President Obama last week addressed the growing problem of “green on blue” attacks in Afghanistan, when members of Afghan security forces turn their guns on their Western partners. “We are concerned about this, from top to bottom,” the president said. In the two weeks before he spoke, there were seven “insider attacks,” killing nine Americans. About 40 coalition troops have been killed by Afghan allies this year. Addressing the unprecedented dangers trainers may face from their own trainees, the president went on to say, “We’ve got what’s called the ‘Guardian Angels’ program,” a stationing of armed NATO soldiers to monitor Afghans and protect Westerners.
This is worse than just another wrenching turn in a heartbreaking 11-year war. Last week saw the 2,000th US death. The coalition total is almost 3,000. A breakdown in trust between coalition troops and their Afghan partners cuts to the quick of the “surge” strategy Obama embraced in 2010. The time-limited escalation of the American effort was supposed to help Afghans summon the competence and will to secure their own country, enabling the NATO withdrawal in 2014. “As Afghans stand up,” Obama told the NATO gathering in May, “they will not stand alone.”
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Anybody remember "Vietnamization"? Didn't work then and doesn't work now. We were better served once we left the conflict altogether. am very disappointed in President Obama's continuation of a needless war (as well as his unfufilled promis to close Guantanamo. These are issues as serious as the economy that get no attention.
Want to talk about flawed policies? Putting an infidel army on the ground in a Muslim country is a flawed policy. Once on the ground, pretending that the conflict has nothing to do with Koran inspired hostility towards infidels is a flawed policy. Deliberately and consistently avoiding any analysis and discussion of the central tenets of Islam is a flawed policy. Media outlets erasing words such as Islam, Muslim and infidel from their style manuals is a flawed policy. All these flawed policies have led to the creation of the empty-headed phrase green on blue atttacks which is just a PC euphemism for Muslim on infidel attacks.
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In Afghanistan, we are seen as just one more in a long line of foreign invaders! We don't have leaders in either party with the courage to admit that it is time to leave. So, once again, young Americans will continue to die due to a flawed foreign policy. We haven't learned anything from Viet Nam. If you really support the troops, get them the hell out!
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I don't agree with Carroll often, but I do this time. The Afghan escapade is not a war, it's an exercise in nation building, and nation buidling doesn't work when the nation, such as it is, isn't worth building. No matter what we do, no matter how long we stay, Afghanistan will descend into chaos after we leave, so why stay any longer?
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SystemWentBerserk, the incompetence was the Bush administration's. There was no Afghanistan strategy after eight years there: "The remaking of American strategy in Afghanistan began, though no one knew it at the time, in a cramped conference room in Mr. Obama's transition headquarters in late 2008. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, who had spent the last two years of the Bush administration trying to manage the many trade-offs necessary as the Iraq war consumed troop and intelligence resources needed in Afghanistan, arrived with a PowerPoint presentation. The first slide that General Lute threw onto the screen caught the eye of Thomas E. Donilon, later President Obama's national security adviser. "It said we do not have a strategy in Afghanistan that you can articulate or achieve," Mr. Donilon recalled three years later. "We had been at war for eight years, and no one could explain the strategy."" See "Charting Obama's Journey to a Shift on Afghanistan" [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/us/obamas-journey-to-reshape-afghanistan-war.html?pagewanted=all ]
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