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

Category: Terror War

  • Bloom is off the rose

    USAToday reports that Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State, decided to get tough with Pakistan one of our strongest allies in the near east;

    “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to,” Clinton said in an interview with Pakistani journalists in Lahore. “Maybe that’s the case. Maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know.”

    I wonder how tough she’ll be when she talks to Iran – you know someone with whom we should be tough. She defended her comments on television this morning;

    “I wanted to get that out on the table, because the Pakistanis have talked about a trust deficit and it’s a two-way street,” Clinton said in an interview shown on NBC’s “Today Show.” “We have questions, they have questions.”

    Yeah, because at this point neither side knows how much they can trust each other. The Pakistanis don’t want to hang their collective neck out when they know that the US Left will pull the rug out from under them at any minute for no good reason other than their feelings.

    Over the last few days, I’ve watched Clinton get tough with the Afghans and the Pakistanis, but they tread lightly around Iran and Korea…you know, the folks that want to wipe us out.

    Clinton was asked about American commitment to the war against terror;

    “What guarantee,” the woman asked, “can Americans give Pakistan that we can now trust you — not you but, like, the Americans this time — of your sincerity and that you guys are not going to betray us like the Americans did in the past when they wanted to destabilize the Russians?”

    Clinton responded that the question was a “fair criticism” and that the U.S. did not follow through in the way it should have. “It’s difficult to go forward if we’re always looking in the rearview mirror,” said Clinton, on the second day of a three-day visit, her first to Pakistan as secretary of State.

    Well, that’s not an answer. That’s not reassuring. It tells me that this administration will reevaluate their commitment on a daily basis – probably using polls. Like Clinton’s husband did with Haiti, Somalia…and Afghanistan. Oh, sorry…I looked through that rearview mirror again.

  • Yeah, we’re the ones with a problem

    This is from Firedog Lake’s Blue Texan. When I read it, I thought about the commenter here that said no matter what he does, we’ll never like Obama. Apparently, you guys like Obama enough for the rest of us;

    fdl-bds

    Yeah, Obama makes ONE trip to Dover so he’s automatically a better President than Bush was. OK. that’s your opinion, but at least get the whole quote from the Stars and Stripes interview instead of picking words out;

    President Bush has met hundreds of families of fallen soldiers, but he has yet to attend a servicemember’s funeral, he said Tuesday.

    “Because which funeral do you go to? In my judgment, I think if I go to one I should go to all. How do you honor one person but not another?” he said.

    The appropriate way to express his appreciation to the family members of fallen troops is to meet with them in private, he said.

    I get the feeling that the Left is feeling a bit wee-wee’d up from the embarrassment of the media’s tongue bath of the President so they’ve turned to out-dorking the media. Even Alan Colmes joins in;

    colmes-bds

    To be truthful, I appreciate the President going to Dover, but taking the press corp with him is fairly disgusting. The media’s behavior reporting the event is laughable – one photo opportunity at Dover doesn’t make him a leader, or even thoughtful.

    In my opinion, he’s setting us up for a disappointment in Afghanistan.

  • Boehner: Time for a decision on Afghanistan

    American Power blog writes that, after the stunning attack on UN members at a guest house yesterday, the United Nations is reconsidering their mission in Afghanistan. Still the President dawdles. John Boehner, Ohio Republican, says it’s time for a decision from this White House;

    “This has gone on now for well over two months, and I think it’s time for the President to make a decision. My biggest concern is that the men and women that are in Afghanistan in the military, they are at much greater risk as a result of his unwillingness to make a decision.”

    The Washington Post writes that Obama is still asking for information on Afghanistan upon which to base his decision;

    President Obama has asked senior officials for a province-by-province analysis of Afghanistan to determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help, information that his advisers say will guide his decision on how many additional U.S. troops to send to the battle.

