With the fighting winding down in Iraq, President Obama appears poised to send more troops to Afghanistan:
President Barack Obama has approved adding about 17,000 U.S. troops for the flagging war in Afghanistan, administration, defense and congressional officials said Tuesday.
The Obama administration is expected to announce on Tuesday that it will send one additional Army brigade and an unknown number of Marines to Afghanistan this spring and summer. Officials spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the official announcement.
About 8,000 Marines are expected to go in first, followed by about 9,000 Army troops.
The new forces represent the first installment on a larger influx of U.S. forces widely expected this year. Obama’s decision would get several thousand troops in place in time for the increase in fighting that usually comes with warmer weather and ahead of national elections in August.
I’ve already heard murmurs in certain quarters saying that any troop increase to Afghanistan will make the fighting Obama‘s war, that success or failure will rest on his shoulders. Perhaps these were provoked past reason by anti-war agitators in years past, mindless goons who labeled the Iraq fighting as Bush’s war, with the tacit implication that failure there would be his alone.
But those are our soldiers and Marines rushing towards the sound of the guns, and failure in Afghanistan will be measured in their blood.
We must be better than that. This is our war.
It always has been.
I have hopes that, abandoning the term “War on Terror” we might see more realistic terminology applied to who and what we are in fact fighting. Afghanistan is but one theater of Our War against Radical Islam (that might be redundant) but I doubt we will become so clear in our objectives.
Well said Lex…
I’m sure there are some people who come at it with the attitude you describe, Lex.
But I think there are a significant portion of those who recognize it is “our war” and use the phrasing “Obama’s war” to point out that he can no longer do what he did before: take unrealistic potshots from the sidelines and keep himself distanced from it. He and his cohorts painted it as “Bush’s war,” but now it’s “their war,” too. I think there’s a certain amount of gratification to us that he can no longer stand on the outside; he is forced to join “our war.”
In rereading, I”m concerned I may not have expressed myself clearly…
It was always our war. But in some ways, it seemed that until now HE didn’t see it that way. So, calling it “Obama’s war” is a way to drive home the point that he can no longer pretend it’s “someone else’s war,” to reinforce that we are all in it together (or at least, should be).
I agree with FbL, the current use of “Obama’s war” is to point out and ensure that he can’t weasel himself out of whatever comes following HIS decisions.
Mirroring what OldAT6Flyer said: It’s important to understand that this is ONE WAR with a number of different ‘theaters’. Each is important as success in each is necessary for the success of the whole, which is imperative.
The idiot arguments and sound-bite-thinking of the left should not be adopted as our way of evaluating or criticizing strategies or the progress of the GWOT, or whatever it is or will be called. I admit that using their own silly statements to bait them is fun . . . but not useful here.
Oh I don’t know–about Obama not being able to weasel out. He’ll just say that the “Afghan War was not the war I thought I knew”–and throw it under the bus.
But he’s made a troop commitment here; I’m not certain that it was made on his military commander’s advice–he doesn’t seem to listen to Petraeus all that much–or because he made a promise in the campaign.
For whatever the reason, I hope the additional troops can be deployed usefully and successfully.
Politicians as micromanagers of military campaigns have a piss poor track record–vis LBJ.
What concerns me is that there is a fight between whether the troops need to be in Afghanistan by in time for the “fighting season” (Spring), or in time for the elections (summer). This seems to speak to different priorities: taking the fight to the enemy, or simply attempting to protect the civilians/population centers. Those two objectives are not mutually exclusive, but there are huge traps in the latter, and it is the latter that Obama seems to be favoring according to reports. As more then one military commentator/blogger has said, it’s starting to look an awful lot like the Iraq pre-surge tactics… very worrisome.
Yes, Lex, it IS our war and always has been.
But most of the American people don’t realize it because, except for military members and families, no one else is involved to much of an extent. Reminds me of a poster I saw somewhere…
“Americans aren’t at war, the Marines are”
apologies to Army, Navy and Coast Guard…just quoting the poster
I wish we, the civilians, were more involved.
While BHO may have been enlightened somewhat (had an epiphany even) in his post-innaugeration security clearance upgrade, that does not exonorate the MSM. They’ll have wax burns on their hands for years to come for holding candle light vigil in their labeling of the GWOT as Bush’s War. They should be the beacons of fact, and instead they sling their ideaology-driven crap at us.
We, who have been there, are there, will go there, have always known that this is our war.
This must be choir practice.
Sadly one of the biggest failing of the Bush Administration, in my opinion, was not to communicate to the American people the sacrifices being made by the few such as to emphasize the need for more by the many. We are at war and yet, even now, it is hard to find evidence of it in the daily lives of our citizens. Oh you can find mention of it daily in the press but always as if it is an abstract thing – something distant or to be attached to someone, like President Bush, and not something that should affect us everyday in some way.
When our nation makes a choice (and that is what happened – it wasn’t just the President) to go to war it is incumbent that we all be made to participate – even if to pay more taxes to pay for it. When we don’t it becomes somebody else’s war the sacrifices borne only by the members of the armed services and their families.
