Category: Terror War

Fox News reports that the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani told 60 Minutes last night that the US should examine our time table for withdrawal of military forces from his country;

“Deadlines concentrate the mind. But deadlines should not be dogmas,” Ashraf Ghani told CBS’ “60 Minutes” in an interview that aired Sunday evening.

[…]

Ghani also told CBS that he was concerned about the possibility that Islamic State fighters could make their way to Afghanistan. However, that concern was refuted by ISAF commander Gen. John Campbell, who said that “This is not Iraq. I don’t see [Islamic State] coming into Afghanistan like they did into Iraq. The Afghan Security Forces would not allow that.”

Well, see Ghani is talking about “victory” and that word doesn’t exist in the Pentagon or the White House. The President has already made it clear that the war in Afghanistan has ended – they even changed the name of the operation and had a new flag made and everything. Last year, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, made it clear that he wanted us out of Afghanistan. In fact, according to Reuters, Ghani talks to Karzai almost daily.

“Karzai tells Ashraf Ghani to be very cautious dealing with the U.S. and (that he) must react quickly and strongly when they breach the (security) agreement,” said the source, who declined to be named.

Yeah, well, the Afghan government is going to complain no matter what we do.

AW1Ed sends us an Associated Press article in which they talk to Iraqi Lieutenant General Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi one of the lead commanders in the war against ISIS;

Yet al-Saadi is deeply pessimistic. In a two-hour interview with The Associated Press, he said Iraq’s military lacks weapons, equipment and battle-ready troops and complained that U.S. air support was erratic. Both the military and the government remain riddled with corruption, he said. Most of the senior generals serving when the military fell apart had skills “more suited to World War II,” he said.

“If things don’t get better,” warned the general, “the country could end up divided” between its Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish populations.

Well, I wonder what they’ve been doing over there since we left in December 2011. The active and reserve forces total about 800,000 troops and this year’s US Defense Budget includes $1.3 billion in aid. The general’s last line should scare everyone – that was Joe Biden’s plan for the partition of Iraq – since Joe has been on the wrong side of history since he went to Congress, if we adopt a plan that was his, it will fail.

A veteran of Iraq’s 1980-88 war against Shiite Iran, al-Saadi said he turned down offers of help from Iranian military advisers in retaking Beiji. Iran has been closely helping Iraq’s government in the fight against the extremists.

“If I had accepted help from non-Iraqis, the history books will say the victory was not ours, the Iraqis,” he said.

Well, unless Americans are non-Iraqis. It’s interesting to note that al-Saadi is a Shi’ite, but he seems to put the future of his country ahead of his religious beliefs, at least as far as Iran is concerned.

The Washington Post reports that some US advisers are experiencing the war in Iraq against ISIS in the Anbar Province a little more often than they’d like.

The militants, positioned at a nearby town, have repeatedly hit the base with artillery or rocket fire in recent weeks. Since the middle of December, the U.S.-led military coalition has launched 13 airstrikes around the facility.

U.S. troops have suffered no casualties as a result of the attacks. But the violence has underlined the risks to American personnel as they fan out across Iraq as part of President Obama’s expanding mission against the Islamic State, even as he has pledged U.S. operations will not “involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.”

The war always seems to find US troops in spite of the administrations’ claims that they won’t be involved in combat. I remember US Navy Commander Albert A. Schaufelberger, a SEAL who was advising Salvadoran troops in that country in 1983 as the deputy chief of US forces, during a different presidential administration. The media made it well-known that American troops there wouldn’t have long arms and wouldn’t be involved in combat.

According to Donald Hamilton, public affairs officer of the United States Embassy, Commander Schaufelberger was shot at about 6:30 P.M. when he went to the university to pick up a friend. According to the embassy official, a car pulled up alongside him and fired four shots.

Mr. Hamilton said details of the incident were very preliminary. In addition to his duties as deputy chief of the military group, Commander Schaufelberger was the head of the group’s naval section and chief of security.

In the real world, where there are truly boots on the ground, war always seems to find US troops.

Five more graduates of Guantanamo University have been resettled in Kazakhstan, according to the Miami Herald after the aircraft they were riding to their new homes had mechanical problems;

The transfers of three Yemenis and two Tunisians demonstrated the far-flung nature of the State Department’s resettlement deals as it tries to chart new lives for cleared captives whose home nations are too unsettled for repatriation.

It was also the latest in a surge of transfers that has reduced the prison camp population to 127.

So I guess that’s one way to close the prison without Congressional approval. We can always drone them later, I suppose.

But the base at Guantanamo doesn’t seem to be closing anytime soon. According to another Miami Herald article, the Navy is pumping more money into the base for a new dependent school;

Congress recently allocated the funds for the new W.T. Sampson School to put the children of American sailors stationed here under one roof. It will meet Americans with Disabilities Act standards, have a proper public address system, computer and science labs, art and music rooms, a playground, cafeteria and gym — just like any new school anywhere in America.

