Afghanastan - Obama's war of choosing

Wow. You need to grow up or learn the English language. I stated an opinion based upon a fact that Afganistan poses no clear and present danger to the US.

To most folks, that should satisfy the criteria for the basis of a discussion.

You need to address my fact, which I posed to you as a question, as to what threat does Afganistan pose to US.

wot are you on? did you read my last post? Did you see my question..the question I asked before you requested I answer yours????

Was that your question remaining unanswered? The answer is obvious - if the locals don't care about the Taliban's return why should we?

That they don't care is certain - and my source on that subject is unimpeachable, Gen. McChrystal's NATO briefing 3 days before the Rolling Stones article appeared. Military sources say the briefing was the real reason his resignation was accepted, not the article.

Andrew Bacevich wrote this for The New Republic:

As a candidate for president, George W. Bush famously promised to pursue a “humble” foreign policy. The events of 9/11—for Bush akin to a conversion experience—swept humility by the board. The 43rd president found his true calling: Providence was summoning him to purge the world of evil.

When it came to fulfilling this mission, Bush’s subsequent efforts yielded precious little. Recklessness compounded by profound incompetence became the hallmark of his administration. Yet of this there can be no doubt: Until the day he left office, Bush himself remained certain that his intentions were pure and the nation’s cause righteous. In particular, he believed, and believed deeply, in the Iraq war.

Bush’s Freedom Agenda ended in abject failure—no liberalizing tide has swept the Islamic world. The promised Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda never materialized. Implementing the heinous Bush Doctrine of preventive war in Iraq yielded an insurgency that sent millions fleeing to squalid refugee camps. As a direct result, thousands of American soldiers were killed and many thousands more maimed or otherwise deeply scarred.

Despite all of this and more, George W. Bush never wavered. He remained resolute, his conscience clear. He knew he was doing God’s work. He was—and no doubt remains today—a true believer. The 43d president was a well-intentioned fool, who inflicted grievous harm on his country. Yet when Bush stands before his Maker (or the bar of History), he will say without fear of contradiction: “I did what I thought was right.”

Barack Obama is anything but a fool. Yet when called upon to account for his presidency, honesty will prevent him from making a comparable claim. “The problems I inherited were difficult ones,” he will say. “None of the choices were good ones. Things were complicated.”

The Afghanistan war forms part of that complicated inheritance where good choices are hard to come by. Much as Iraq was Bush’s war, Afghanistan has become Obama’s war. Yet the president clearly wants nothing more than to rid himself of his war. Obama has prolonged and escalated a conflict in which he himself manifestly does not believe. When after months of deliberation (or delay) he unveiled his Afghan “surge” in December 2009, the presidential trumpet blew charge and recall simultaneously. Even as Obama ordered more troops into combat, he announced their planned withdrawal “because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own.”

The Americans who elected Obama president share that view. Yet the expectations of change that vaulted him to the presidency went well beyond the issue of priorities. Obama’s supporters were counting on him to bring to the White House an enlightened moral sensibility: He would govern differently not only because he was smarter than his predecessor but because he responded to a different—and truer—inner compass.

Events have demolished such expectations. Today, when they look at Washington, Americans see a cool, dispassionate, calculating president whose administration lacks a moral core. For prosecution exhibit number one, we need look no further than the meandering course of Obama’s war, its casualties and costs mounting without discernible purpose.

Obama doesn’t want to be in Afghanistan any more than Benjamin Netanyahu wants to be in the West Bank. Yet like the Israeli prime minister, the president lacks the guts to get out. It’s all so complicated. There are risks involved. Things might go wrong. There’s an election to think about.

So the war continues. Sustaining some artfully updated version of the status quo becomes the easier (or more expedient) course. Thus does a would-be messiah promising salvation and renewal succumb to the imperatives of “politics”—with young soldiers and their families left to bear the consequences.

The question demands to be asked: Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake?

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is the author of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (2010), The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008), and The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005), among other books.

You re apparently lost in your own confusion.

You recon they dont care, well I might suggest you ask them. It still does not answer my question , does it?

No confusion just your refusal to answer a question...

The Pashtun or Pathans make up most of the population in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northwest India. The Kashmir situation in India brought India and Pakistan two times into war and in the third war India aided East Pakistan (East Bengal) in the split between East and West Pakistan. East Pakistan became Bangladesh (Bengali nation). Then Pakistan under Benizar(?) Bhutto encouraged Taliban along with the United States in fighting the Soviets. The Taliban were funded by Saudi Arabia as the Wahhabi fundamentalist sect controlled the Saudi kingdom. The Taliban are also Pashtun. So it is very complicated.

What was your question ?

Use your debating skills and search it out.

Nothing has changed with some of you dim bulbs!!!

Were you there in your usual front row seat or did the general give you a pre-conference phone call, High Notions.



Yeah right. High ranking US military. They'd probably lie if you asked them if they had a wanker.

Let me make this clear, Xris. I don't want any of those war criminals having any hand in any efforts to make things better for the Iraqis or Afghans. I would like them to be placed right where they belong, in a rat-infested prsion.

Reparations, paid by the coalition of the suckups, now that would be another issue.

I've not bothered with this thread for a few days as it is frankly too depressing. However, your ignorance of history is such I have been compelled to post.

Do you actually know who was responsible for putting the Taliban in power, and why it was done?

I'll give you a clue. It was precisely because they are a bunch of looneys and it also involved Russia in one of the last by-proxy cold-war conflicts.

Clue number two: It was the same people who put the Bath party in power and supplied military "advisors" in addition to arming them with chemical nerve agents so they could gas their own people. You may have heard of their recently hanged leader.

If the USA continually insists on supping with the devil, it really must remember to take a very long spoon.

Given its past history of ******* up other people's countries, the USA should get the hell out of Afghanistan. Sure enough, the place will sink into a hell hole. But, it will eventually recover. If history is anything to go by, though, continued "help" from the USA will be far worse for them in the long run.

Go and read some history for God's sake....

I gave far more than a clue, Steve, in Post: # 4,271,739, on page 4.

So are you saying that every US serviceman or woman in the ME is a war criminal?
Are you also saying that every US serviceman or woman that ever served in the ME is a war criminal?

If that is what you are saying, come right out and admit it.

Are you denying that successive USA administrations (aided an abetted on numberous occasions by it's major satellite state, the UK) have orchestrated the deaths of untold numbers of innocent people around the world wherever and whenever it has deemed it's strategic interest to be best served by doing so?

If you are not, come right out and admit it.

It's all about the energy and other key resources you fool.

As far back as 1948, as the head of a State Department planning committee, George Kennan wrote a report, ostensibly about Asian policy but really about how the United States was to deal with its newfound role as the dominant force on Earth.

"....We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population," Kennan wrote. ".....Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction....."

"The day is not far off," Kennan concluded, "when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts."



The rest, as they say, is history

At best, apologists such as yourself are little more than useful idiots. At worst, your apologies are as evil as the actions of your adminstrations.

I think it's fair to say that ordinary service men & women (of any country) have absolutely no say what-so-ever on the disastrous decisions of their governments?