Clock is ticking in Afghanistan – you may remember President Obsma set a time line for getting our troops out of Afghanistan – “not an open ended commitment”.
Listening to guests on John Batchelor’s podcast, it is clear we cannot possibly achieve the stated objectives before we’ve said the troops start coming home.
Does this become Obama’s Vietnam? Do we extend the deadline and escalate the war, or do we declare victory, evacuate and then watch the murders of everyone who helped us?
This was the important war that smart people like Obama and Al Franken knew how to win.
If President Obama called you, what is your advice?
If the red queen is so desperate that he called me for advice, I’d “blame Bush” and quickly cut the phone line. The IRS knows where I live. :)
Seriously, if we really want to get after the Taliban and Al-Qaeda we’re going to have to invade northern Pakistan and capture or kill the terrorists in their mountain strongholds. That’s a tall order when Pakistan is an ally with nuclear weapons. The current White House and Congress don’t have the stomach for that. So we’ll most likely declare victory and evacuate, making sure the satellite feeds mysteriously go down and stay down so that we don’t see a repeat of the Saigon evacuation on the nightly news.
i would redevelop ties with the mountain tribes we have dealt with in the past, hook up small groups of special forces to live in with them and advise and supply to help them fight terrorists like we were so successful at in the past. We could use those predators as light air support along with some of the accurate small arms that we are so successful at designing, and kill the bad guys a lot more cheaply, with less exposure for our men, while empowering Afganiis in their own country.
How do you tell which are the bad guys?
We’re paying the Taliban to “protect” our convoys, then the same people blow them up.