Re: President Obama To Announce Details of Afghanistan Strategy On Wednesday
Sure, but I also think that pulling supplies off of a truck can be dangerous in Afghanistan.
nah. You're staying on Baghram, Leatherneck, or one of its' equivalents. Your worst risk is a random Afghan Police Trainee / Suicide Bomber in the DFAC (chow hall).
I have no real hands on military experience, but I think that PMCs should be the ones there, not civilian volunteers
well, these guys are contractors - they handle alot more than just High Risk Personnel Security.
Those PMCs have a hell of a lot of training, probably more than the average infantryman over there tenfold.
depends on your job. if you are the guy trained to run a chow hall or the port-a-johns.... then probably no. If you are one of the Personal Security Detachments... then your training is indeed superior to that of the average infantryman.
As for the PTTs, I do think great benefit was seen in Iraq, but that was more with actually being hands on, training them in police stations on logistics, etc. I don't think that would really work in Afghanistan as you said simply because I doubt a "cop" over there is anything more than another uneducated, untrained, Afghani person.
well, literacy is actually one of the big efforts. and we are still worried mostly about security in the critical areas. Simple combat effectiveness comes first.
Good point. I really can't argue that... especially the buy in to the new government part. But still though, we're talking about one of the poorest nations in the world, I mean how long do we have to risk American lives and spend our money to get them on their feet?
As long as we wish to maintain world security. OBL gave a 1993 interview to ABC News in which he stated that the two events which convinced his organization that the US could be taken on and beaten were our retreats from Somalia and Beirut. Those were relatively small deals. Our perceived defeat by the Taliban would be.... it would be very bad. It would reverse much of the positive effect of the defeat of AQI by providing a success model for Islamist Fundamentalism. The Arab Spring revolts? You will note they weren't waving pictures of Osama, or Zawahiri, or Qutb, or any of those guys. That is because Islamism was discredited by its' defeat in Iraq - and nothing will lose you supporters in the ME faster than losing a conflict with the West. But nothing will
win you supporters faster than
beating the West. We withdraw, and we are telling an entire generation of young, angry, hopeless middle eastern men with nothing to lose that the way to achieve strength and success is to kill Americans for 10 years plus one. We will be validating the "weak horse / strong horse" motif.
Are they really that bad that they can't even left seat once?
it's all area dependent. It's not all Sangin... but some of it is.
With all the years that we've been there that just cannot be true. I've had even the dumbest, clumsiest new agents take the right seat within a month... can it really, really, be that bad with these Afghanis?
"all the years that we have been there" is a reference to the country, not the individual area. Remember, people in Nad Ali don't care what happens in Baghram, they care what happens in Nad Ali. But we've only been in
that area really for about a year and some change. Furthermore, it's not just a matter of 'presence', it's a matter of 'strategy'. We were there for most of that decade not fighting an effective counter-insurgency. The Army had to figure out how to run one in Iraq first - and those lessons only became solidified (for them) in mid-to-late 2008. The Marine Corps caught on alot faster.... but they've done that before, and had some institutional memory of it.
I just don't see how a left/right seat policy cannot be already done over there. They have the most powerful nation in the world supplying and training them. What's wrong with a policy of focusing troops in the border regions, along with leaving a minority behind in already gained zones. It's not just the 100,000 US troops. We have Italians and Germans over there in gigantic numbers. Brits I believe have drawn down significantly.
:lol: our NATO allies are generally useless. giving them an area is effectively giving it to the enemy, as they will sit on their base and generally refuse to go out. the "training" that we have to let them provide is atrocious when they bother to show up. They don't go out at night, they don't go out if they might get shot at, they don't go out if it's too hot, they don't go out if it's too cold they don't go out if something good is on TV.... okay, the TV thing is probably a slight exaggeration.... but not by much. NATO is dead. It's America + people who live on our camps and eat our food and then complain about it.
Right. It's not just the tea party either. We're seeing that with the entire House. Senate republicans who tend to be more older and willing to stick to their guns aren't going for it though.
Well, Obama
should ask for Congressional approval. But they also
should give it to him. They also
should demand that he actually play to
win; instead of this 'let's-see-if-I-can-split-the-difference" angling he seems to have mistaken for "thoughtfulness".
