Our Afghanistan policy has been wrongheaded for a long time. It has only gotten worse since President Obama took over. There is no point in applying more force to the situation. The Afghan people are going to have to sort this out on their own. They probably never trusted us, and after ten years of bloodshed, they certainly don't now.
http://bit.ly/ug2d7H
Not that I am calling Cujo359 and odd dog. His avatar is a rather cute St Bernard pup, and not the least bit odd. But he is only one of the few bloggers who has commented on the latest crash and burn of a general in the Graveyard of Empires.
I find myself in agreement with Cujo359, Obama made a really bad call on Afghanistan. He foolishly doubled down on the misadventure when he should not have. At the time I thought that Bush-Cheney had so badly botched the mission in Afghanistan that their was no recovery from their failed policy. We looked to be on the wrong side of a power curve.
Sadly, I was correct. I found it appalling that very bright minds, fans of the intervention like Taylor Marsh, failed to grasp what type of involvement General Petraeus numbers really meant. You were looking at a commitment larger than the "real" numbers for Iraq; almost million troops (800,000) on the ground. Can you say, undermanned for the mission? Can you say a fools' undertaking? We have just enough trigger-pullers to prevent a rapid collapse of our efforts. The slow, obvious, and ultimately pointless failure of our aims will take a bit longer. And all because Obama can't take the political heat for pulling the plug on a hopeless venture. People will continue to die so the best and brightest can continue to save face and shift the blame.
http://bit.ly/ug2d7H
Not that I am calling Cujo359 and odd dog. His avatar is a rather cute St Bernard pup, and not the least bit odd. But he is only one of the few bloggers who has commented on the latest crash and burn of a general in the Graveyard of Empires.
I find myself in agreement with Cujo359, Obama made a really bad call on Afghanistan. He foolishly doubled down on the misadventure when he should not have. At the time I thought that Bush-Cheney had so badly botched the mission in Afghanistan that their was no recovery from their failed policy. We looked to be on the wrong side of a power curve.
Sadly, I was correct. I found it appalling that very bright minds, fans of the intervention like Taylor Marsh, failed to grasp what type of involvement General Petraeus numbers really meant. You were looking at a commitment larger than the "real" numbers for Iraq; almost million troops (800,000) on the ground. Can you say, undermanned for the mission? Can you say a fools' undertaking? We have just enough trigger-pullers to prevent a rapid collapse of our efforts. The slow, obvious, and ultimately pointless failure of our aims will take a bit longer. And all because Obama can't take the political heat for pulling the plug on a hopeless venture. People will continue to die so the best and brightest can continue to save face and shift the blame.
1 comment:
Yes, I hadn't read the numbers Patreaus was really talking about before, but my own estimate was that it was a lot more than we could reasonably put there. By the time Obama came to power, what we really had to sign up for was restructuring a not-quite national society to be viable on its own. That means taking the place over and running it for a long time, and training the locals to do things for themselves.
Of course, there are also a couple of very big assumptions there:
- That our armed forces could hold it together long enough to do the job, and
- That we actually have some clue what it is Afghanistan would look like if it were a functional national society.
I'm pretty sure neither assumption is valid.
Our mission was doomed from the moment Bush decided to pull out and go have fun in Iraq, but it might never have had a chance anyway.
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