This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Soviet vs. US comparison in A’stan

    In this morning’s Wall Street Journal (it may require subscription), Yaroslav Trofimov compares the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the current US operations there;

    There are major differences between the two conflicts. For one, unlike the isolated Soviet Union, America operates in Afghanistan under a United Nations mandate, part of a coalition of 42 allies. Allied dead, currently 1,528, are barely one-ninth the Soviet toll. Afghan civilian deaths are a small fraction of the estimated one million killed in the 1980s.

    Afghans who compare the two campaigns acknowledge the differences, yet argue that these aren’t always in America’s favor. An examination of this debate over the Soviet experience offers an insight into what American troops are up against — and the issues President Obama must weigh as he decides the course of an unpopular and costly war he didn’t start.

    Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev also faced a troop-increase request during his first year, for a war he had inherited. Soviet generals in 1985 asked for tens of thousands more soldiers to bolster their 100,000-strong contingent, roughly the same size as the current Western force in Afghanistan.

    us-vs-soviets-in-astan

    Trofimov tries to give cover to Obama and Gates for taking so long to make up their minds about troop increases, but it falls flat. There is no excuse for delaying the inevitable. Obama knows he can’t re-elected if he quits in Afghanistan despite the unpopularity of the war – Americans don’t tolerate quitting and Obama would get all of the blame, no matter what Americans tell pollsters.

  • Politicians dawdle, soldiers soldier

    Now that Obama has finally made up his mind to continue the fight in Afghanistan, Now he has to fight his own party according to the Washington Post;

    Top Democrats have made it clear to Obama that he will not receive a friendly reception should he announce what is considered the leading option: sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The legislators have indicated that a request for more money to finance a beefed-up war effort will be met with frustration and, perhaps, a demand to raise taxes.

    Yeah, they’ll line up to raise taxes for the war – the one thing they’re spending money on that is actually a function of government (that whole “provide for the common defense” thing). And because Obama took so long to decide what he was going to do about Afghanistan, our so-called allies have decide to begin their dithering according to the New York Times;

    The administration confronts several hurdles to garnering more allied contributions. In Britain, which has pledged an additional 500 troops, Defense Minister Bob Ainsworth said Tuesday that Mr. Obama had taken too long to decide on a new strategy, harming the British government’s ability to rally public support for the war.

    The British government is facing opinion polls showing that around 70 percent of the public favors an early withdrawal. That figure has nearly doubled in the past six months, as the country has sustained its worst casualties — 97 killed so far this year — since it first deployed troops to Afghanistan after the Taliban were toppled in 2001.

    Germany and France have balked at committing any more forces to a war that has so little public support that they can barely maintain current troop levels.

    Yeah, 3 months of deliberations over the number of troops he’d deploy hasn’t exactly inspired confidence in Obama’s final decisions. Funny how that works.

    To his credit, the President did make phone calls to 10 service members yesterday.

    Meantime, JD Johannes of Outside the Wire sends us pictures of one Thanksgiving meal in Iraq at Tikrit. Stars and Stripes reports on the meal at COP Charkh in Afghanistan;

    “That was good as (expletive),” one soldier said to another after eating.

    And despite the rough conditions, the soldiers said they had a lot to be thankful for. Mainly each other, and that they were all going home. Though there have been many injuries, the company has only lost one soldier in Charkh.

    “I’m thankful that all my buddies are still alive and that I get to spend (Thanksgiving) with the guys to the left and right of me who watch my back every day,” said 1st Platoon’s Spc. William Brown of Milwaukee. “And I’m thankful I’m leaving in two weeks.”

    “I’m thankful I didn’t get shot at today,” said Pfc. Don Garab of Walkerton, Ind., of 3rd Platoon. “And for a good cigar.”

    “I’m thankful I’m not digging that foxhole anymore,” said Spc. John McDermott, one of the unfortunate 2nd Platoon guys tasked with that most un-festive of duties.

    “I’m thankful for ‘A cog’ scopes, M203’s and HEDP,” 2nd Platoon’s Sgt. David Lloyd said, military-speak for his rifle scope, grenade launcher and ammunition. “They’ve saved our ass a lot.”

    Another Stars and Stripes article reports on yet another Thanksgiving celebration in Barak-Baracki;

    Others let sentiment seep through their matter-of-fact, stoic shells.

    “We’re with our family just like we would be at Thanksgiving back home,” said Staff Sgt. Ben McKinnon, of New Haven, Connecticut, nodding toward the soldiers around him that have daily shared hardship, suffering and some elation over the past year.

    It makes you wonder how politicians can continue to allow the troops to hang their asses out without giving them the support they deserve, doesn’t it?

