{"id":62088,"date":"2015-10-01T08:00:29","date_gmt":"2015-10-01T12:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=62088"},"modified":"2015-09-30T18:09:25","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T22:09:25","slug":"afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=62088","title":{"rendered":"Afghanistan. What’s the point, anyway?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Kunduz\"<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

The other day, we read about how the Taliban had taken back the Afghan city of Kunduz for the first time since they lost it in 2001. That the Afghan forces had withdrawn to a nearby airfield to reconsolidate. The New York Times<\/a> reports that it’s probably not going to be anytime soon that the Afghan government gets control of the city. The Taliban seem to think that they have the ANA surrounded in their conclave and the US airstrikes are mostly to protect the ANA troops from the Taliban.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Taliban are strolling around freely like this is their home,\u201d said Ghulam Rabbani Rabbani, a member of the Kunduz provincial council, who like many Kunduz officials had retreated to the airport but was in touch with residents. \u201cThey took a lot of weapons from the intelligence agency\u2019s office, weapons that were stocked for arming pro-government militias. We fear that there was cash and vehicles also.\u201d<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The Kunduz police spokesman, Sayed Sarwar Hussaini, said some American Special Forces soldiers had arrived at the airport Tuesday evening \u2014 although whether they were there to call in airstrikes or to otherwise join Afghan commandos in an attack on the city was not clear.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, now we’re dropping our troops into the middle of the action to rescue the Afghans, pretty much, from themselves. I’m sure our troops don’t mind it, but still.<\/p>\n

From the Washington Post<\/a>;<\/p>\n

The increased support from the U.S.-led coalition comes amid growing signs that Afghan forces are struggling to repel the Taliban fighters, who were able to seize Kunduz in a lightning strike Monday, dealing a major blow to Afghanistan\u2019s Western-backed government.<\/p>\n

An Afghan security official in Kabul said a military fort fell to the Taliban in Wednesday\u2019s fighting in Kunduz and that an estimated 50 security forces based at the fort had either surrendered or were captured.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the meantime, the Associated Press<\/a> reports that the generals are talking a drawdown from Afghanistan to meet the President’s timetable withdrawal for next year.<\/p>\n

About 9,800 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan. But the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. John F. Campbell, has given the administration several options for gradually reducing that number over the next 15-months. The options all call for keeping a higher-than-planned troop presence based on his judgment of what it would take to sustain the Afghan army and minimize the chances of losing more ground gained over more than a decade of costly U.S. combat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, the Taliban are making some late summer advances through out the country, and we’re right back where we were in 2012 discussing US withdrawal…again. the only reason that there are US troops in Afghanistan is so the president can prove that he’s serious about fight the war that he said was “worth fighting” during the 2008 campaign. But you know, what? He’s been half-assing the war through his whole term as President – he should just pull the troops out now. Tomorrow. No. Yesterday. For all the good this jerking around about withdrawal is doing for those people and that country. <\/p>\n

The Afghans don’t want to fight for their own country and the US government doesn’t want to prosecute the war the way it should be fought, so really, what’s the point?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day, we read about how the Taliban had taken back the Afghan city of … Afghanistan. What’s the point, anyway?<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":62090,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/62090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}