I'll bet the Democratic Party killed them. You should be the first on the web to speculate about that.
Posted by Lefty at June 29, 2005 08:15 AMI've heard there may have been a number of Navy SEALs onboard. I have a childhood friend who's a SEAL. He's been in Afghanistan several times. I don't know if he's there now. I hope not.
Posted by muckcat at June 29, 2005 08:46 AMThe Taliban claimed responsibility. No doubt a clone of one of the rocket launchers we sent them in the 80's to take down Russian helicopters.
The "Mission Accomplished" in Afghanistan is turning into running battles with a renewed Taliban. That's what happens when you focus on oil at the expense of terrorism. Thank God the idiot son let us know the commanders have enough, if not too many, troops. Hell, we can hold Afghanistan with a pissed-off Girl Scout and a stale box of mint cookies.
Posted by phidipides at June 29, 2005 08:47 AMUS forces have the most sophisticated “support aircraft” in the world, multiple layers of communication devices, Special Forces - that are being ground to a pulp in Iraq.
Posted by Flamethrower at June 29, 2005 08:56 AMparadox,
Are you against our action in Afghanistan? If so, how do you think the US should have responded to 9/11? Just curious on your position.
Posted by Tex at June 29, 2005 09:22 AMTex, don't be an idiot. We went into Afghanistan years ago, bailed as fast as we could to send soldiers to Iraq, leaving Afghanistan with only a token US fighting force that has hunkered down in safe zones while the Taliban regrouped. This military action was short circuited by Bush and here we are, years later still being shot at an killed by the same group we should have routed a long time ago. In short, another failed Bush mess at the expense of our fighting men and women.
Posted by T2 at June 29, 2005 09:42 AMI think the U.S. should have responded to 9/11 by going after bin Laden. Pretty damn simple, go after the person who responsible. Did we really think that bin Laden gave a shit about Afghanistan getting bombed? It's not his land, not his people, just a convenient place to hide out.
The Taliban is back, the heroin trade is flourishing and Americans are still dying. What the hell are we doing sending innocent soldiers to die for now?
Posted by ann at June 29, 2005 09:48 AMTex, tell us all how swimmingly the Afghan war was waged. Bin Laden (still alive and free 4 years post-9/11) was lost in the fog of Tora-Bora. Reliable, verified accounts have the U.S. military pulling their best Keystone Kops routine when it came to capturing him. Bush boasts of soliciting the advice of the military in the conduct of his wars. However it's obvious once you tell the man something he doesn't want to hear your career is over. Ask Shinseki.>> New York Times, Feb 28, 2003: Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, "wildly off the mark." Pentagon officials have put the figure closer to 100,000 troops. Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year. (snip)...Neither Mr. Rumsfeld nor Mr. Wolfowitz mentioned General Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, by name. But both men were clearly irritated at the general's suggestion that a postwar Iraq might require many more forces than the 100,000 American troops and the tens of thousands of allied forces that are also expected to join a reconstruction effort. (snip)...
We were lied to Tex, and the lies continue. Nice President you have there. Lying, murdering sociopath is what he is.
It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Now chimpy's friendly pollsters (Rasmussen Reports) can't mask the fact he's toast.
President Bush Job Approval
Bush Job Approval
Strongly Approve 24%
Somewhat Approve 22%
Somewhat Disapprove 15%
Strongly Disapprove 38%
Wednesday June 29, 2005--Forty-six percent (46%) of American adults approve of the way George W. Bush is performing his role as President. Fifty-three percent (53%) disapprove of the President's performance.
The President's Approval Rating today is his lowest since May 18.
The President's Approval Rating is based upon telephone interviews conducted each night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. Only a small portion of the interviews for today's reading were conducted following the President's speech on Iraq last night.
Just 42% of Americans now believe that the U.S. and its allies are winning the War on Terror. That's the lowest level of optimism ever recorded by Rasmussen Reports in a series of surveys conducted over the past two years.
Forty-nine percent (49%) of Americans say President Bush is more responsible for starting the War in Iraq than Saddam Hussein.
