Steven P. BarrettOBAMA SAYS THE AFGHAN WAR "HAS TO BE WON" -- Is HE tough enough to win it?
August 12th 2008 18:20
By Steven Barrett
There's something to find admirable in Barack Obama's foreign policy views after all when he speaks about the war in Afghanistan as one "we have to win." None of the wimpy hand-wringing stuff he's thus demonstrated with Iraq (curiously enough just as we've got the enemy by the throat and can actually close the deal.)
What's admirable in Obama's rhetoric isn't always matched by the "finer points" he hasn't revealed yet. Either he has none or even he and his advisors admit the nation's not ready to stomach them. One of them, and it shouldn't surprise anyone with any working brain cells, centers around his usual double-talk. But how does one practice appeasement with the Taliban and keep his finger on the trigger of a fully cocked weapon before he either lets it down or accidently fires it out of fatigue?
This is a danger our already over-stretched miltary faces to some degree with the Bush administration's desire to have its cake and eat it too. We could've won the war in Iraq far more convincingly even before the self-inflicted wound of Abu Gharib created more jihadhists to fight, had we only gone in to Falujah in much the same way we entered Baghdad.
We eventually won at Falujah and cleaned out both al Qaeda and their Baathist co-belligerant "allies." And we could've and should've taken that Shia mullah who had an outstanding arrest warrant for his role in the murder of a rival cleric just after Saddam fell.
But no, we allowed our diplomats to call the shots and far too many lives were lost subsequently to that blown opportunity among others we let pass through our blood-stained diplomats' hands.
So how IS Obama going to deal with an enemy as fierce as none we've faced since the Japnese, North Korean and Viet Cong? (The North Vietnamese, no virtuecrats when it came to warmaking either, fought a more conventional style of combat.)
Take a look at a column published in today's Boston Globe by H.D.W. Greenway: "The long, hard slog against scrappy Taliban fighters."
Really Long Link
"Scrappy?" How about barbaric? Hope you won't think my choice of words isn't too rough itself after reading this true story: One day a unit of American soldiers were passing through the Kandahar AFB area when all of a sudden a suicide bomber rushed towards the Humvee (which thankfully had been sufficiently armored.) Unfortunately for the unit's Commanding Officer, he was unable to swing his .50 calibre weapon around in time to prevent the bomber from getting any closer and detonating the bomb. As a result, the butcher killed 22 civilians, wounded 8 more and wounded several men in that unit. No American soldiers were killed.
Those men were due to be sent Stateside within a few weeks. The CO and his men will likely have to deal with the prospect of nightmarish flashbacks for the rest of relatively young lives.
This war can be won, but it has to be treated as if it were a fight for our very survival. Because it is. We rejoiced in the "west's" win over Soviet Communism, forgetting that while we supplied the tools thanks to former Congressman "Good Time" Charlie Wilson, D-TX, we walked away when the nation needed us the most as it was trying to rebuild itself. Then we basically ignored the plight of Muslims in the Balkans and left them to the tender mercies of the Serbs. And when we did have to go into Afghanistan to clean out the Taliban and al Qaeda, we blew it by sitting back on the early successes we enjoyed in rousting the Taliban and Bin Laden's gangs out of Kabul and Kandahar -- only to think we could bomb the masterminds of 9/11 into oblivion through Daisy Cutters and "bunker buster" ordinance.
In the meantime, while fighting in Iraq, enough eyes were lifted off our original enemies and guess what; they resurfaced and I'm afraid they're going to be a lot more difficult to defeat this time.
Does Obama have the necessary material to face this return threat fully, forcibly and comprehensively enough to see it to an unconditional surrender victory? Is he as willing to win this in the battlefields of our urban ghettos and college campuses where Afghani (100 percent heroin) is sold cheaply -- as he says he's going to be in the battlefields around Kabul, Kandahar, Tora Bora, etc. -- or will more lives get sold as cheaply in those battlefields as they are in our streets and dorms?
There's only one way to win with a force like the Taliban: make defeat for them so manifestly painful and convincing that it'll be centuries before another warrior in that area even thinks of growing a beard, holding a rocket-launcher and teaching his sons it's okay to summarily execute women, children and non-combatants for the merest infractions.
Is Obama really tough enough to pull of what the Russians, the Brits and we're in danger of not pulling off: the final defeat of barbarism masking itself off as a legitimate form of Islam or any religious system. It is barbarism and Obama had better put up, or shut up and right now.