But the investment also illustrates the Pentagon’s intent to keep this base open even if President Barack Obama manages to move out the last 132 war-on-terror captives, and close the prison run by 2,000 or more temporary troops and contractors.

There’s a discussion going on, apparently, about John Kerry and others who have begun calling that ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State thing Daesh instead. I guess it’s the acronym in Arabic, and it pisses off the members of that particular band of thugs. Which goes in the “plus” column. But as it turns out, it’s just the Left trying to be politically correct, as usual, according to two pointyheads in the Washington Post;

Kerry and other Western officials have taken to using the Arabic acronym Daesh. Why? It’s a reaction to reports that Islamic State fanboys fume when people use the Arabic acronym for the group instead of its fuller name. It’s also an effort by Westerners to distinguish between Islam and the Islamic State. As French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius explained, “I do not recommend using the term Islamic State because it blurs the lines between Islam, Muslims and Islamists.”

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon made a similar argument using another version of the Islamic State’s acronym. “As Muslim leaders around the world have said, groups like ISIL – or Daesh — have nothing to do with Islam, and they certainly do not represent a state,” he said. “They should more fittingly be called the ‘Un-Islamic Non-State.’”

I guess what you call it is more important than killing all of the thugs, so we don’t have to worry about what we call it. But, you know, being Liberals, they have to over think everything to no logical benefit for anyone. Form over substance.

The pointyheads compare it to Harry Potter novels;

The first is what Harry Potter fans would recognize as the Voldemort Effect, wherein the books’ protagonists fearfully refer to the villain Voldemort as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named to avoid attracting his attention. Refusing to say the name of the Islamic State does something similar by enhancing the allure of the Group-That-Must-Not-Be-Named in radical quarters.

Refusing to utter the Islamic State’s name also needlessly complicates the religious fight to discredit the organization. Muslims understandably feel that their religion is being hijacked. But there’s something odd about an American president or Secretary of State opining on what is and isn’t legitimately Islamic. Shouldn’t it go without saying that a murderous extremist group isn’t what Muslims are all about?

Yeah, I don’t know – I guess I’m going to need some more Muslims tell me what to think about it rather than risk offending someone. Personally, I’d rather the pointyheads come up with way to wipe out the organization than talk about what we should call them. I’d have liked that they were on the side of victory, you know, seven years ago when we needed them.

Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.

The President courageously ended the war in Afghanistan from his Hawaiian vacation, according to the Associated Press;

President Barack Obama says the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.

Obama is welcoming the end of U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan. The war came to a formal end Sunday with a ceremony in Kabul.

Obama says in a statement that the effort has devastated al-Qaida’s core leadership, brought justice to Osama bin Laden and disrupted terrorist plots. He says U.S. troops and diplomats have helped Afghans reclaim their communities and move toward democracy.

Meanwhile, in Kabul, NATO ended it’s mission in Afghanistan, according to Stars & Stripes;

The U.S. and NATO formally transitioned Sunday to a new “non-combat mission in a combat environment” whose definition remains as unclear as Afghanistan’s future, now that the bulk of foreign forces have left.

During an hour-long ceremony in a drab gymnasium at the headquarters of the military coalition that has battled against insurgents for 13 years, generals hailed the end of a mission, while struggling to explain the parameters of what will still be a substantial military operation in Afghanistan.

I wonder how al Qaeda voted on this “transition to a new non-combat mission”. The president spoke to US troops while he was on vacation on Christmas day;

President Barack Obama marked the end of more than a decade of combat in Afghanistan by paying tribute to America’s military, telling troops on Christmas Day that their sacrifices have allowed for a more peaceful, prosperous world to emerge out of the ashes of 9/11.

A more peaceful world, huh? Not according to Reuters;

The Islamic State militant group has killed 1,878 people in Syria during the past six months, the majority of them civilians, a British-based Syrian monitoring organization said on Sunday.

Islamic State also killed 120 of its own members, most of them foreign fighters trying to return home, in the last two months, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

I remember when I was in college, they told me that the Vietnam war the longest war in our history and they told me that it lasted from 1955 – 1975. I guess they revised those dates down recently so that they could call Afghanistan our longest war. Good for the history police.

Now this new “non-combat mission” is Operation Resolute Support – certain to scare the bejesus out of the Taliban. It even has a fancy schmancy flag;

On the U.S. mainland and across the globe, other prominent leaders were fanning out, echoing the president’s message with their own Christmas visits and phone calls to American troops.

Well, that’s what important – a message. That’ll show those jihadists.

You may not have heard, but Mu’ath al-Kaseasbeh, a Jordanian F-16 pilot fell into the hands of those thugs in ISIS yesterday. According to the US military, his craft wasn’t shot down as those ISIS fellows claim.

My normal cheer this time of year has been tempered by this news, because, yeah, Mu’ath al-Kaseasbeh isn’t a Christian and this holy day has no meaning to him, but anyone engaged in the wholesale slaughter of ISIS is my brother.

He’s probably having a bad day today and it’s only going to get worse. If you can find it in your heart, please wish the best for him to whichever diety you converse. And mention some comfort for his father, while you’re at it.