Posted by Jesusland Joe at June 29, 2005 09:57 AMAre you against our action in Afghanistan? If so, how do you think the US should have responded to 9/11?
I was briefly opposed to the Afghan war; I thought that we could lean on Omar heavily enough to get him to fork over Al Qaeda without having to spill a lot of blood unnecessarily. Omar quickly made it clear that he wasn't a reasonable person, and at that point I was fully on board.
You would be hard-pressed to find many people who were even that skeptical of the need for war with Afghanistan. Some of us do object pretty strongly to how it was fought, though. Sure, we won the early going; how hard can it be to defeat forces whose main weapons technology is Toyota pickup trucks with machine guns on them? But the failure at Tora Bora was really an indictment of Rumsfeld's theories about the supremacy of light, nimble forces. We needed boots on the ground if we were going to have a prayer of catching AQ as they fled.
Posted by Matt Davis at June 29, 2005 09:58 AMNow we know 17 GI's died in Afghanistan yesterday. From enemy fire. SO, here is where we sit there, years into the war: No BinLaden, No Mullah Omar, huge heroin production,active, lethal Taliban regrouped, our US soldiers dying by the dozen. The War President Bush is Commander in Chief, responsible for putting US forces in Afghanistan woefully under equipped, undermanned and under commanded and we, the USA, cannot defeat an army of guys on camels and 20 year old toyota pickups. George Bush, The War President is a miserable failure. His speech sucked too.
Posted by T2 at June 29, 2005 10:05 AMI was just trying to feel people out. I don't think a large number of forces on the ground are necessary in Afghanistan at this point. It's more of a police mission to try and weed out the good from the bad. More soldiers would just provide more targets for Taliban. This isn't a formal war with battle lines, etc... I think the Afghan operation was pretty successful. OBL is still on the loose, but if you think AQ hasn't been severly damaged, you must be living in a "I won't admit anything can go right for something run by GW" dream land. Just to be clear, I'm not saying everything is just awesome, but it defintely beats doing nothing.
Posted by Tex at June 29, 2005 10:07 AMJust to be clear, I'm not saying everything is just awesome, but it defintely beats doing nothing.
Yes, and it's clearly inferior to taking the nation's attention off Afghanistan to gin up another war--one that had the twin virtues of being unwinnable and being unnecessary.
Posted by Matt Davis at June 29, 2005 10:16 AMTex, when did Matt propose "doing nothing"? This smacks of Rove "liberal baiting."
Posted by Jesusland Joe at June 29, 2005 10:44 AMJoe,
He didn't. I'm not trying to bag on Matt or anyone else here. I'm just stating my view. That's it. I'm not trying to make a counterpoint.
Posted by Tex at June 29, 2005 10:51 AM"I'm not saying everything is just awesome, but it definitely beats doing nothing."
Item: Not enough forces were allowed into Afghanistan/to take part in Operation Anaconda (February 2002), with the result that several hundred hard core Al Queda types slipped into Pakistan. Why not enough resources? They were being redeployed to Iraq. (Source: "Not A Good Day To Die", a terrific book about Operation Anaconda.)
Item: Musharraf has quietly kicked the 2.5 million Afghan refugees which took up living in Pakistan after 2001 - 2002 out of Pakistan and back into Afghanistan (the last 500K just returned). Among those 2.5 million are hundreds, if not thousands, of Al Q types which Musharraf wanted out of Pakistan.
Item: Many of the Special Forces operating in Afghanistan since early 2003 are reservists whose area of specialty is -- Central and South America. Why? Because the SF units conversant in SW Asia were all pulled out for Iraq.
Point: The war in Afghanistan has been pursued in a half -assed manner from the get - go. There are many of us who would have loved to have seen many of the units being wasted in Iraq instead having been sent to Afghanistan. The result is we would have had OBL's head on a pike by now.
Instead, we are sending GIs to a place with too few soldiers with the result that the opposition is getting ramped up again. Today's shoot - down of a Chinook is not the last we are going to be hearing from Afghanistan.
