umm, that was a given the instant bush wanted a new toy.
No matter what Obama does, the right will criticise him for it, even if his action are exactly the same as what Bush did and they all clapped like trained seals about.
We could have been out long ago, but for Iraq.
I think the current president has not taken enough of a stand to get enough resources to actually solve the problem, and is trying to hew to his promises to get out.
The only trick/problem is how to do that without letting the s we are fighting have a credible claim to some sort of "see, we made them leave" victory. That would be a defeat that would concern me.
umm, that was a given the instant bush wanted a new toy.
everytime u clowns start a new administration for the new liberated country, why do you clowns always select fkn ots who have no leadership qualities, let alone any form of recognize education....
the fkn muppets u guys always put in charge are dumb like , as long they willing to listened and take orders from you guys, u keep them in the job....fck them incompetent s...
On the bright side, heroin availability/use has skyrocketed in the US since we have been over there!
"to get enough resources to actually solve the problem"
there is no solution,
because the problem is that the Afghanis and Pakis will simply outwait this current chapter of invaders who will eventually give up and retreat in defeat.
iow, quite simply
It's Their Country
While that sounds nice, what you end up with are the Taliban moving back in and we are back to where we were in 2000.
What we need to do is depose Karzai and go old school colonial and have a nice puppet with one of our own in complete control.
Yeah, that philosophy really kicked ass in Vietnam.
Ngo Dinh Diem says hi!
The Vietnamese Governement was autonomous. They were dependent on our aid but we did not have fiat powers. Vietnam was the beginning of our 'joint government' strategy and the beginning of our failures. Ngo was an organic creation that we tried to make powerful. I am proposing we become the state.
It is not the same thing.
We handle domestic, defense, law enforcement et al. I would even be down with the Tea Party running the fiscal policy over there. Maybe you boomers can be useful after all.
We would be labeled as subjugators and imperialists but they cannot have selfdetermination and we have our national security interests at the same time.
We leave them alone we get AQ. We hold their hand and they bite it. They need to get in the back.
It's not as if their government did not attack us.
"their government did not attack us."
OBL and AQ were not part of the Afghan govt.
"we have our national security interests"
so after 12 years of build up of the USA INTERNAL police/surveillance state and $1.5T every year in imperial spending, the USA is still not secure?
Sweet i have CC and boutie both disagreeing with me and siding with one another. i must be doing something right.
The Taliban set up AQ in Jalalabad and gave them all manner of support. Their leader was the same Mullah Omar. If you want to argue that they are proxies for other interests then fine but that does not mitigate the point.
Organic?????
Dude was living in the US from 1950 until he went back as President in 1955. He was supposed to be a puppet. he was even pushing Christianity as the preferred religion.
After he was exiled. I suppose you think the Khomeini was a product of the French?
If anything what you should take from this is Karzai is the parallel here.
Of course. , the CIA may end up killing him like they did Ngo Dinh Diem.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...-up-insurgentsOver the last decade, the United States has provided hundreds of thousands of small arms—including machine guns, grenade launchers, and rifles—to the Afghan security forces. But the US and its Afghan counterparts are doing an inadequate job of tracking these weapons, government investigators claim, increasing the likelihood that they could wind up in the hands of the resurgent Taliban, which has recently made key military advances that are threatening Afghanistan's fragile stability.
In 2010, following reports that the US military was losing track of the guns it was providing to Afghan troops, Congress required the Defense Department to register and monitor all weapons given to the Afghan National Security Forces, which includes the army and police. But the primary US databases that track these arms aren't up to the task; they don't communicate with each other and are riddled with incomplete information, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reports. Auditors examined serial numbers recorded in one database and found that 203,888 weapons—or 43 percent—had missing information or duplicate numbers. Many entries that included serial numbers lacked shipping or receiving dates.
That doesn't surprise me. They lost track of the fast and furious guns too.
