Category: Terror War

Reuters reports that the Taliban assaulted the Afghan Parliament today using suicide bombers and a car bomb, you know, the way they usually assault stuff. No one was injured except some civilians who happened to be in the area – a woman and her child were killed and thirty others were injured – again typically Taliban. The Afghan defenders report that they eliminated the six Taliban fighters who hadn’t blow themselves up.

Fox News says that the Taliban has stepped up their attacks because ISIS threatens to be a political force in that place;

Fox News National Security Analyst KT McFarland spoke to John Hannah and Benjamin Collins about Afghanistan’s security situation.

Hannah, a senior counselor with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, sees similarities in the attack to tactics used by ISIS in the Middle East.

“They are looking at a U.S. drawdown significantly. They think that they might be able to re-create what ISIS has done in Iraq,” he said. This attack “is very much the Taliban putting down their marker and they are on the offensive elsewhere in Afghanistan, picking up territory – the Taliban is back.”

But, yeah, this war against terror or contingency operation or whatever the Hell it is called these days seems to be going swimmingly.

But, you should watch steel-spined fellow of the Afghan parliament when the bomb went off. He hardly flinched;

Pinto Nag sends us a link to Fox News about Fareed Mumuni who unsuccessfully attacked federal officers with a knife while they’re rolling up a cell of terrorists that they discovered;

No one on the Joint Terrorism Task Force team, made up of state, local and federal law enforcement agents, was hurt in the attack allegedly carried out by Fareed Mumuni just a day after another New York man, Munther Saleh, was charged with plotting to make a pressure cooker bomb. Authorities believe Saleh and Mumuni were working together, and both allegedly told police they “had pledged allegiance” to ISIS.

[…]

A federal law enforcement source told Fox News that anti-terrorism investigators are building numerous cases and expect several federal indictments in the coming weeks before July 4. Each of the cases involve homegrown extremists radicalized through social media, said the source.

Well, at least it will give the Feds something to do until the holidays. Too bad we can’t send them to Guantanamo anymore. We should really stop taking prisoners.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the blame for the White House’s lack of a clear strategy in the war against ISIS rests on the Pentagon because, for some reason, the out going leadership, namely chairman of the joint chiefs Martin Dempsey wants to urge caution;

Top military officials, who have typically argued for more combat power to overcome battlefield setbacks over the past decade, emerged in recent White House debates as consistent voices of caution in Iraq. Their shift reflects the paucity of good options and a reluctance to suffer more combat deaths in a war in which America’s political leaders are far from committed and Iraqis have shown limited will to fight.

“After the past 12 years in the Middle East, there is a real focus by senior military leaders on understanding what the endgame is,” said a military official, “and asking the question, ‘To what end are we doing this?’?”

The end is the utter destruction of ISIS without a chance that they can reform in another entity. The goal is to make ISIS’ brand of warfare and terror too deadly to replicate. But, of course, Dempsey, the Secretary of the Army and the Army Chief of Staff are all retiring from those positions in the next few months, so they’re preserving their legacies, like the current administration – everyone wants to look like they’re doing something when really, they are not.

In the days that followed [the collapse of the Iraqi Army in Ramadi] , Obama assembled his national security team to fix a strategy that appeared to be foundering.

Like everything else this administration does in regards to ISIS, they were too late. Dempsey knew that Ramadi was going to fall to ISIS more than a month before it happened and the Pentagon did nothing to fight the relatively easier (compared to the planned assault to take Ramadi back) defensive battle. the strategy doesn’t appear to be foundering, it is foundering because a strategy doesn’t exist. But, nothing will change because this administration and any military leaders they appoint to the impending vacancies will just be biding their time for the next president.

But, given the current crop of candidates for president, I don’t see any danger to ISIS’ future.

Don’t worry, though, the Shi’ite militias produced two people to talk to the Associated Press who don’t want Americans to help them;

Noting the increased number of U.S. advisers, trainers, logisticians and security personnel, al-Amiri scoffed at the notion that an additional “450 experts will be able to win the battle.”

“There were 150,000 American troops, thousands of tanks and mortars, and hundreds of jets, and they were unable to do anything to al-Qaida in 2006 and 2007,” al-Amiri said.

So, there you go. I guess the militias get a vote on the President’s cabinet.

The Washington Post’s editorial board joins the growing list of critics of the way the Obama Administration is waging their war against ISIS in their lead editorial this morning. Of course, I write “waging war” in the loosest sense of the term.

With the campaign against the Islamic State faltering, President Obama has agreed to dispatch 450 more U.S. troops to an Iraqi air base near the provincial capital of Ramadi, which the terrorists captured last month. The underlying logic of his policy, however, hasn’t changed. Rather than aiming to destroy the Islamic State, Mr. Obama is focused on limiting U.S. engagement. The result is an under-resourced effort that remains unlikely to succeed.

