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

Category: Terror War

  • Straddling that fence

    As it’s been pointed out across the blogosphere today, President Obama’s speech last night was generally a cut and paste job from some early GWB speeches interspersed with apologies to the Left for making the politically expedient decision. And today, Obama sent out his minions to apologize even further to the Left and try to talk tough for the Right. As reported in the Washington Times, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Senate Armed Services Committee hearing;

    “We’re not just going to throw these guys into the swimming pool and walk away,” Mr. Gates told the committee. “It will be based on conditions on the ground, but at the same time . . . we have to build a fire under them, frankly, to get them to do the kind of recruitment and retention that allows us to make this transition.”

    Gates added a proviso;

    But asked specifically by Sen. Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat, who is Senate Armed Forces Committee chairman, if the July 2011 date set by Mr. Obama to begin the “transition” process could be “conditions-based,” Mr. Gates replied, “No, sir.”

    An escape hatch. Ask anyone in the South Vietnamese government how our “condition-based” guarantees work out. We abandoned the South Vietnamese in 1975, the Afghans in 1988, the Iraqi Shi’ites in 1991, Somalia in 1993, and the Haitians. What’s going to stop us from abandoning the Afghans in 2012?

    On the other hand, the last time a Democrat president announced a date-certain for withdrawing troops right before an election was Bosnia before 1996. Last I checked, we’re still there. So what reason does the Left have for believing their own guy?

    It all comes down to credibility and since staffing only 75% what the generals requested is a muddled political compromise (which took 94 days, by the way) from where will the magic credibility spring? Neither side has reason to believe anything this president and his administration says.

  • Paying for war

    We’ve watched as government spending has increased over the last year at a rate which is the only thing that will never be described by this White House as unprecedented. The word “trillions” slides off the tongues of politicians like honey these days. Every where you turn, there are signs announcing the commencement of some new federal spending – a drive to western Maryland this weekend was punctuated with huge placards introducing me to the wonders of a federally funded guardrail replacement project.

    Now, after waiting 94 days for President Obama to make a decision on troop commitments to Afghanistan, Democrats are finally talking about tax increases – apparently because the administration has proposed something that actually falls into the responsibilities of government – defense. The main proponent of a “war tax” is David Obey;

    Obey criticized the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on economic grounds and recently proposed a war tax to pay for an escalated war in Afghanistan.

    Thought it’s impossible to know Obey’s motives, the tax seems to be less a serious policy proposal and more an effort to call out GOP deficit hawks who abandon their fiscal restraint when it comes to deficit-funded wars. (Obey has similarly called political bluffs in the past.)

    Oddly enough, Obey complains that Republicans are demanding that Congress pay for their social programs.

    The Hill reports that there is little support for a war tax;

    Most senators and representatives pointed to the recession, saying that a tax increase would be poorly timed because it could prolong the economic drought.

    “It’s not a good idea to raise taxes in the middle of an economic downturn,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). “I do think it needs to be paid for over some budget period. But I don’t like the idea of raising taxes now, at a time of economic weakness. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

    But the Washington Post wrings it’s hands over the prospect of an increase in troops without an increases in taxes;

    Obama’s proposal would place more than 200,000 troops altogether in Afghanistan and Iraq. If the troop level across both nations averages 75,000 through the next decade, the operations will cost an additional $867 billion — more than the $848 billion health-care legislation the Senate is considering.

    As if the Post’s readership doesn’t know that $867 billion is more than $848 billion. Thanks, Washington Post for clearing that up. I wonder if they’ve noticed that “health care” isn’t mentioned in the Preamble of the Constitution yet.

    It took minutes for Obey to run in circles and proclaim that the sky is falling;

    Minutes after Obama finished speaking, Obey issued a statement opposing the troop buildup and warning that the cost of the military efforts “could devour our ability to pay for the actions necessary to rebuild our own economy. We simply cannot afford to shortchange the crucial investments we need in education, job training, healthcare, and energy independence. The biggest threat to our long-term national security is a stunted economy.”

    Of course, no one is mentioning that there is a tax hike scheduled for next year, the year that the Bush tax cuts expire. So any increase the Congress imposes on us is in addition to a return to the Clinton tax era – which means that millions who pay no taxes now will get the surprise of their lives when they’re suddenly in a 15% tax bracket.

  • Fence sitting as a war policy

    I read somewhere that a compromise is an arrangement whereby people who can’t get what they want make sure nobody else does either. and that’s the way this drizzle is shaking out in Afghanistan.

    According to the Associated Press, President Obama is ordering only 30,000 troops for his drizzle over the next 6 months and then he’ll announce he’s pulling them back out in 19 months. So, I’m guessing there won’t be much action for the next 19 months while the Taliban takes sabbatical.

    The Washington Times writes that both sides in the US aren’t happy about his decision;

    Two liberal Democrats and a moderate Republican lawmaker are set to announce their opposition to the president’s plan Tuesday afternoon, just hours ahead of Mr. Obama’s nationally televised address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. And Republican leaders, who support the president’s call for more troops to Afghanistan, have qualified that support by saying that any talk of an exit strategy won’t fly.

