Category: Karl Eikenberry, that dick

The Washington Post reveals an excerpt from Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book due out this week entitled “Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan” which illustrates that which I’ve been saying from the beginning about Obama’s lack of commitment to the surge in Afghanistan causing it’s failure. From the Associated Press report on the book;

Obama purposely did not read a grim CIA assessment of Afghanistan that found little measurable benefit from the 30,000 “surge” forces Obama eventually approved, the book quotes a U.S. official as saying.

A previously undisclosed Biden memo to Obama in November 2009 reflects his view that military commanders were asking Obama to take a leap by adding tens of thousands of forces whose role was poorly defined.

Although Biden’s doubts have become well known, the new book details how Biden used a months-long White House review of the war to question the basic premise that the same “counterinsurgency” strategy that had apparently worked in Iraq could be applied to Afghanistan.

“I do not see how anyone who took part in our discussions could emerge without profound questions about the viability of counterinsurgency,” Biden wrote to Obama.

The reason Bush’s surge in Iraq worked was because he demonstrated that the US was committed to winning in Iraq. Despite the fact that Republicans and Bush lost the 2006 election, Bush announced the surge days after the election. While Democrats, IVAW, Vote Vets, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi worked to undermine the impact of the troops against the insurgency, those insurgents realized that they couldn’t stand against the US determination to kill them and they decided their best bet was to join us in destroying the foreign fighters in Iraq.

The Obama Administration lacked that determination. Eager to seek a political solution that wouldn’t anger their base too much, the Obama Administration sought a compromise on commitment instead, which signaled to the Taliban that they could wait us out. Despite the fact that the CIA said that 30,000 troops wouldn’t have that much impact on the Taliban, Biden, the smartest man in the room, wanted the number capped at 20,000. Even that dick Eikenberry gave the Taliban hope;

[Ambassador to Afghanistan, that dick Karl] Eikenberry, a former top Army general who had served in Afghanistan, said more forces would only delay the time when Afghans would take over responsibility for their own security.

The Eikenberry memo was leaked shortly after he sent it, and confirmed by U.S. officials. Biden was presumed to agree with it, but he stayed mum at the time.

Obama’s compromise – 30,000 additional forces and a deadline to begin bringing them home – was intended to blunt the momentum of a resurgent Taliban insurgency without committing Obama to an open-ended war.

Their strategy from the beginning was withdrawal – if the war had appeared open-ended, it might have dissuaded the Taliban from continuing a fight which had no end, as it looked to the Iraq insurgency in 2006. But Obama, Biden and Eikenberry blew it. they were more scared of an open-ended war than the Taliban. The Obama Administration blinked.

The first wave of the insurgency surge, 17,000 Marines, were sent to Helmand. from the Washington Post’s excerpt;

“Can someone tell me why the Marines were sent to Helmand?” the incredulous McChrystal asked his officers.

The answer — not fully known at the time to McChrystal and his officers — would reveal the dysfunction of the U.S. war effort: a reliance on understaffed NATO partners for crucial intelligence, a misjudgment of Helmand’s importance to Afghanistan’s security, and tribal politics within the Pentagon that led the Marines to insist on confining themselves to a far less important patch of desert.

Kind of reminds you of Lyndon Johnson plotting targets in Hanoi, doesn’t it? So the Obama Administration ignored the CIA recommendations along with the tactical expertise of their commander on the ground to fight the wrong war in the wrong way – depending on Joe Biden’s ninja robot zombies. Joe Biden who has been on the wrong side of every foreign policy debate since he got to the Senate. The smartest guy in his own head.

Yeah, we need four more years of this crowd.

Ring-knocker and my very first plaoon leader Karl Eikenberry, That Dick (yes that’s his full name) finally grows a pair of ‘nads in his final days as ambassador to Afghanistan according to the Washington Post;

After an upbeat speech about Afghanistan’s future prospects to university students in the Western city of Herat, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry added remarks that he said were “spoken from my heart.” He complained bitterly about American forces being “compared to occupiers” and being “told that they are only here to advance their own interests,” suggesting such comments could lead the United States to give up on Afghanistan.

Although he did not mention Karzai by name, Eikenberry was referring almost verbatim to harsh criticisms the Afghan president voiced Saturday and has expressed on previous occasions. “I must tell you that I find occasional comments from some of your leaders hurtful and inappropriate,” Eikenberry said.

Well, ya know what, Lieutenant Dingleberry, (as he was known around the squad bay) maybe if you’d said something like that in the early days of your tenure, Karzai might have shut up with that shit by now. Instead you just took all of it right the ass, and allowed karzai to say whatever he wanted.

But “hurtful and innappropriate” are words for pussies. How about calling him a fucking liar with his empty, third-world head up his third-world ass?

I’d have choked the little curtain-draped goat-raper by now.

Maybe the next guy will have the ‘nads to call Karzai what he is; only a sliver away from being the Taliban in the war against terror. In fact, Karzai can have all of those civilian casualties laid at his feet – if he hadn’t made hiding behind civilians an effect strategy, the Taliban never would have employed it against us to the extent they have, the little cowards.

Even the title of Charles Krauthammer’s latest piece in the Washington Post is brilliant. But there’s so much more;

The new post-bin Laden dispensation is that the entire decade-long war on terror was an overreaction — as shown by the bin Laden operation itself, which, noted one critic, looks a lot like police work, the kind of law enforcement John Kerry insisted in 2004 was the proper prism through which to address the terror threat.

On the contrary. The bin Laden operation is the perfect vindication of the war on terror. It was made possible precisely by the vast, warlike infrastructure that the Bush administration created post-9/11, a fierce regime of capture and interrogation, of dropped bombs and commando strikes. That regime, of course, followed the more conventional war that brought down the Taliban, scattered and decimated al-Qaeda and made bin Laden a fugitive.

We came to kill. That is what you do in war. Do that in police work and you’ve committed murder. The Navy SEAL(s) who pulled the fateful trigger would be facing charges, not receiving medals.

You should read the whole thing.

I’ve watched members of the former Bush Administration credit completely the Obama Administration with bin Laden’s death, but no reciprocation from the Obama folks. They couldn’t have pulled off the flawless operation without all of things the Bush Administration had put in place, but you won’t hear that from the Obama crowd who are still on the campaign trail and still campaigning against Bush.

Don’t forget that this administration wants more diplomats and fewer troops in Afghanistan. If they were fighting the war the way they want to fight, there’s be a crowd of diplomats outside the OBL compound still negotiating with him to surrender. And that dick Eikenberry would be hogging the megaphone.