The Missing Link From Killeen to Kabul »
Posted By Beau7890 2 weeks, 5 days ago in Political Opinion
As their Fort Hood rhetoric made clear, McChrystal’s most vehement partisans don’t trust American Muslims, let alone those of the Taliban, no matter how earnestly the general may argue that they can be won over by our troops’ friendliness (or bribes). If, as the right has it, our Army cannot be trusted to recognize a Hasan in its own ranks, then how will it figure out who the “good” Muslims will be as we try to build a “stable” state (whatever “stable” means) in a country that has never had a functioning central government? If our troops can’t be protected from seemingly friendly Muslim American brethren in Killeen, Tex., what are the odds of survival for the 40,000 more troops the hawks want to deploy to Kabul and sinkholes beyond?
About the only prominent voice among the liberal-bashing, Obama-loathing right who has noted this gaping contradiction is Mark Steyn of National Review. “Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet” were “gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously,” he wrote. “And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas.” You have to applaud Steyn’s rare intellectual consistency within his camp. One imagines that he does not buy the notion that our Army, however brilliant, has a shot at building “strong personal relationships” with a population that often regards us as occupiers and infidels.
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Beau7890
Truth rests on the mathematical reeds of the infinite and everything moves forward by order of the eagle riding pillion, while the genius of vegetable ...
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fsev412 weeks, 5 days ago
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Read this column just a short while ago and was going to post it as it is one of the best analysis of the tie between Ft Hood and Afghanistan that I've seen. I guess I have to get up an hour or so earlier if I hope to beat Beau to the punch.
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I think Obama is beginning to listen to the Eikenberrys, Hoh's and folks like Frank Rich and that his visits to Dover, Area 60 in Arlington and the memorial at Ft Hood are weighing heavily on his decision. I do not envy him in this choices.
For those hawks who want to claim all Muslims are our enemies I hope they are aware that there are 1.5 billion of them in the world. Should we try to eliminate them all? Where should we start? -
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Beau78902 weeks, 5 days ago
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This link should get you past the logon page if you're registered with the NY Times. I don't know if it'll work if you're not:
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/opinion/15rich.h...
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Beau78902 weeks, 5 days ago
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From the article:
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Last week we learned that the ambassador, a retired general who had been the top American military commander in Afghanistan as recently as 2007, had sent two cables to Obama urging caution about sending more troops.
We don’t know everything in those cables. What we do know is that American intelligence continues to say that fewer than 100 Qaeda operatives can still be found in Afghanistan. We also know that the Taliban, which are currently estimated to number in the tens of thousands, can’t be eliminated. As McChrystal put it to Filkins, there is no “finite number” of Taliban, so there’s no way to vanquish them. Hence his counterinsurgency alternative, which could take decades, costing untold billions and countless lives. -
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gamahuche2 weeks, 5 days ago
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I'm not sure which would be the most relevant metaphor for the extraordinary disjoint between the ostensible US goals and their execution - in as much as they are either defined and/or consistent; in fact its impossible to conceive of any success EVER being achieved in Afghanistan. Please give me a friendly nudge in a hundred years time, or whenever, if I was wrong.
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pokydoke2 weeks, 5 days ago
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I agree, Afghanistan is a quagmire that we can never win. Our best hope would be to pave their roads and fix their bridges. I think that would do more to win hearts and minds than friendly soldiers. While they are at it they could do the same for us.
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