Nice going Obomba...
nothing do with Obama, AND everything to do with your adored military assholes who can't count, won't count,and waste $Ts of taxpayer dollars.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arch...nt/?insrc=hpssBut Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living shows that everything has not been said. His new and shocking indictment demonstrates that the failures of the intervention were worse than even the most cynical believed. Gopal, a Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor reporter, investigates, for example, a US counterterrorist operation in January 2002. US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, had identified two sites as likely “al-Qaeda compounds.” It sent in a Special Forces team by helicopter; the commander, Master Sergeant Anthony Pryor, was attacked by an unknown assailant, broke his neck as they fought and then killed him with his pistol; he used his weapon to shoot further adversaries, seized prisoners, and flew out again, like a Hollywood hero.
As Gopal explains, however, the American team did not attack al-Qaeda or even the Taliban. They attacked the offices of two district governors, both of whom were opponents of the Taliban. They shot the guards, handcuffed one district governor in his bed and executed him, scooped up twenty-six prisoners, sent in AC-130 gunships to blow up most of what remained, and left a calling card behind in the wreckage saying “Have a nice day. From Damage, Inc.” Weeks later, having tortured the prisoners, they released them with apologies. It turned out in this case, as in hundreds of others, that an Afghan “ally” had falsely informed the US that his rivals were Taliban in order to have them eliminated. In Gopal’s words:
The toll…: twenty-one pro-American leaders and their employees dead, twenty-six taken prisoner, and a few who could not be accounted for. Not one member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda was among the victims. Instead, in a single thirty-minute stretch the United States had managed to eradicate both of Khas Uruzgan’s potential governments, the core of any future anti-Taliban leadership—stalwarts who had outlasted the Russian invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban years but would not survive their own allies.Gopal then finds the interview that the US Special Forces commander gave a year and a half later in which he celebrated the derring-do, and recorded that seven of his team were awarded bronze stars, and that he himself received a silver star for gallantry.
Or consider Gopal’s description of the fate of several principal Afghan politicians in the book:
Dr. Hafizullah, Zurmat’s first governor, had ended up in Guantanamo because he’d crossed Police Chief Mujahed. Mujahed wound up in Guantanamo because he crossed the Americans. Security chief Naim found himself in Guantanamo because of an old rivalry with Mullah Qassim. Qassim eluded capture, but an unfortunate soul with the same name ended up in Guantanamo in his place. And a subsequent feud left Samoud Khan, another pro-American commander, in Bagram prison, while the boy his men had sexually abused was shipped to Guantanamo….
Abdullah Khan found himself in Guantanamo charged with being Khairullah Khairkhwa, the former Taliban minister of the interior, which might have been more plausible—if Khairkhwa had not also been in Guantanamo at the time….
Nine Guantanamo inmates claimed the most striking proof of all that they were not Taliban or al-Qaeda: they had passed directly from a Taliban jail to American custody after 2001.
More excellent treatment of USA's REAL allies who saved lots of military lives
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QplQ...QEd30rQbuvCtTQ
https://twitter.com/ml_maria_/status...694016512?s=12
So many Afghan threads, I picked this one.
Still going on 20 years later.
What a farce.
War is above all a business.
War profiteers, their investors, and the politicians they own, supplying the American Capitalistic Empire's never-ending, unwinnable wars are loving it, just another way the oligarchy redistributes upwards the wealth of the non-oligarchy.
Trash's budget, handed to him by the oligarchy, is unlimited increases in war making funds, while cutting $Ts for the non-oligarchy.
And conservatives would rather throw trillions at this than something like universal health care because, "Them boys are heee-rows."
Military-Keynesianism is a twofer: massive government spending is an economic stimulus, along with tax cuts, it creates a fiscal deficit that provides a pretext for cutting direct services to human beings, so that in our case, social control is also a result.
While we complain about Trump's silly tweets, he wants to cut Medicare and Medicaid by trillions, Social Security by billions.
Why?
To pay for tax cuts and military spending hikes.
Redistribution of wealth good now.
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