Mullen is the same douche who tried to stifle Petraeus. Afghanistan deserves what it gets. we should just poison the poppy crop, bomb the hell out of it and leave them to the tender mercies of the Taliban, dropping a Hellfire on them often enough to keep them nervous. Afghanistan and Pakistan need their borders reorganized tribally anyway, since everyone seems to be stuck in the ninth century.
Maybe because- we chose the time and the place of the main front (Iraq) to our advantage?
Fighting tolleybons in a stone age country with no infrastructure aint exactly the battlefield most generals would choose, except general obama of course
We need a real President.
Plus the zero has made the mistake of moving the battle from the favorable battleground of Iraq (which Bush smartly choose) to the unfavorable battleground of Afghanistan (which has been the graveyard of armies of centuries).
Afghanistan will be Zero's Vietnam.
I am a retired Army officer who is probably as conservative as anyone. I have a son who is an SF “A” Detachment Commander and two other military sons. Having said that, I find myself in agreement with very strange company in opposition to increasing our military commitment to Afghanistan. I don’t believe we have the available resources to secure the country. I don’t believe the Afghans have any kind of commitment to democracy as we know it. I don’t believe America has the political will to sustain what is necessary to prevail there. I think we should commit to securing Kabul and the corrupt (albeit friendly to us) Central Government and the major population center of Kandahar and our Air Base there at the expense of abandoning the rural tribal regions. From there, use Air Power and Drone Aircraft to keep the bad guys on their toes and continue to nudge Pakistan to secure their own borders. Unless we adopt this strategy now, we will be pulling our troops out in a year or 18 months from now with our tails between our legs. In the final analyis, the Taliban know we will leave sooner or later and they can wait us out. I say sooner is better than later. I never thought I would be taling like this, but this has a lot of parallels to the last two years of Vietnam.
Psst! hey Genius- We will always be "starting over again" every few years in these places, because some "brilliant" top military officers stood by scratching their arses while Islamists wrote: "The laws of the Koran are superior to any laws contained in this constitution" - which you then stopped scratching your butts and signed.
This pretty much made everything we are trying to do there pointless. So get our guys out of there, no point getting them killed for nothing.
Afghanistan, “Graveyard of Empires.” Obama wanted to be president so he owns this war now. What does he plan to do with it?
Let’s take the operation back from NATO and finish the job.
Using drone aircraft to patrol the mountains of Afghanistan and the lawless areas of Pakistan seems to me the best way to use our limited resources. We have made many successful kills of Taliban leaders with Hellfire missiles fired from drone aircraft.
The mounting fatalities on the ground are another matter. There is probably a better way to keep our ground troops away from ambush and roadside IEDs. Patrolling routinely encourages enemy ambushes that are hard to detect and suicide bombers against fixed installations.
The lasting lessons of warfare require that to win means destroying the enemy’s will to continue fighting by massive use of firepower (usually delivered from the air) that destroys civilian housing and civilians on a massive basis. Otherwise, the war will last many generations as the Taliban have an unlimited supply of martyrs.
and this from today
“Four British Troops Die for 150 Votes”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6811537.ece
while bambi lounged on the beach and ate clams