  • IAVA co-founder, Phil Carter, hit by Gitmo bus

    Some of you who were around TAH last year, might remember that TSO tore up the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America “scorecard” of the Senate which was created and manipulated to make us believe that Barack Obama was better for veterans than John McCain. Then TSO found that one of the co-founders of IAVA, Phil Carter, was the Obama campaign’s veteran advisor, and I busted the IAVA trying to cover up that fact when TSO exposed them.

    Oh, yeah, Phil Carter was also the guy who came out to meet Matthis Chiroux Liam Madden when Chiroux Madden delivered IVAW’s list of demands to the Democratic National Convention in Denver last year. In addition to the “scorecard” scam and stroking the IVAW, Carter was working for the Obama Campaign while he wrote a regular column at the Washington Post’s Intel Dump. Phil Carter parlayed those little stunts in service to Obama into a job position at the Pentagon, the Deputy Assistant secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs.

    Well, according to the New York Times, Phil Carter is the latest casualty of the Guantanamo bus;

    Phillip Carter, who was named deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy in April, resigned last Friday because of “personal issues,” a Pentagon official said. Mr. Carter could not be reached for comment and no other reasons were given for his departure.

    Mr. Carter, 34, a lawyer and an Army adviser to the Iraqi police in Baquba in 2005 and 2006, was in charge of veterans outreach in President Obama’s 2008 campaign.

    Mr. Carter’s departure comes as the administration has acknowledged that it will not be able to close the prison by Jan. 22, the self-imposed deadline Mr. Obama announced immediately after taking office.

    Mr. Carter has also left in the middle of the administration’s efforts to prosecute some of the Guantánamo detainees and find a location in the United States to house perhaps 50 to 100 terrorism suspects indefinitely. The Cuba prison now has 215 detainees.

    Noah Schachtman writes;

    I just got off the phone with Carter. “I know this is a Washington cliche, but sometimes the cliches are true,” he tells me. “I made this tough decision for personal reasons, even though I loved the job and the work we were doing. Hopefully I’ll have the chance to serve again.”

    Yeah, Phil, everyone else lies about “personal issues” but in your case it’s true – just you. This on the heels of Greg Craig’s personal issues. I hope Carter feels that all of his underhanded misuse of his veteran status was worth it. I’ll be watching to see what job he scores in the 2012 campaign.

  • Afghanistan decision in living color

    J.P.Friere at the Washington Examiner writes that after 88 days of dawdling on the question of whether and how much to support the troops in Afghanistan, all we get is a crummy picture;

    decisive-obama

    This is the image the White House hopes to see in papers. Similar to previous ones, the president is doing the talking. In this most recent, he is motioning his hand in a decisive way. In the most recent, note how many folks still have the coversheets on. (Maybe they’re cover sheets?)

    During every meeting for the last three months, the president has released photos of himself talking to national security staff about Afghanistan. This is during the three months after General Stanley McChrystal warned the president that if we didn’t take action within a year, the situation in Afghanistan would deteriorate beyond repair.

    Yup, 88 days of dithering.

    Here’s another meeting to which they didn’t invite Hillary;

    fake-meeting

    Somehow, the presence of Joe Biden, The Smartest Man In The World (TM), in a national security council meeting doesn’t inspire much confidence in the ultimate decision.

  • Why does he have to say it?

    I guess Axelrod told President Obama that he couldn’t get elected if he didn’t send some troops to Afghanistan and apparently they’ve just been bickering over the number the last few months.

    finish-the-job

    General McCrystal asked for 40,000 troops and Obama is thinking about 34,000. When I was an infantry platoon sergeant and I needed a crucial part to keep my platoon running, or an important piece of equipment, I’d request 3 – that way I made sure I’d get one. I hope that’s what General McChrystal did when he requested troops.

    Either way, Obama has bought his share of the war whatever the outcome. He wasn’t willing to buy the full boat, so every death, every casualty is fully his – from the day McChrystal submitted his report 3 months ago.

    “It is my intention to finish the job,” he said of the war in Afghanistan….

    It damn well better be.

  • Hitchens to “Who Created Hasan”

    This past weekend, I read Robert Wright’s anti-intellectual piece in the New York Times entitled “Who Created Major Hasan?“. Of course, since it’s Robert Wright and the New York Times, you know his conclusion. It was us (or US, if you prefer)

    Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were supposed to reduce the number of anti-American terrorists abroad. It’s hardly clear that they’ve succeeded, and they may have had the opposite effect. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, they’ve inspired homegrown terrorism — a small-scale incident in June, a larger-scale incident this month. That’s only two data points, but I don’t like the slope of the line connecting them.