    After two months and six meetings, he still doesn’t have the data he needs to make a decision. But, the AP/Stars & Stripes reports that the President took time to welcome fallen soldiers at Dover Air Force Base last night.

    In a midnight dash to this Delaware base, where U.S. forces killed overseas come home, Obama honored the return of 18 fallen Americans Thursday. All were killed in Afghanistan this week, a brutal stretch that turned October into the most deadly month for U.S. troops since the war began. The dramatic image of a president on the tarmac was a portrait not witnessed in years. Former President George W. Bush spent lots of time with grieving military families but never went to Dover to meet the remains coming off the cargo plane. Obama did so with the weight of knowing he may soon send more troops off to war.

    Not all soldiers die, AP. Some of them save lives by their presence. It appears that the Taliban are stepping up their pressure to scare the President from making the right decision. All of the media fawning over his visit to Dover doesn’t help our troops one whit. More on the President’s visit to Dover at The Mudville Gazette.

    Stop voting present, President Obama, and make the right decision.

  • Ahmadinjad touts western cooperation

    Contrary to what the west has been telling us they’re doing, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bragged to a crowd today that the west is now helping Iran develop their nuclear program according to the Associated Press/Fox News Channel;

    “Today we reached a very important point,” Ahmadinejad said, speaking at a rally in the northeastern city of Mashhad. “Ground has been paved for nuclear cooperation” and Tehran is ready to now work on nuclear fuel supplies and technical know-how with the U.N. nuclear watchdog, Ahmadinejad added.

    But he insisted his government “will not retreat even an iota” over the nation’s right to pursue a nuclear program — which the West fears masks a nuclear arms ambition.

    Well, I can see how he might get the idea since everything the West tries to do, Ahmadinejad simply rejects. Even the Washington Post has noticed a dangerous trend in the Obama Administration’s negotiating style;

    Many of us worry that, for Obama, engagement is an end in itself, not a means to an end. We worry that every time Iran rejects one proposal, the president will simply resume negotiations on another proposal and that this will continue right up until the day Iran finally tests its first nuclear weapon, at which point the president will simply begin negotiations again to try to persuade Iran to put its nuclear genie back in the bottle.

    Russia, meanwhile, will continue to be accommodated as a partner in this effort, on the perpetually untested theory that if Obama ever did decide to get tough with Iran, Moscow would join in. Russia thus reaps all the rewards of engagement without ever having to make a difficult decision.

    I guess all we can do is sit around and wait for that first nuclear test in the Iranian desert while the Obama Administration twiddles it’s stupid thumbs.

  • Fighting them at home

    A radical muslim sect leader from Detroit was killed by FBI agents yesterday according to the Washington Times;

    Luqman Ameen Abdullah fired a gun when FBI agents, who had come to arrest him on criminal charges, ordered him to drop his weapon, according to authorities. The agents fired back and killed Abdullah. An FBI dog was also fatally shot, though it was not immediately clear whose bullets killed the dog.

    Abdullah, also known as Christopher Thomas, was the leader of the Detroit faction of a Sunni Islam group known as Ummah, which consists mainly of American blacks who converted to Islam while in prisons throughout the country. Abdullah had been convicted in 1981 of assault and carrying a concealed weapon.

    I guess he got his wish – the Times quoted from one of his sermons;

    In one sermon, according to court records, Abdullah shouted at his followers, “Police, so what? Police die too! Feds die too! Do not carry a pistol if you’re going to give it up to police. You give them a bullet.”

    Well, there you go, buddy. So what?

  • Why AP doesn’t fight our wars

    The Associated Press, in trying to show how smart they are and how incompetent the US military points out;

    There are already more than 100,000 international troops in Afghanistan working with 200,000 Afghan security forces and police. It adds up to a 12-1 numerical advantage over Taliban rebels, but it hasn’t led to anything close to victory.