There’s a policy? I didn’t realize that. The only policy that I see is to appear as if the president is serious about engaging the thugs of ISIS without actually doing much to defeat them, but it’s like last year in Afghanistan where the focus wasn’t on defeating the Taliban, but rather on withdrawing US troops at the end of the year so the President could tell us that he had ended our participation in that war. Now there are ten thousand troops remaining in Afghanistan because the politicians lost their focus last year.

Without saying so, the Post admits that President Bush was right, strategy-wise, in Iraq;

Mr. Obama’s escalation nevertheless is most notable for excluding the steps that American and Iraqi commanders and military experts have been saying for a year are necessary to decisively reverse the Islamic State’s momentum. These include the deployment of U.S. advisers to front-line Iraqi units, along with spotters who can call in airstrikes, and an increase of close-in air support.

Such tactics worked during the U.S. “surge” in Iraq, and they allowed Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban government in 2001-2002. That they are not being used now, despite the Islamic State’s recent gains, seems to be explained only by Mr. Obama’s political resistance to reversing his decision to withdraw U.S. forces four years ago.

The concept of “limited warfare” has been disproved as ineffective as far back as the war against Mexico in 1846. But, politicians think that they can manage warfare from a distance for short-term political gains. It only ends up costing the lives of the folks who fight those wars. Thus far, this administration has been lucky in that regard.

I disagree that US troops need to accompany Iraqi forces into combat, that probably won’t end well for at least some of those US troops. The story of Dakota Meyers in Afghanistan comes to mind, where some US advisers accompanied Afghan forces into a box canyon trap against their better judgement.

The incrementalism of [President Obama’s] approach, with small and isolated steps taken too late, cannot change the momentum of the war. The Islamic State continues to attract thousands of recruits and to inspire new affiliates abroad because of the widespread perception that it is holding the United States at bay.

You defeat the extremists in ISIS with an outward appearance of overall strength and huge, resounding, indisputable victories. The US looks impotent in Iraq and unable to win. Until this administration can form the word “victory” in their collective mouth, it will elude them.

Fox News reports that the Pentagon has recommended to the White House that another 400 US troops be deployed to Iraq to join the 3000 who are already there training the Iraqis to fight the ISIS invaders from the Syrian Civil War;

The official said that the White House had not made a final decision on the recommendation, which would bring the total number of American troops in Iraq to approximately 3,400.

[…]

The Pentagon also plans to open a sixth training base in Iraq’s Anbar province, a vital battleground against the terror group. No Iraqi troops are currently being trained by U.S. forces at the al-Asad airbase in Anbar.

The Pentagon says that the additional forces and base are aimed at bolstering the number of Sunni Muslims in the fight against ISIS. Currently, there are 2,598 Iraqi forces being trained by U.S. forces. Of that number, about 800 are Kurds and the rest are Shiite Muslims.

Wait, wait, wait. We have 3000 troops training 2600 Iraqis? The concept is called using US troops as “force multipliers” – one US soldier having a training impact on several allied foreign soldiers who will then be used in the actual fighting. I guess everyone gets their own personal trainer, and it looks more like US trainers are “force equalizers”.

The President was correct when he said there is no strategy.

Yesterday in a press conferance at the G7 meeting in Germany the President admitted that “we don’t have a complete strategy” in regards to fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq, a year-and-a-half after the fall of Fallujah. Yeah, well, tell me something I don’t know.

The State Department immediately sent out John Kirby, their newest talking face who just left the same job at the Pentagon to do it for Kerry, to counter the President’s statement, according to The Hill;

“We do have a strategy, the president was referring to a specific plan to improve training and equipping of the Iraqi security forces,” department spokesman John Kirby said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Kirby told the panelists that the strategy covers “ends, ways and means.”

“The ends are very clear, we’ve said this all along, the goal is to degrade and defeat ISIL, to remove them as a threat in the region and frankly, around the world. The ways we are going to do that are through obviously airstrikes. We have to train and equip Iraqi Security forces, this is their fight on the ground. We have to stem the flow of foreign fighters,” he said, using the administration’s preferred acronym for ISIS.

Yeah, but they’re not real serious about it. I read the other day how four separate airstrikes took out one ISIS fighting position and an anti-aircraft artillery piece. That doesn’t sound like a force that wants to “degrade and defeat” ISIS. I’m not saying that we, the public, need to know what the strategy is, but we do need to see an administration that means what they say. And, oh, by the way, someone should tell the president that we need to see that he’s confident about the way we’re conducting the war.