My younger son and I recently watched this movie, “Restrepo”. It is a documentary that follows a US Army platoon over a 15 month assignment in the Korengal valley.
My main take-away was that the mission seemed to be without focus, and that the troops were fighting a largely defensive battle and spending a lot of energy trying to build goodwill with the locals. The locals, mostly farmers, who clearly did not care for the Taliban, seemed to just want the fighting to stop, even if it meant the return of the Taliban.
Even allowing for a healthy liberal bias on the part of the film-makers, it paints a very grim picture of the situation there.
I was skeptical about Afghanistan even when Bush was CIC. Afghanistan is not like Iraq. Iraq has in past centuries been a reasonably civilized place, and it has natural resources (oil) that can give it a vibrant economy. Afghanistan is a thankless sh*thole, with only one viable export: opium. So even if you buy into this nation-building business, it is hard to fathom it being successful in Afghanistan. On top of that, the terrain there that makes it impractical to wage the kind of air war we did in Iraq. The enemy just disappears into the mountains and waits for you to leave.
With Odumbo in charge, and what I am sure are libtarded ROE, I am convinced that we need to get out of there ASAP.
Good film, and I appreciate the insight. I watched a BBC Film called “The Power of Nightmares” The entire purpose of the film was to explain how the entire threat of terrorism was totally overhyped. There was a blatant bias and the narrow scope of this film by showing it only during the Bush Administration time period, but think about it, if the 9/11 Hijackers didn’t need to use Afghanistan to carry out their attacks, and weren’t shown to be there, then what was the point? Also, the film explained a great deal of issues that were overhyped, such as the “dirty bomb” or the real proportion of the U.S. Population that actually gets fragged by terrorists as opposed to domestic criminal activity. All-in-all pretty informative, but I walked away from the film with the general fact that the actual threat from Afghanistan alone, unless there is some information that someone can really spit out, isn’t really all that much of a threat, or at least gets overhyped on the security measures, anyways.