Out of sight out of mind. We cannot afford to adopt this attitude with so very much at stake.
Here is a post from an old Navy squadron mate’s neighbor. Sorry for length of the post, but some interesting reading.
“Afghanistan.
> >
> > This is from our neighbor in Yuma. Jim is a retired Delta pilot and a Marine fighter pilot. The letter comes from his son serving
in Afghanistan. Jim asked me to pass on the facts to others.
> >
> >
> > Reconnaissance Marine in Afghanistan
> >
> > It’s freezing here. I’m sitting on hard, cold
> dirt between rocks and shrubs at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains along the Dar ‘yoi Pomir River watching a hole that leads to a tunnel that leads to a cave. Stake out, my
friend, and no pizza delivery for thousands of miles.
> > I also glance at the area around my ass every ten to
> fifteen seconds to
> > avoid another scorpion sting. I’ve actually given up battling the chiggers and sand fleas, but them scorpions give a jolt like a cattle prod. Hurts like a bastard. The antidote tastes like transmission fluid but God bless the Marine Corps for the five vials of it in my pack. The one truth the Taliban cannot escape is that, believe it or not, they are human beings, which means they have to eat food and drink water. That
requires couriers and that’s where an old bounty
hunter like me comes in handy. I track the couriers, locate the tunnel entrances and storage
facilities, type the info into the handheld, shoot the coordinates up to the satellite link that tells the air commanders where to drop the hardware, we bash some heads for a while, then I track and record the new movement. It’s all about intelligence. We haven’t even brought in the snipers yet. These scurrying rats have no idea what they’re in for. We are but days away
from cutting off supply lines and allowing the
eradication to begin.
> >
I dream of bin Laden waking up to find me standing over him with my boot on his throat as I spit a bloody ear into his face and plunge my nickel plated Bowie knife through his frontal lobe. But you know me. I’m a romantic. I’ve
said it before and I’l l say it again: This country blows, man. It’s not even a country. There are no roads, there’s no infrastructure, there’s no
government. This is an inhospitable, rock pit shit hole ruled by eleventh
century warring tribes. There are no jobs here like we know jobs.
Afghanistan offers two ways for a man to support his family: join the opium trade or join the army. That’s it. Those are your options. Oh, I forgot, you can also live in a refugee camp and eat plum-sweetened, crushed beetle paste
and squirt mud like a goose with stomach flu if
that’s your idea of a party. But the smell alone of those ‘tent cities of the walking dead’ is enough to
hurl you into the poppy fields to cheerfully scrape bulbs for eighteen hours a day.
> >
> > I’ve been living with these Tajiks and Uzbeks and Turkmen and even a couple of Pushtins for over a month and a half now and this much I can say for sure: These guys, all of ‘em, are Huns. Actual, living Huns. They LIVE to fight. It’s what they do. It’s ALL they do. They have no respect for anything, not for their families or for each other or for themselves. They claw at one another as a way of life. They play polo
with dead calves and force their five-year-old sons into human cockfights to defend the family honor. Huns, roaming packs of savage, heartless beasts who feed on each others barbarism. Cavemen with AK47′s. Then again, maybe I’m
just cranky.
> > I’m freezing my ass off on this stupid hill
> because my lap warmer is running out of juice and I can’t recharge it until the sun comes up in a few hours. Oh yeah! You like to write letters, right? Do me a favor, Bizarre. Write a letter to CNN and tell Wolf and Anderson and that
awful, sneering, pompous Aaron Brown to stop calling the Taliban ‘smart.’ They are not smart. I
suggest CNN invest in a dictionary because the word they are looking for is ‘cunning.’ The Taliban are cunning, like jackals and hyenas and wolverines. They are sneaky and ruthless and, when confronted, cowardly. They are
hateful, malevolent parasites who create nothing and destroy everything else. Smart. Pfft. Yeah, they’re real smart. They’ve spent their entire lives reading only one book (and not a very good one, as books go) and consider hygiene and indoor plumbing to be products of
the devil. They’re still figuring out how to work
a Bic lighter. Talking to a Taliban warrior about improving his quality of life is like trying to
teach an ape how to hold a pen; eventually he just
gets frustrated and sticks you in the eye with it.
> >
OK, enough. Snuffle will be up soon so I have to get back to my hole. Covering my tracks in the snow takes a lot of practice but I’m good at it.
Please, I tell you and my fellow Americans to turn off the TV sets and move on with your lives.
The story line you are getting from CNN and other news agencies is utter bullshit and designed not to deliver truth but rather to keep you glued to the screen through the commercials. We’ve got this one under control. The worst thing you guys can do right now is sit around analyzing what we’re doing over here because you have no idea what we’re doing and, really, you don’t want to know. We are your military and we are doing what you sent us
here to do.”
> >
We will lose in Afghanistan and our military will come home defeated.
Obama will make sure of this…
Sending a mere 14,000 more into the conflict will not make a difference.
There are so many options that have not been tried yet that I hesitate to say that losing there is a foregone conclusion. Little things like the Khyber Pass work both ways. This looks like another place where Juche might not work out so well but it is hard to feel pity for them either.