan. I’m shocked that NBC is doing some actual reporting.
If you try to defend everywhere, you wind up defending nothing. If you try to solve all the world’s problems, you wind up solving no problems.
ping
Nuke and salt the poppy fields.
Get our US Troops out, dammit! Quit wasting US Blood & Treasure in that filthy shithole.
Israel is the only thing worth protecting in the ME; screw the Petro-Dollars. We’ll survive the SHTF crash.
He’s advancing the islamist/muzzie caliphate.
The Afghanistan inheritance serves only to bolster the CIC’s credibility.
You can’t civilize tribes. Africa is proof.
Trash-can-istan Ping.
I just came from a thread where I disagreed with the characterization of our action in Afghanistan as a “meat grinder” by another freeper.
Iwo Jima was a “meat grinder”. We lost as many men each day on iwo Jima as we have lost on average in an entire year, each year since we have been in Afghanistan. That in no way diminishes the sacrifice of youth, blood and money that we have put into Afghanistan since 2001, but I think it is important to keep things in the proper perspective. It is three times more dangerous to be a citizen of Chicago than it is to serve in the US Military in Afghanistan.
Our military have done an excellent job under the circumstances they have been asked to serve in, especially the way they have been increasingly stabbed in the back and asked to do ever more worthless missions since the Democrats took power in 2006.
Given how they are being increasingly ignored, underfunded, handcuffed and betrayed by the civilian (and some of their own) leadership, we should have brought them home in 2006.
“If you like your IED deaths and multiple deployments, you can keep them.”
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