    What AP hasn’t noticed is that the Taliban knows where they are and they know where the US troops are, generally. That’s kind of an advantage – especially since COIN requires that we protect civilians and create an environment of security for them, and the Taliban isn’t required by doctrine or international opinion to provide a measure of security for anyone – except themselves.

    I guess AP envisions some sort of man-to-man defense.

    Of course, you have to read almost to the end to read where AP admits it’s 12-1 ratio is a bit misleading;

    The 12-1 ratio may be misleading because two-thirds of the Allied force is made up of Afghans, who lack the training and experience. The Taliban usually fight in small, cohesive units made up of friends and fellow clansmen. A more meaningful ratio, then, might be 4-1 or 5-1.

    Historically in guerrilla wars, security forces have usually had at least a 3-1 advantage.

    At the height of the U.S. ground involvement in South Vietnam in 1968, the 1.2 million American troops and their allies outnumbered the Communist guerrillas by about 4-1. French forces in the 1945-54 Indochina war numbered about 400,000 men, only a slight numerical advantage against the rebels.

    In a more recent campaign, Russia’s Chechen war in 1999-2000, Russian troops held a 4-1 advantage over the insurgents.

    But 5-1 doesn’t make good headlines like 12-1 does. I guess they’re lobbying the Obama Administration to keep our presence in Afghanistan lower. That won’t encourage the Taliban, will it? If you read even further, you’ll notice they admit that they don’t even know the number of Taliban that they use in their ratio anyway.

    Why did they even bother to write the article?

  • The cost of indecision

    Donald Douglas at American Power tells us about the bomb that went off in Pakistan this morning while Hillary Clinton visited the country .

    Stars & Stripes/Associated Press tells the story of gunmen attacking a guest house in Kabul killing at least 12 UN workers. The Telegraph reports that al Qaeda accepted blame for the worst bomb attack in Iraq in years that claimed over 150 casualties (including scores of children) this weekend.

    The same type of attacks preceded our 2006 mid-term election to present the appearance of the futility of the war in Iraq in order to influence the American people’s decisions. Bush surprised the entire country as well as Iraqis by increasing combat power in Iraq instead of capitulating to the enemy.

    Apparently, our enemies think they have an opportunity to scare this administration into abandoning the Middle East. It’s probably not a coincidence that all of this is happening while the US is trying to solidify support in the Security Council against Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

  • Biden plan hits UN roadblock

    It’s hard to know who to cheer for in a fight between Joe Biden’s plan for the war in Afghanistan and the United Nations. Biden’s plan is to use Special Forces soldiers and drone aircraft to take out Taliban and al Qaeda leadership, exposing fewer troops to actual combat. But the UN has stepped in and want the Obama Administration to prove how their plan is legal, according to the Associated Press and the Stars and Stripes;

    Alston, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s investigator on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, raised the issue of U.S. Predator drones in a report to the General Assembly’s human rights committee and at a news conference afterwards, saying he has become increasingly concerned at the dramatic increase in their use, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, since June.

    He said the U.S. response – that the Geneva-based council and the General Assembly have no role in relation to killings during an armed conflict – “is simply untenable.”

    “That would remove the great majority of issues that come before these bodies right now,” Alston said. “The onus is really on the government of the United States to reveal more about the ways in which it makes sure that arbitrary executions, extrajudicial executions are not, in fact, being carried out through the use of these weapons.”

    In my opinion, Biden’s plan is unworkable and will only serve to lengthen our stay in the region, but still, the UN seems oblivious to the fact that Taliban and al Qaeda forces who are the target of drones are responsible for thousands of deaths of innocent civilians. That seems a worse record of human rights abuses than blowing up a few terrorist leaders.

    If this was the Bush Administration, I wouldn’t worry about the use of drone aircraft decreasing, but since this is the Obama/Biden era, those two might be more responsive to UN idiocy. The article doesn’t mention the use of Special Operations troops, but you know that can’t be far away. Of course, the UN seems more preoccupied in blunting US military power than they are in making the world a safer place in which to live.