There's something to find admirable in Barack Obama's foreign policy views after all when he speaks about the war in Afghanistan as one "we have to win." None of the wimpy hand-wringing stuff he's thus demonstrated with Iraq (curiously enough just as we've got the enemy by the throat and can actually close the deal.)
What's admirable in Obama's rhetoric isn't always matched by the "finer points" he hasn't revealed yet. Either he has none or even he and his advisors admit the nation's not ready to stomach them. One of them, and it shouldn't surprise anyone with any working brain cells, centers around his usual double-talk. But how does one practice appeasement with the Taliban and keep his finger on the trigger of a fully cocked weapon before he either lets it down or accidently fires it out of fatigue?
This is a danger our already over-stretched miltary faces to some degree with the Bush administration's desire to have its cake and eat it too. We could've won the war in Iraq far more convincingly even before the self-inflicted wound of Abu Gharib created more jihadhists to fight, had we only gone in to Falujah in much the same way we entered Baghdad.
We eventually won at Falujah and cleaned out both al Qaeda and their Baathist co-belligerant "allies." And we could've and should've taken that Shia mullah who had an outstanding arrest warrant for his role in the murder of a rival cleric just after Saddam fell.
But no, we allowed our diplomats to call the shots and far too many lives were lost subsequently to that blown opportunity among others we let pass through our blood-stained diplomats' hands.
So how IS Obama going to deal with an enemy as fierce as none we've faced since the Japnese, North Korean and Viet Cong? (The North Vietnamese, no virtuecrats when it came to warmaking either, fought a more conventional style of combat.)
Take a look at a column published in today's Boston Globe by H.D.W. Greenway: "The long, hard slog against scrappy Taliban fighters."
Really Long Link
"Scrappy?" How about barbaric? Hope you won't think my choice of words isn't too rough itself after reading this true story: One day a unit of American soldiers were passing through the Kandahar AFB area when all of a sudden a suicide bomber rushed towards the Humvee (which thankfully had been sufficiently armored.) Unfortunately for the unit's Commanding Officer, he was unable to swing his .50 calibre weapon around in time to prevent the bomber from getting any closer and detonating the bomb. As a result, the butcher killed 22 civilians, wounded 8 more and wounded several men in that unit. No American soldiers were killed.
Those men were due to be sent Stateside within a few weeks. The CO and his men will likely have to deal with the prospect of nightmarish flashbacks for the rest of relatively young lives.
This war can be won, but it has to be treated as if it were a fight for our very survival. Because it is. We rejoiced in the "west's" win over Soviet Communism, forgetting that while we supplied the tools thanks to former Congressman "Good Time" Charlie Wilson, D-TX, we walked away when the nation needed us the most as it was trying to rebuild itself. Then we basically ignored the plight of Muslims in the Balkans and left them to the tender mercies of the Serbs. And when we did have to go into Afghanistan to clean out the Taliban and al Qaeda, we blew it by sitting back on the early successes we enjoyed in rousting the Taliban and Bin Laden's gangs out of Kabul and Kandahar -- only to think we could bomb the masterminds of 9/11 into oblivion through Daisy Cutters and "bunker buster" ordinance.
In the meantime, while fighting in Iraq, enough eyes were lifted off our original enemies and guess what; they resurfaced and I'm afraid they're going to be a lot more difficult to defeat this time.
Taliban
Does Obama have the necessary material to face this return threat fully, forcibly and comprehensively enough to see it to an unconditional surrender victory? Is he as willing to win this in the battlefields of our urban ghettos and college campuses where Afghani (100 percent heroin) is sold cheaply -- as he says he's going to be in the battlefields around Kabul, Kandahar, Tora Bora, etc. -- or will more lives get sold as cheaply in those battlefields as they are in our streets and dorms?
There's only one way to win with a force like the Taliban: make defeat for them so manifestly painful and convincing that it'll be centuries before another warrior in that area even thinks of growing a beard, holding a rocket-launcher and teaching his sons it's okay to summarily execute women, children and non-combatants for the merest infractions.
Is Obama really tough enough to pull of what the Russians, the Brits and we're in danger of not pulling off: the final defeat of barbarism masking itself off as a legitimate form of Islam or any religious system. It is barbarism and Obama had better put up, or shut up and right now.
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