Let Taliban feel the 'righteous might'

Houston Chronicle ^ | Oct. 29, 2001, 6:09PM | Krauthammer - Best Editorialist Today

[RobbyS]

Amen!

[Professional]

This guy must be a Freeper. Amen brother!

[b4its2late]

Losing is not an option. Losing is fatal. This is no time for restraint and other niceties. This is a time for righteous might.

Yep. Bring in the big guns....

[Ronin]

Robby, I have been keeping my mouth shut because I am not a General and I don't have access to the information that the Brass have, but DAMN if this does not express EXACTLY what I feel.

You do not fight a war by Marquis de Queensbury rules. You fight with maximum force, destructiveness and power at sustainable cost and the ONLY acceptable conclusion is victory.

Just what in the name of Ned is going on here?

[KQQL]

Yea , we all know we are half ass fighting.
Powell the moron should be fired, he screwed up with leaving Sadman in Iraq, and now he is listening to his muslim friends the Pakistani and Saudi. ( who by the created the Taliban)
After all, the soviets did lose to this bunch.
If America wants to win this war , it has to let the armed forces take care of the fighting first and worry about the political stuff later.

[RobbyS]

Shock 'em and then rock 'em.

[Billy_bob_bob]

Very interesting article, and I pretty much agree with the premise and the conclusions. The problem is no matter what we do over there we are going to make the overall situation worse.

I try to think through the ramifications of Pakistan or Egypt falling to Islamic fundamentalist governments, or the House of Saud falling in Saudi Arabia. It's like trying to plot the trajectory of billiard balls on the break, a dozen balls all moving in different directions and bouncing off of each other. The major difference is that the calculus of the Middle East is about a million times more complicated than the billards example. I keep coming to the conclusion that things are going to get very, very interesting in the not too distant future.

[KQQL]

Yea , we all know we are half ass fighting.
Powell the moron should be fired, he screwed up with leaving Sadman in Iraq, and now he is listening to his muslim friends the Pakistani and Saudi. ( who by the created the Taliban)
After all, the soviets did lose to this bunch.
If America wants to win this war , it has to let the armed forces take care of the fighting first and worry about the political stuff later.

Guess who ratted out HAQ.... Pakistan's CIA , our new friend.

[RobbyS]

Don't blame Powell. He didn't make the decision in Iraq. And now he is following the "realpolitik" notions of Scowcroft and "Others" who did make the big decisions on Iraq.

[BCrago66]

Your point is very well taken, but it seems to me that a half-assed war effort would only increase the chances that the "moderate" Abab states will fall to the radical Islamic faction. Like animals and savages, this element smells weakness and then pounces.

[Billy_bob_bob]

"Guess who ratted out HAQ.... Pakistan's CIA , our new friend."

I had not heard this information. What is your source? This is very, very interesting data, and I would really like to find out more about this story.

[Billy_bob_bob]

You are basing your argument on the premise that Islam and Islamic fundamentalists are the problem. You are correct in your premise, but this is not the premise upon which we have based our current campaign. Since our campaign is based on the idea of punishing "terrorists" without offending "Islam", we have tied ourselves into knots right out of the gate and put ourselves in the difficult position we are now in.

[rolling_stone]

Interesting story on tv tonight showing that there are about 60,000 afghanistan people living in Freemont California who left Afghanistan 20years ago and many are now succesful....Seems these people would like to return to their homeland and help restore democracy should the Taliban be gone...found a couple of links showing that they advised the US and Clinton about the training camps and conditions in Afghanistan years ago...sad...

http://www.afghanistanvoice.org/NEWSLTRS/1997DEC.shtml

http://www.afghanistanvoice.org/AfghanistanVoice-March2000.htm

[rockfish59]

30 years ago in vietnam, we fought a war finely calibrated to win 'hearts and minds'. bomb today, pause tomorrow. that strategy met with nothing but pain and defeat.'

we lost the war because of the media and communists infesting the U.S.A.

this time, the media should be made to 'walk point'!!!

[BCrago66]

I am shamefully ignorant of the history of Afganistan, but I have read in these last weeks that a couple decades ago, it was somewhat of a semi-Western nation, with enlightened art, female doctors, etc.

I've also read that there is in Afganistan great resentment at both Pakistan and other Mid-east nations for high-jacking their country and causing the present disaster.

[rolling_stone]

I am ignorant of the history of afghanistan also, seeing the short clip on tv about the people who fled 20 years ago certainly gave me a different picture of their people. Amazing what democracy and capitalism can do for people!

[EaglesUpForever]

Yep, I could care less if Pakistan is happy. No, I take that back, I would be upset if Pakistan ends up happy. We should side with the Northern Alliance, India, Russia, and Iran, and drive the Taliban right out of power.

[Vauss]

Simple. If you want to fight a war in afghanistan, hundreds of miles from the sea, 1500 miles from our nearest major logistics base, 12,000 miles from the US coast, with the need to airlift all supplies, equipment, etc., you have to carefully plan what you are going to do, with what troops, and how. You don't want to drop a half-baked force into Afghanistan that you can't resupply. You particularly don't want to drop them into Afghanistan without serious degrading and shaping of the Taliban armed forces. I spent a year in Afghanistan, my parents spent three. Like hundreds of thousands of Russian troops, my dad got dysentery. Not a pleasant experience. To effectively fight the Taliban, we need to invade at a time and place of our choosing with forces that can help build a logistics base in Afghanistan while hard-core spec ops troops and rangers take the fight to the enemy. Winter will be our ally, not theirs. Time is on our side, not theirs. The Taliban are in for some rude shocks in the next few months. This is not the Clinton "slam-bam-so-long-mam" cruise missile administration. The Bush people are serious players who know how to keep good op sec. Cheney gave us a little hint. "The Taliban and Al Qaeda will not know anything till it is upon them." In other words, we are going to kick their butts good.