Posted by at June 29, 2005 10:58 AMTex, lay out what you think would have been an effective and appropriate response to 9/11, short term and long term strategy.
Posted by Jesusland Joe at June 29, 2005 11:00 AMMaybe the Friday evening news dump...but would they dare?
The point here is clear. Would you want to be screaming "Go Team" when your guys are down 94 to 3 and your opponents are on your 3 yard line with a first and 10? No. You would appear an asshole.
Bush certainly did not want as a backdrop to his "its worth it" cheer the image of 17 dead young American kids.
I say we find out tonight after the 7 pm news.
Joe - Just off the top of my head...
Short Term Goals
- Disrupt AQ operations
- Freeze AQ financing
- Dismantle AQ training facilities
- Breakup Suspected AQ cells in US - incarcerate/deport members
- Incarcerate/deport those with active links to extremist Islamic movements
- Increase ability of FBI/CIA to monitor extremist Islamic activity within the US and around the world
- Empower FBI/CIA to act on known intelligence of threats at home or around the world
Long Term Goals
- Remove Taliban from power
- Establish secular govt in Afghanistan
- Capture/Kill AQ leadership
- Secure American borders
- Actively monitor and neutralize threats from extremist Islamic movements
So you agree Iraq is a sideshow which has drained resources from an effective strategy and endangers our long term goals and success?
Posted by Jesusland Joe at June 29, 2005 12:04 PMSo you agree Iraq is a sideshow which has drained resources from an effective strategy..
That sums it up for me.
Posted by Centrist at June 29, 2005 12:09 PMJoe,
I think Iraq was a mistake since Saddam didn't have any WMD or really pose that much of a threat to us. I don't buy the Sean Hannity line of it's worth it to end the rape rooms and torture, etc. There's a lot of people in the world that need to be freed, but I don't want to invade those countries.
However, it's really important for us to win in Iraq now that we're there. I think talk of a timeline for troops to come home is just polical positioning by dems... We need to stay until we win and Iraq can be self sufficient. I don't think we can really tell how long that will be at this point.
Posted by Tex at June 29, 2005 12:32 PMto take part in Operation Anaconda
How funny. That's what my wife calls our night out away from the kids.
Posted by Centrist at June 29, 2005 12:40 PMThis is in reaction to the exchange about Afghanistan, above, between Tex and Jerusalem Joe.
I can't recall if I've mentioned this, but in case I haven't.... I am close personal friends with a long-time spook who works for a U.S. intelligence agency he has never acknowldeged the name of, even to his wife of some 38 years. He's about as far from a muscle-bound Navy Seal sort as anyone could be.... more like your George Smiley type. Old, pudgy, bland-looking, the kind of guy you would expect to see selling shoes in a Florsheim shoe store ... except that he is very, very smart. And extremely deadly.
My friend was dispatched to Afghanistan in the earliest days of the conflict and stayed on for many months there in what he said was a training capacity. All he would say is that he was responsible for assembling a team of U.S. experts in "security" and Afghan trainees... hundreds of them, I gather. In periodic messages he let me know that things were going very well and he was quite enthusiastic about the progress they were making.
Then came the war in Iraq. My friend's team was disbanded on orders from Washington and transferred to various parts of Iraq. The Afghan 'training' or whatever it was, simply was discontinued.
My friend was furious. Said to me that the Iraq War essentially wiped away all that he and his team had accomplished, which he assessed as quite a bit. He was then asked to go to Iraq and take a look at a similar job they had for him there. It was a large, ambitious program involved with training Iraq domestic "security officers" ... policemen of some sort, I gathered, but that could be wide of the mark. He spent several weeks checking it out. Then he declined the job.
The U.S. military brass was making it into a huge mess, he explained to me, rotten and incompetent from start to finish. Narrow, completely rigid, over-bureaucratized, and run largely by callow incompetents from the U.S. who didn't have a glimmer what they were doing or how to go about it.