    That’s what happens when you’re supposed to be a leader you try to please everyone. Everyone expects to be made happy and no one is. Every 20-year-old buck sergeant learned that on the first day of PLDC.

    ADDED: In this link from TSO, the American Legion has it’s reservations about the policy, too.

  • No Gun Ri and Bagram

    Adirondack Patriot sent us this link to an Albany Times-Union article about the opening of a new archives for documents related to the alleged atrocity at No Gun Ri, Korea in 1950. Adirondack Patriot writes;

    There is so many things wrong about this. First, a non-historian professor is compiling history based driven by personal interest. A computer science professor with no military experience is going to dabble in amateur historical analysis and somehow it will be cast in stone as historical fact.

    Second, the person has already framed this event as a “massacre” by American soldiers, disregarding the work by an American infantry major who researched the incident and disproved the AP story (which was based on the accounts of three proven liars).

    Third, there is no new evidence to justify this “historical” project. Using taxpayer money to solicit historical accounts is a pretty crappy way of collecting reliable facts.

    Forth, this research will involve free and open access to the North Korean archives of the event, right? Yeah, right.

    In short, the campus liberals and the media are again portraying the United States military as murderers and using taxpayer money to do it.

    Honestly, I stopped paying attention to the No Gun Ri discussion when it was determined that one of the main witnesses, Edward Daily, was proven to have been no where near the incident. One of the charges was that US soldiers set up machine guns at the opposite ends of a tunnel and fired on the refugees. I guess the bullets in those days were programmed to only hit Koreans and not to hit the machine gun team at the other entrance.

    But there’s a similar story in the Washington Post this morning about two Afghan teenagers who claim they were held at a secret prison at Bagram Airbase and tortured. The Post is careful, in this case to mention that there’s no corroboration for the teens’ charges, but that doesn’t stop them from reporting ridiculous stories;

    The two teenagers — Issa Mohammad, 17, and Abdul Rashid, who said he is younger than 16 — said in interviews this week that they were punched and slapped in the face by their captors during their time at Bagram air base, where they were held in individual cells. Rashid said his interrogator forced him to look at pornography alongside a photograph of his mother.

    Um, why show them porn? What would it accomplish? It sounds like something the TSA would force me to do while my plane is pulling away from the gate, but to what end would an interrogator engage in that behavior? I mean, seriously. Their job is to get information not torture someone simply for the sake of torture – like I said, that’s TSA’s job.

    At the beginning of his detention, he was forced to strip naked and undergo a medical checkup in front of about a half-dozen American soldiers. He said that his Muslim upbringing made such a display humiliating and that the soldiers made it worse.

    “They touched me all over my body. They took pictures, and they were laughing and laughing,” he said. “They were doing everything.”

    It sounds like that episode of Family Guy when Peter got a prostate exam;

    I’ll never understand why the media is so eager to believe any story that makes the American fighting forces look like perverted, bloodthirsty monsters no matter how ridiculous the story sounds.

    I’m sure Mathew Alexander will have some information on this even though his time as an interrogator was more than three years ago and in a different country.

  • A cartoonist meets our troops

    Stephan Pastis, the creator of the comic strip “Pearls Before Swine”, recently went on a tour for the USO in the Middle East along with nine other cartoonists and met our troops. He discovered what most of us here at TAH already know;

    I have never been thanked by anyone as I was by those soldiers we visited in hospitals and on military bases. Their thanks were as sincere and heartfelt as anything I’ve ever heard. And as much as it was for our being cartoonists whose strips they might enjoy, I think it was also simply because we were there.

    I wish I could introduce them to you. They were sincere and direct and respectful to a degree I have never experienced in my day-to-day life here. And if something were to have posed a threat to any of us while we were there, I had no doubt they would have protected us before they protected themselves.

    Every morning, I groan while getting out of my bed knowing that I have to face a day with the latte-drinking crowd and I miss the mornings when I bounded from my bed at oh-dark-thirty looking forward to my day (weeks, months) ahead that I’d spend among soldiers. I’m glad that Mr. Pastis believes the gap between the troops and the latte crowd is bridgeable, and I’d like to share his optimism, but I don’t hold out much hope.

    The latte crowd prefers to see the troops as victims of George Bush, of a failed education system, of predatory recruiters, of jingoistic neo-cons – that way the latte crowd doesn’t have to accept the fact that there are things in this country worth dying and sacrificing. That there are people in this country who put other things above SELF.

    People who have never spent a day in uniform think that sacrifice means watching the news a few times every week and being subjected to homogenized images of war. I’ve heard them tell recovering wounded soldiers that “we’ve all lost things in this war” when the only thing they’ve given up is cheap coffee and common sense.

    Thanks to David Marron of The Thunder Run for the link.

  • 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?

  • 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.