Obama issues new Afghanistan military orders

This is a clear sign of weakness

FE Pre Obama: Kill all them ragheads! Turn it into a glass parking-lot!

FE Post Obama: We should pull out, there's no good solution to this problem.

That said, I think that Afghanistan is a very very important issue right now. We shouldn't just "call it quits" as FE is suggesting. The only reason we are mired there right now is due to the fact that someone *cough* W *cough* committed our forces to two separate conflicts at the same time. If troop levels had been higher from the get-go, and we had worked with Pakistan pre-invasion to allow our troops to push up from the south while simultaneously pushing in from the north-west, then we wouldn't be in the situation we are now. The whole thing was poorly planned from the beginning and we didn't learn our lessons from the Soviets.

To make matters worse, Abdullah Abdullah clearly wasn't interested in the welfare of his country by refusing to enter a run-off election after he claimed fraud was committed by Karzai. Had he done so and won, or even lost, it would have lent much more legitimacy to the NATO presence in the country. As it stands, we have a corrupt leader as an ally, and that never works out well.

One promising sign is that the aforementioned elections were, on a whole, peaceful. Something that we don't see much of in war-torn countries. This is a sign of progress that I don't think many really look at with open eyes. Had the Taliban made good on their threats of harm and reprisal against those who voted in the elections, we'd have far more to worry about.

What is needed is a good old fashioned pincer attack on the southern border. Pakistan's step-up against militants in their country's northern provinces is a boon to our efforts to stabilize that area of the world, and I think that over the next 5-8 years, we can do the job we went there to do so long as we keep up a good troop presence and do our very best to stay out of government affairs.

Edited by tallen702 - 30 November 2009 at 5:22pm

__sneaky__ wrote: tallen702 wrote: FE Pre Obama: Kill all them ragheads! Turn it into a glass parking-lot! FE Post Obama: We should pull out, there's no good solution to this problem.  QFT!

tallen702 wrote: FE Pre Obama: Kill all them ragheads! Turn it into a glass parking-lot! FE Post Obama: We should pull out, there's no good solution to this problem.

Fact of the matter is..........the middle east tends to be like the wild west of the world. Granted they all have their own countries and forms of government set up but they still have their extremist factions that create the problems and do not fully agree with everything that is done regarding tradition. Two of the last times the middleeast had any sort of unity was during the crusades. In some cases certain groups were still pitted against one another. The other time was when the Ottoman Empire was still in power. Ever since then it has kind of become a mess within itself.

Rofl_Mao wrote: Why don't we move most of our troops that are in Iraq to Afghanistan if we are basically done there?

I think they are still in the transitional phase of turning things over to the Iraqi's. I am not overly positive because I haven't been really reading up on it to much lately. So I may very well be dead wrong.

brihard wrote: Small point, but Afghanistan isn't in the Middle East. It's Southwest Asia.

Its a lot closer than the U.S. is.

k. :)

The Senate just published a report about how we shouldn't have missed him in Tora Bora in 2001.

Also, the Middle East isn't the Wild West of the world, sub-Saharan Africa is.  The Middle East has gubments.

http://foreign.senate.gov/