General McChrystal wants more troops and has delivered a 66 page "assessment" to Obama with rationales.
Reality: He's perpetuating a war to perpetuate a fraud on the American people.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
http://media.washingtonpost.com/...
http://www.thenation.com/...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
From General McChrystal's Assessment:
http://media.washingtonpost.com/...
The stakes in Afghanistan are high. Nato's Comprehensive Strategic Political Military Plan and President Obama's strategy to disrupt, dismantle, and eventually defeat al Qaeda and prevent their return to Afghanistan have laid out a clear path of what we must do. Stability in Afghanistan is an imperative; if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban - or has insufficient capability to counter transnational terrorists - Afghanistan could again become a base for terrorism, with obvious implications for regional stability.
So then there's Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and probably many other spots. Are we going to follow them all over the world until our last soldier is dead?
From the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
WASHINGTON — The top military commander in Afghanistan warns in a confidential assessment of the war there that he needs additional troops within the next year or else the conflict "will likely result in failure."
To reflect reality it's an indefinite occupation. Of course the easier way to get additional troops is to call it a "war." Seems more like a danger to us that way.
And in order to know what "failure" is, we have to define "success." Oh yes, it's "we'll know it when we see it."
The general also describes an increasingly savvy insurgency that uses propaganda effectively and is using the Afghan prison system as a training ground. Taliban and Qaeda insurgents represent more than 2,500 of the 14,500 inmates in Afghanistan’s overcrowded prisons.
What about your propaganda, General? And probably half the world or more is a potential training ground. Again, are we going to do this forever, then?
From The Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/...
"Safe Haven Myth" Bites the Dust posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 09/16/2009
One of the most intelligent and thoughtful comments on Afghanistan so far comes from Paul Pillar, the former chief analyst for the US intelligence community and a renowned expert on terrorism, who writes in today's Washington Post that the real issue in Afghanistan is: What is a "terror haven"? Pillar's argument ought to be required reading for anyone thinking about what "success" in Afghanistan means, since the chief fall-back argument for anyone who supports a long-term counterinsurgency strategy there is that the United States cannot allow the country to become a safe haven for Al Qaeda.
From The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Who's Afraid of A Terrorist Haven?
The debate has largely overlooked a more basic question: How important to terrorist groups is any physical haven? More to the point: How much does a haven affect the danger of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests, especially the U.S. homeland?
The answer to the second question is: not nearly as much as unstated assumptions underlying the current debate seem to suppose.
When a group has a haven, it will use it for such purposes as basic training of recruits. But the operations most important to future terrorist attacks do not need such a home, and few recruits are required for even very deadly terrorism. Consider: The preparations most important to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took place not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States.
In the past couple of decades, international terrorist groups have thrived by exploiting globalization and information technology, which has lessened their dependence on physical havens.
By utilizing networks such as the Internet, terrorists' organizations have become more network-like, not beholden to any one headquarters. A significant jihadist terrorist threat to the United States persists, but that does not mean it will consist of attacks instigated and commanded from a South Asian haven, or that it will require a haven at all. Al-Qaeda's role in that threat is now less one of commander than of ideological lodestar, and for that role a haven is almost meaningless.
These trends have been familiar to counterterrorist cognoscenti for years but have gone mostly unmentioned in discussion of Afghanistan.
The issue is whether preventing such a haven would reduce the terrorist threat to the United States enough from what it otherwise would be to offset the required expenditure of blood and treasure and the barriers to success in Afghanistan, including an ineffective regime and sagging support from the population. Thwarting the creation of a physical haven also would have to offset any boost to anti-U.S. terrorism stemming from perceptions that the United States had become an occupier rather than a defender of Afghanistan.
Among the many parallels being offered between Afghanistan and the Vietnam War, one of the most disturbing concerns inadequate examination of core assumptions. The Johnson administration was just as meticulous as the Obama administration is being in examining counterinsurgent strategies and the forces required to execute them. But most American discourse about Vietnam in the early and mid-1960s took for granted the key -- and flawed -- assumptions underlying the whole effort: that a loss of Vietnam would mean that other Asian countries would fall like dominoes to communism, and that a retreat from the commitment to Vietnam would gravely harm U.S. credibility.
To sum up:
The "safe haven" meme is simply bullshit. The terrorists, if chased out of Afghanistan can go -- or have already gone -- to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other lands in all directions.
Or in no direction at all. They can go to the internet, apartments, etc. etc (just use your imagination).
And it's just another Vietnam. An indefinite occupation -- started by neo-cons who got their training from Leo Strauss: Perpetual war gives a nation a sense of purpose; else the masses would be harder to control. And you support it by lies. See Joseph Goebbels for details. Leo Strauss too. But, ironically, maybe not so much Machiavelli. Leo Strauss hated Machivelli because he didn't hide his philosophy -- he published a frickin' book on it.
Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby and others were Straussians.
Some background on Strauss by the world's expert on him, Prof. Shadia Drury, U. of Regina (Also see her books on Strauss, particularly "The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss"):
http://www.informationclearinghouse....
Another lie -- spreading "democracy." Forcing a democracy without a constitution, securing individual rights and the operation of the rule of law, simply means the majority can just vote in another totalitarian dictatorship. But that doesn't matter. Because our underlying purpose is to stay on to wage perpetual "war."
The stated goal in Vietnam: To prevent the spread of communism, starting with South Vietnam, to be followed by other countries.
Of necessity, indefinitely.
The unstated, yet actual goal in Afghanistan: To prevent the spread of terrorism, starting with Afghanistan, to be followed by other countries.
Of necessity, indefinitely.