Is it about time to harvest the heroin in Afghanastan?

Report: More troops needed for Afghan war succes

Obama defends stands on Afghanistan

National Security Writer Anne Gearan, Ap 8 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan has reported to President Barack Obama that without more troops the U.S. risks failure in a war it's been waging since September 2001.

"Resources will not win this war, but under-resourcing could lose it," Gen. Stanley McChrystal wrote in a five-page Commander's Summary. His 66-page report, sent to Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Aug. 30, is now under review by Obama.

"Although considerable effort and sacrifice have resulted in some progress, many indicators suggest the overall effort is deteriorating," McChrystal said of the war's progress.

Geoff Morrell, a deputy assistant secretary of defense for communications issues, said in a statement the assessment "is a classified, pre-decisional document, intended to provide President Obama and his national security team with the basis for a very important discussion about where we are now in Afghanistan and how best to get to where we want to be."

While asserting that more troops are needed, McChrystal also pointed out an "urgent need" to significantly revise strategy. The U.S. needs to interact better with the Afghan people, McChrystal said, and better organize its efforts with NATO allies.

"We run the risk of strategic defeat by pursuing tactical wins that cause civilian casualties or unnecessary collateral damage. The insurgents cannot defeat us militarily; but we can defeat ourselves," he wrote.

In his blunt assessment of the tenacious Taliban insurgency, McChrystal warned that unless the U.S. and its allies gain the initiative and reverse the momentum of the militants within the next year the U.S. "risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible."

The content of the report was first reported by The Washington Post, which said it withheld publication of portions of the document at the government's request.

Morrell confirmed the report, but said the Pentagon would not release McChrystal's assessment.

"While we would have much preferred none of this be made public at this time we appreciate the paper's willingness to edit out those passages which would likely have endangered personnel and operations in Afghanistan," Morrell said in an e-mail statement.

The Pentagon and the White House are awaiting a separate, more detailed request for additional troops and resources. Media reports Friday and Saturday said McChrystal has finished it but was told to pocket it, partly because of the charged politics surrounding the decision. McChrystal's senior spokesman, Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, told The Associated Press on Sunday the report is not complete.

Obama is re-evaluating whether the renewed focus on hunting al-Qaida that he announced just months ago has become blurred and whether more forces will do any good.

"Are we doing the right thing?" he asked during one of a series of interviews broadcast Sunday. "Are we pursuing the right strategy?"

A spokesman for Afghanistan's Defense Ministry said Sunday the Afghan government would not second-guess international military commanders on the need for more troops, but said that the greatest need is actually on the other side of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

"The focus should be on those points and areas where the insurgency is infiltrating Afghanistan," he said, referring to the Pakistan border region where Taliban and al-Qaida fighters hide and plan attacks.

In Congress, the war has taken on a highly partisan edge. Senate Republicans are demanding more forces to turn around a war that soon will enter its ninth year, while members of Obama's own Democratic Party are trying to put on the brakes. Obama said in the Sunday interviews that he will not allow politics to govern his decision.

Nor has the president asked his top commander in Afghanistan to sit on a request for U.S. reinforcements in a backsliding war.

"No, no, no, no," Obama responded when asked whether he or aides had directed McChrystal to temporarily withhold a request for additional U.S. forces and other resources.

But he gave no deadline for making a decision about whether to send more Americans into harm's way.

"The only thing I've said to my folks is, 'A, I want an unvarnished assessment, but, B, I don't want to put the resource question before the strategy question,'" Obama said. "Because there is a natural inclination to say, 'If I get more, then I can do more.'"

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress last week he expected McChrystal's request for additional forces and other resources "in the very near future."

The White House has remained vague about how long it would take to receive the report and act on it.

Obama spoke on CNN's "State of the Union," ABC's "This Week," NBC's "Meet the Press," and CBS' "Face the Nation."

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Obama hates babies

It's simple economics. Checks and balances.
The more they can get killed off, the lower the unemployment numbers look.

It is a complex issue. In Vietnam, we knew Russia and China were providing the guns, ammo, explosives, and weaponry to fight us at an almost unlimited rate. We also knew that there was little we could do about it. Afghanistan has no such manufacturing facilities so where is the support coming from? Pakistan is supplying the Taliban but from what source, officially? Pakistan is supposed to be "our friend". Where are the factories supplying the war? Who is paying for the supplies and weapons?

There are not that many mountain passes between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the area of question at the border.