My friend moved on to other spooky pastures, thankfully further from Iraq, where he is much happier doing a similar job with far better indigenous personnel to mess up the show. Reflecting back, he told me not long ago that the day we lost the Afghanistan War was the day Bush decided to invade Iraq.
Tex,
I understand where you are coming from, however, have you talked to anyone who has worked in training the Iraqi's? The trainers say that the Iraqis don't want to fight and when bombs or bullets are lobbed, the Iraqis are the first ones running for the hills. How can you help someone who is unwilling to help themselves? We are trying to sell them on democracy when they don't have a clue as to what it is. I find this whole adventure an enormous tragedy. The political arm of the war was lost when we failed to close down abu ghirab. It looks like the only way to "win" the war is to become a military strongman just like Sadaam. Sad, very sad.
I said this in the Open Thread, but it speaks directly to Tex's point:
I think talk of a timeline for troops to come home is just polical positioning by dems... We need to stay until we win and Iraq can be self sufficient.
Realistically, with the pool of available troops at the U.S.'s disposal, we can keep a relatively serious presence in Iraq for what? Maybe a year?
That's why it doesn't make any sense to say that setting a departure date encourages the terrorists to just "wait us out." They can wait us out anyway, because they can see that our ability to sustain the occupation is becoming attenuated.
It's difficult to think of a strategy that allows us both to keep the army from breaking and to keep Iraq from devolving further into civil war. If we leave, we can keep the army from breaking. If we don't we might not be able to stop the civil war regardless of our efforts. Thus, declaring victory and going home is probably the least bad of all the shitty outcomes available.
A family friend and fellow Eagle Scout is a helicopter pilot serving in Afghanistan. I'm praying that he's not dead right now.
Posted by Tim at June 29, 2005 01:00 PMThe decision to invade Iraq was a monumental fuckup.
The administration screwed the pooch.
We need to do what we can to stabilize the situation or it will be a worse nightmare for years to come.
When do the impeachment hearings start.
Posted by muckcat at June 29, 2005 01:01 PMTex said - More soldiers would just provide more targets for Taliban.
So would fewer soldiers be fewer targets for Taliban? Let's bring 'em home.
Posted by the professor at June 29, 2005 01:06 PMMatt,
I'm not saying the insurgents are waiting us out. I just saying the battle isn't over with them and if we leave before it is, Iraq will be a safe haven for millitant operations. I don't think the military will "break" if we are there longer than a year from now.
I'm really sorry, Tim. My thoughts and prayers are with you; these are horrible experiences that those of us on the outside really can't comprehend.
I will let the excellent readers and editors in this thread speak for themselves on the current debacle in Afghanistan; I cannot say it better myself.
I am just left will an enormous well of sadness and anger that it did not have to be with this way. War was so obviously needed to rectify what had happened to us with that country; that we would have a CIC who just walked away from the mastermind of 9/11 and leave the job undone still defies belief.
Our men and women are dying for nothing. That our military would lie to us about it and that our media would be complicit speaks volumes to the utter degradation of this country under Bush. We're a lying, evil killing disgrace on the planet and I will be eternally ashamed for it.
Posted by paradox at June 29, 2005 01:44 PMI don't buy the Sean Hannity line of it's worth it to end the rape rooms and torture, etc.
For one brief moment I thought you were talking about prison reform in the United States.
Afghanistan. A land where the oil minister became President. Proof that the American way to bootstrap yourself up is the bestest. If it weren't so handy for a pipeline we would have left it to fend for itself long ago.
I think the Afghan operation was pretty successful. "Was" is the past tense. It's still going on, with no end in sight. That's the problem. No apparent plan from the administration. If you read the international news purveyors (because the MSM sure won't tell you) you'll find that the Taliban have regrouped, their attacks are becoming better coordinated and more deadly, and they are using larger groups of people to attack with. No rational person thinks things are just fine there.
Posted by phidipides at June 29, 2005 01:53 PMThere are now more American dead in Afghanistan this year than in any year since 2001.
