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About our Afghan “allies” is to be found within this Reuters headline: Anti-U.S. emotions run high at Afghan dogfighting ring At home we put professional athletes into prison for abusing animals in this way. As for overseas barbarians, we treat them differently: We send them apologies.  The venue is always important. Of course, this site might have worked just as well. Update: Now here’s an apology for the ages. Something of a unique problem, in Afghanistan: Two boys equipped with suicide vests were arrested here over the weekend, less than a year after one of them had been pardoned by President Hamid Karzai for the same crime, and presented to reporters on Sunday. The boys, named Nasibullah and Azizullah, were described by officials [...] Racing for the exits in Afghanistan, the White House is floating trial balloons about winning the good faith of the Taliban by releasing some of its most important figures now being held at Guantanamo, according to the editors at the WSJ: Mohammad Fazl, around age 45, was the senior-most Taliban commander in northern Afghanistan [...] The US military has a “can do” culture. When assigned a mission, the question is not whether it is a good idea, or whether it is even achievable, but how to get the mission done, preferably with minimum casualties to own forces. That’s the way you fight and win, from the squad level up [...] I have been generally favorably disposed to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. While at CIA, his bureaucracy’s intelligence gathering apparatus drove the military operations which finally put postage paid to Osama bin Laden, not to mention Hellfire warheads on the foreheads of hundreds of mid-level AQ and Taliban seeking refuge in the Pakistani badlands. [...] England’s King Henry VIII famously went through six wives on his way to finding one that would deliver a male heir for the throne. Poor Catherine of Aragon was a political marriage that didn’t quite take, although her daughter Mary would survive to give Ann Boleyn’s Elizabeth a hard time. Elizabeth I was their [...] On his way to the White House to learn of the administration’s plans to draw down the Afghan surge, General David Petraeus was asked a question from a retired mentor: Petraeus had returned to Washington from his command in Kabul for consultations with Obama on the drawdown, and for a Senate committee hearing on [...] ISAF has a new policy with respect to the murder of coalition troops by their ostensible Afghan allies: Military commanders in Afghanistan have stopped making public the number of allied troops killed by Afghan soldiers and police, a measure of the trustworthiness of a force that is to take over security from U.S.-led forces. [...] When our forces first went into Afghanistan, it was all about the kinetics. A couple of years ago, the mission moved to “hearts and minds”, firepower being eschewed in favor of making nice. Then came the “Afghan surge”, which never included as many forces as the forward commanders requested, but definitely resulted in increased [...] |
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