I don't get it. Gen. McChrystal is saying that civilian casualties need to be reduced even further as part of a larger effort to reverse the strengthening Taliban/mujahadin/AQ tide.



You guys are getting the baby killing, heroin harvesting, Obama, unemployment thing from where?

Willing, I sincerely do not know what it accomplishes to accuse a man of something that despicable. How would you like to have to be responsible for that decision. It's easy for us to sit here and say he should do this or that, not so easy for the people involved.

Our soldiers are the babies I refer to. To me, if you're under 33, you're a baby. That's my oldest kids age.

Afghans crop of choice is opium poppies, right?

Who said anything about Hussein??

Dead soldiers can't collect unemployment.

it's a tricky situation

The Pak military has control of the nuclear weapons and they are VERY nationalistic. And no matter what happens politically the military won't give up control of the weapons. Not even if it means a military coup (remember Musharrif?)

But the Pak security and intelligence forces are mostly pro Taliban and covertly supporting them

And the Pakistan Prime Minister is caught in the middle

He knows very well he's sending a lot of kids to their death.
It must be easy enough for that General. He sits up in an office. No way would he put himself in the line of fire.

Met a sweetheart recently who is being deployed soon. I just wish the men a sound peace of mind and the babies a safe return.

That's just very patronizing to hear. All U.S. service members make a personal decision to serve and they sacrifice a lot in order to continue to serve. Even (or especially) those under 33. Calling them babies isn't doing anyone any justice, even if well-intended.

...Yes, they grow poppy in Afghanistan. They also grow marijuana. Their culture is different than ours and they don't throw people in prison for years for drug possession. Prohibition is mainly an American thing...

...Didn't mention Hussein.

...Of course a dead soldier can't collect unemployment. He/she wouldn't ever have been unemployed. And familiarize yourself with SGLI and survivors benefits. Kind of blows the 'Obama hates soldiers and want them to die' theory...

Just saying. =P

Good grief. Nobody wants to kill babies.

If he puts himself in the line of fire, where is the leader if he is killed? How does it make sense? Just asking..

Look I hate war, but I am not the only one that lives here. I have to accept that people are going to volunteer to serve and that we have to have a military. But I can't see accusing a man of wanting to kill children. I tend to believe even if you are not completely mature, if you volunteer and go through that hell, you are an adult.

Thank you for serving.

The price of freedom is sometimes paid with blood. It's far easier to sit back and do nothing than to accept that something must be done at the cost of human lives. I am free today because people before me were willing to die for my freedom. I am thankful that I don't have to make these decisions. And I am thankful for those that put their lives on the line for my freedom.

I did a little research based on your comments and hit this article. I knew the problem was complex but I didn't (and I don't think most people) realize how intertwined the area politics can be. This article is about a year old and presents a wider perspective about Obama and the war. The last sentence is quite telling.

Begin Quote: by Christopher Hitchens Sept 15, 2008

At a recent dinner party in the British embassy in Kabul, one of the guests referred to "the Afghan-Pakistan war." The rest of the table fell silent. This is the truth that dare not speak its name. Even mentioning it in private in the Afghan capital's green zone is enough to solicit murmurs of disapproval. Few want to accept that the war is widening; that it now involves Pakistan, a country with an unstable government and nuclear weapons.

Related in Slate
In 2001, Ken Silverstein explained Pakistan's intelligence agency's role in introducing Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Also in 2001, James Gibney theorized about how far the United States could push Pakistan before the country crumbled. In 2003, Hitchens discussed Bernard Henry-Lévy's book about the death of Daniel Pearl and its link to the Inter-Services Intelligence agency. In June 2008, Fred Kaplan analyzed how the United States found itself in the current situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"Don't mention the war," as Basil insists with mounting hysteria in Fawlty Towers. And, when discussing the deepening crisis in Afghanistan, most people seem deliberately to avoid such telling phrases as "Pakistani aggression" or—more accurate still—"Pakistani colonialism." The truth is that the Taliban, and its al-Qaida guests, were originally imposed on Afghanistan from without as a projection of Pakistani state power. (Along with Pakistan, only Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates ever recognized the Taliban as the legal government in Kabul.) Important circles in Pakistan have never given up the aspiration to run Afghanistan as a client or dependent or proxy state, and this colonial mindset is especially well-entrenched among senior army officers and in the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI.