Posted by at June 29, 2005 01:57 PMYeah, so much for getting al Qaeda and the Taliban "on the run." Seems to me that they are alive. Could it be maybe because we stepped down our troop levels in Afghanistan to gear up for the illegal war in Iraq? Hmmm??
Posted by James at June 29, 2005 02:10 PMI love the fact that y'all still think you can beat W when he isn't running for anything. How messed up are y'all? I don't care if his nuimbers are in the teens. He is not running again. They don't matter. And with numbers in the teens, he's obviously accomplished something. We'll see how things fall afterward. 2006 looks to follow 2004, y'all don't have very many candidates. And, unfortunately for you. 18 out of 33 House seats in play are Democratic, and the Senate is even worse for you. So revel in the numbers, rejoice, throw a party, get drunk. What you have the day after is how much value those falling poll numbers are worth.
Posted by peter at June 29, 2005 02:10 PMIt's amazing how reading "y'all" is as annoying as hearing it.
Posted by at June 29, 2005 02:19 PMTex, don't take this the wrong way but you sound like bush. Of course we "have to win." But what is the definition of winning? What is the cost based on the definition? Based on this administration's track record, what will it take to "win"? What options do they have? What is your personal threshold for the price worth paying to "win"? How many of our soldiers lives? How much money from the taxpayers? How many Iraqi innocent civilians caught in the crossfire?
Posted by Jesusland Joe at June 29, 2005 02:19 PMPeter, bless your heart we're trying to end the war and save lives and you want to live in the past. Lay off the Kool aid for awhile
Posted by Jesusland Joe at June 29, 2005 02:27 PMI love the fact that y'all still think you can beat W when he isn't running for anything. How messed up are y'all?
Did I miss the election blog somewhere?
Clinton got a blowjob! There, that'll give you something to fret about. Meanwhile, we'll keep honoring the dead by trying to ensure that as few as possible have to die for these madmen.
It's amazing how reading "y'all" is as annoying as hearing it.
How do you feel about "You'ns"?
Posted by phidipides at June 29, 2005 02:55 PMGetting Bush to the teens will get us back the House, and then we can impeach Bush.
There, Peter, you feel better? We're doing this to put your war felon hero in prison. Get it?
Posted by paradox at June 29, 2005 03:04 PMthanks, paradox. i thought it was obvious but, eh, this crowd.
Posted by benjoya at June 29, 2005 03:12 PMY'all, must be a red state Southerner. You all know the type. Well if "y'all" don't steal the 2006 elections, I would not be too sure if I were you on the outcome.
Larre, thanks for the interesting post. Nice to hear FACTS instead of the usual b.s.
Tim, I pray that your friend his safe also.
Posted by Judith at June 29, 2005 05:06 PMI opposed the invasion of Afghanistan for two reasons. First Afghanistan had done nothing to us. Second Bush/Cheney/Rummy were going to lead the charge and they are fuck-ups. It was clear from what they said about what they would do in Afghanistan that they would fuck up. If OBL and his gang were behind 9/11 (I have serious doubts about that), we didn't need to bomb the country to get them. Only a massive and surprise attack on Kandahar with all exits closed off would have caught them.
Bush must have taken advice from Putin on how to handle Afghanistan.
Posted by Marie at June 29, 2005 05:33 PMI hate to state the obvious, but..
The numbers are also the best indicator of immediate political capital. Really low numbers makes it very tough to stay "on message" and will send congressional members off the reservation in an attempt to save their job.
Posted by Simp the Biodiesel Pimp at June 29, 2005 05:47 PMI personally think that "y'all" is perhaps the greatest southern cultural contribution.
Think about it: Wouldn't English gain utility from a standardized single-word expression of the second person plural? The answer, clearly, is yes.
And the fact that the innovators who gave us "y'all," the most elegant expression of this collective form of address, happen to be a bunch of hicks? Don't let bigotries against southerners get in the way of a genuinely useful idea.
Posted by Matt Davis at June 29, 2005 07:05 PMYou tell em Matt. How dare y'all make fun of us cuz we tawk funny.
Posted by Jesusland Joe at June 29, 2005 10:07 PM