Jun 10 2010

A Longer and Wronger Way Home from “Obama’s War”

Among many other recent innovations, including a “featured advertiser,” Pheedo, which showed up like news on their RSS feed today, the Washington Post has been calling the war in Afghanistan “Obama’s War” for the past few months, and in case you wonder what that never-ending mess is all about, they add a helpful sub-title…  

Combating Extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan

So we were apparently “combatting extremism” in Marjah when we reduced that primitive hamlet to rubble, and the very bad new news on top of all the other very bad old news about that brutal operation is that it was…

A total honking failure!

Residents of this onetime Taliban sanctuary see signs that the insurgents have regained momentum in recent weeks, despite early claims of success by U.S. Marines.

Firefights between insurgents and security forces occur daily, resulting in more Marine fatalities and casualties over the past month than in the first month of the operation, which began in mid-February.

Firefights every day! More and more US casualties!

It’s like some kind of nightmare joke! A Marine blogger at Military Times calls Marjah a petting zoo in Hell!

Pets from Hell

And that’s a scene from Marjah! Look at it! One shack, one Marine, and one crazy dog!

So this total honking failure has finally inspired General Stanley A. McChrystal with some second thoughts about running the same kind of operation in Kandahar.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is finding himself squeezed between a ticking clock and an enemy that won’t go away.

On Thursday, during a visit to NATO headquarters here, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal admitted that preparations for perhaps the most critical operation of the war — the campaign to take control of Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace — weren’t going as planned. He said winning support from local leaders, some of whom see the Taliban fighters not as oppressors but as their Muslim brothers, was proving tougher than expected. The military side of the campaign, originally scheduled to surge in June and finish by August, is now likely to extend into the fall.

And meanwhile Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was extending another deadline…

“All of us, for our publics, are going to have to show by the end of the year that our strategy is on the right track and making some headway,” Gates said Wednesday during a visit to London to meet with British leaders.

Is our strategy “on the right track?”

We won’t “know” until the end of the year!

Harharharhar!!!

3 comments

  1. http://militarytimes.com/blogs…

    On my first patrol outside the wire with 3/6, the Marines I was with searched a deserted compound after finding spent AK47 rounds on a road in front. A note was left by its apparent owner saying that the compound was abandoned ahead of the initial February assault on Marjah, but a dog, chained to a pillar, had been left behind. It looked miserable, and probably didn’t make it through the week.

    On another occasion, Marines patrolling through a farm compound came face to face with snarling dog. Baring its teeth, it snapped against its chain, clearly trying to defend its turf and take a chunk out of a Marine’s leg – or worse – in the process. The Marines’ preferred option was to avoid it, but they trained their rifles on the dog in case it broke its chain. Children nearby saw the scenario playing out, and responded by pelting the dog with stones until it yelped repeatedly and laid down.

    So maybe we can make the Taliban yelp and lie down, too, if we have enough stones!

  2. I’m not exactly “high” on humans these days.

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