We were all warned of this many years ago. When the Clinton administration sent cruise missiles into Afghanistan in reprisal for the attacks on our embassies in East Africa, the missiles missed Osama Bin Ladin but did, if you remember, manage to kill two officers of the ISI. It wasn't asked loudly enough: What were these men doing in an al-Qaida camp in the first place? In those years, as in earlier ones, almost no tough questions were asked of Pakistan. Successive U.S. administrations used to keep certifying to Congress that Pakistan was not exploiting U.S. aid (and U.S. indulgence over the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan) to build itself a nuclear weapons capacity. Indeed, it wasn't until after Sept. 11, 2001, that we allowed ourselves to learn that at least two of Pakistan's top nuclear scientists—Mirza Yusuf Baig and Chaudhry Abdul Majid—had been taken in for "questioning" about their close links to the Taliban. But then, in those days, we were too incurious to take note of the fact that Pakistan's chief nuclear operative, A.Q. Khan, had opened a private-enterprise "Nukes 'R' Us" market and was selling his apocalyptic wares to regimes as disparate as Libya and North Korea, sometimes using Pakistani air force planes to make the deliveries.

The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem. It is not a real country or nation but an acronym devised in the 1930s by a Muslim propagandist for partition named Chaudhary Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. The stan suffix merely means "land." In the Urdu language, the resulting acronym means "land of the pure." It can be easily seen that this very name expresses expansionist tendencies and also conceals discriminatory ones. Kashmir, for example, is part of India. The Afghans are Muslim but not part of Pakistan. Most of Punjab is also in India. Interestingly, too, there is no B in this cobbled-together name, despite the fact that the country originally included the eastern part of Bengal (now Bangladesh, after fighting a war of independence against genocidal Pakistani repression) and still includes Baluchistan, a restive and neglected province that has been fighting a low-level secessionist struggle for decades. The P comes first only because Pakistan is essentially the property of the Punjabi military caste (which hated Benazir Bhutto, for example, because she came from Sind). As I once wrote, the country's name "might as easily be rendered as 'Akpistan' or 'Kapistan,' depending on whether the battle to take over Afghanistan or Kashmir is to the fore."

I could have phrased that a bit more tightly, since the original Pakistani motive for annexing and controlling Afghanistan is precisely the acquisition of "strategic depth" for its never-ending confrontation with India over Kashmir. And that dispute became latently thermonuclear while we simply looked on. One of the most creditable (and neglected) foreign-policy shifts of the Bush administration after 9/11 was away from our dangerous regional dependence on the untrustworthy and ramshackle Pakistan and toward a much more generous rapprochement with India, the world's other great federal, democratic, and multiethnic state.

Recent accounts of murderous violence in the capital cities of two of our allies, India and Afghanistan, make it appear overwhelmingly probable that the bombs were not the work of local or homegrown "insurgents" but were orchestrated by agents of the Pakistani ISI. This is a fantastically unacceptable state of affairs, which needs to be given its right name of state-sponsored terrorism. Meanwhile, and on Pakistani soil and under the very noses of its army and the ISI, the city of Quetta and the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas are becoming the incubating ground of a reorganized and protected al-Qaida. Sen. Barack Obama has, if anything, been the more militant of the two presidential candidates in stressing the danger here and the need to act without too much sentiment about our so-called Islamabad ally. He began using this rhetoric when it was much simpler to counterpose the "good" war in Afghanistan with the "bad" one in Iraq. Never mind that now; he is committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy. And that, I think, is another reason why so many people are reluctant to employ truthful descriptions for the emerging Afghan-Pakistan confrontation: American liberals can't quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he's ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less.

Ok,

I have to say something....

I may not have voted for Obama and frankly I don't really like the guy.

However, as far as the military is concerned he has done some good things for us as well(The new post 9/11 gi bill) granted it was started under the bush administration but his administration finished it and pushed it through.

To say that someone is intentionally killing our troops because he wants the unemployment rate to look better? give me a break.

again I am one of those 'babies' you refer to...and frankly take offense to being called a baby. I wouldn't trust a baby with a gun, but need I remind you that those 'babies' are the reason you are able to sit behind your computer out of harms way yourself? and the fact that the 'general' didn't just enter the the military as a general. He earned that spot by proving that he is capable of leading. To accuse a general of just 'not worrying' pretty much not care what happens to their troops is completely insane.

Here's a scenerio for you, since you seem so capable of making a decision based on life(true story)

There was a conductor of a train watching the train go down the tracks he realized he needed to change the trains direction or it was going to crash...however changing the direction meant that his kid(who was playing in the gear area) was going to die because the gears would crush him. I conductor made the call and changed...his son died in the process but everyone on the train lived.....

My point sometimes you have to sacrifice a few to save many.