What are your thoughts on the recent happenings in Afghanistan?

It’s escalating

Coalition Military Fatalities By Year
Year – Fatalities
2001 – 12
2002 – 69
2003 – 57
2004 – 60
2005 – 131
2006 – 191
2007 – 232
2008 – 295
2009 – 519

http://icasualties.org/oef/

I really think the government should send obama and his cabinet over there and give them all guns, let them fight for a while and I will grantee our war would be over in one day!!

I think these events are tragic.
I fear the current mission is ill-defined and unlikely to produce lasting results of any benefit to any of the countries involved.

7 of the 8 Americans were CIA guys… ‘blowbacks’ are a bitch.

My take on the surge is that we are pulling our troops back into more easily defended urban settlements, and that the additional troops are there mainly to insure that casualties will be kept to an absolute minimum. There will be no more using troops as bait to draw fire and call in air strikes.

As you may recall, after the Iraqi surge things quieted down considerably allowing the American public to almost forget about the war. This, I think, is how the Obama Administration hopes to get through an election year without the war taking center stage as an issue. According to a recent leaked report publicized by Richard Engle, the military knows that there is absolutely no chance of training up the Afghan military to replace us when we leave. Indeed, as a spate of U.S-trained soldiers suddenly turning their weapons on Americans, we may creating another Al Qaeda in whomever we train.

I suspect that we will use the next 18 months to build as many roads, bridges and schools as we can in order to mitigate as much of the ill-will as possible we have caused by riding roughshod over the local population over the past 8 years. I think we are just trying to postpone our withdrawal until after the election and make it as dignified as possible under the circumstances. I think the real tip of the spear will be the CIA in Pakistan. The rest is just cover.

@wildbird Very knowledgeable and well thought out response-NOT!

What they are doing in Khost is exactly what we should be doing in Afghanistan, the execution of the plan was really stupid. We are never going to “win” a war there, we shouldn’t even try. It is not in our purview to tell other countries what political system they have to have. After 60 years of failure that should be obvious to the most obtuse, John Wayne wannabe hawk in Congress.

Our only mission in Afghanistan or any other country in the region is to seriously damage independent terrorist groups. We should be killing or capturing any leader of these groups and bringing their financial supporters to public trial. We can’t do this with 140,000 American soldiers. This is what spies, covert missions and special forces are all about. We find the guys who are attacking civilians around the world. We capture them, dead or alive and the ones who we bring in alive we give public trials. However we don’t do stupid things like trusting their agents.