    So, clearly Wright is a proponent of sitting on our collective hands. Well, Christopher Hitchens took it upon himself to knock down Wright’s straw house;

    For a start, did Hasan or [Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad — Carlos Bledsoe, the Arkansas murderer] ever say what “killing” of which “Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan” they had in mind? There isn’t a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both countries by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that’s not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too. It takes a true intellectual to survey this appalling picture and to say, as Wright does, that we invite attacks on our off-duty soldiers because “the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy—a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims—is so dubious.” Dubious? The only thing dubious here is his command of language. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact? For shame. The slippery slope—actually the slimy slope—is the one down which Wright is skidding.

    It’s clear to me who created Major Hasan – the cowardly imams and terror sponsors who are afraid of dying themselves, but have no aversion to sending their own children into the flames. Hasan handed out Korans to his neighbors – what if one of us handed out the Bible to our neighbors in the Middle East? Tell me we’re the violent ones in this fight.

    Yeah, just once I’d like to see someone on the Left, the non-racist, defenders of human rights Left, someone besides Hitchens, admit that the war is worthy of our commitment. The only reason these cretins think that they have any chance at all of winning this war is because they have pathetically ignorant pea-wits like Wright defending them and the New York Times to give the pathetically ignorant pea-wits a forum.

  • Diddling intensifies

    The Washington Post reports this morning that after President Obama’s latest meeting (tenth in 86 days) with advisers over whether to properly staff our war in Afghanistan or not, he’ll continue to dawdle at a furious pace;

    For much of the fall, Obama has been meeting with his war council to determine a new strategy in Afghanistan, where 68,000 U.S. troops are currently deployed. Now he has 18 weekdays left to announce his decision — not counting Thanksgiving break — before he leaves for his Christmas-holiday vacation in Hawaii.

    But his schedule for the rest of November and December is filling up with other events and appearances, some of which could create public relations challenges if they happen too close to the presentation of an expanded war effort.

    Administration officials have said Obama will not outline his decision until after Thanksgiving, and it appears increasingly probable he will do so early next week. In addition to McChrystal and Eikenberry, senior administration officials whose support for the strategy is essential are preparing to be in town for possible appearances before Congress.

    So here we sit 87 days (thanks, for keeping count, Claymore) since General McCrystal requested more troops, but Obama’s schedule is filling up with events to which Republicans aren’t invited. It’s really a shame that this war keeps intruding on Obama’s social schedule – I mean he’s dedicated 30 whole hours to the thing in the last 87 days – what else do you guys want?

  • Surrender sounds so easy

    I read this at ThreatsWatch earlier today, but it just sounded so incredible that I didn’t want to believe it, let alone write about it;

    It comes to our attention that the MEMRI Blog highlights an article from the Saudi al-Watan in Arabic that – according to an Afghan source – the United States is talking to the Taliban seeking to trade control of 5 provinces in exchange for the cessation of attacks on US bases. MEMRI summarizes:

    An Afghan source in Kabul reports that U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry is holding secret talks with Taliban elements headed by the movement’s foreign minister, Ahmad Mutawakil, at a secret location in Kabul. According to the source, the U.S. has offered the Taliban control of the Kandahar, Helmand, Oruzgan, Kunar and Nuristan provinces in return for a halt to the Taliban missile attacks on U.S. bases.

    Kunar province borders the Khyber Pass region where the majority of US and NATO supplies pass enroute from Pakistan. And the remaining four provinces constitute fully the southern 25% of Afghanistan’s territory.

    But the more I thought about it, the more credible it sounded. From Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive;

    Like I said this is a sole source so far, but sadly it fits in with Eikenberry’s strategically leaked messages stabbing Gen. McChrystal in the back by calling for no reinforcements. It also offers President Obama the opportunity to start the exfil from the country and avoid having to attempt to win.

    From Greyhawk;

    The story defies logic and belief, but unfortunately if the US State Department (or the White House) hasn’t responded clearly and forcefully to unequivocally deny the allegations yet, now would be a good time to do that, too. The current administration has elected to conduct its Afghanistan business via leaks and rumors.

    From Cassandra;

    Can you imagine the reaction if George Bush were still in office? Would any sane person give a story like this the time of day? Sadly, Obama’s hands off (to put it mildly) leadership style and ineffectual waffling inspire confidence in neither his grasp of the situation nor his resolve:

    I still don’t want to believe the article, but Obama has put his foreign policy on cruise control while he focuses on taking over the economy. He has Karl Eikenberry providing guidance and I’ve been warning you that Eikenberry was a dickhead, a dangerous dickhead, when he was my PL, and apparently he hasn’t changed in 35 years.

    Like Jimbo pointed out, this is the same kind of deal that the Pakistanis tried to strike with the Taliban last year. Now the Pakistani Army is trying to dislodge the Taliban because they used their territories as a base from which to strike the rest of the country with suicide bombers. Not like they haven’t done that before.

    All of this talk about diplomacy and give-and-take sounds dreamy, but for Pete’s sake, look who we’re talking about here.