Sunday, October 08, 2006

This bit of news is worthy of note. Remember you saw this on this day and date because, I'm convinced, the Bush administration will ignore the situation in Afghanistan and allow the country to fall back under Taliban rule.
Why? Because Dubya is fighting the war on terror with blind eyes and a muzzle on his brain's voice.

To wit:
8 Oct. 2006: Gen. David Richards, a British officer who commands NATO's 32,000 troops in Afghanistan, warned in an interview with The Associated Press that if life doesn't get better over the winter, most Afghans could switch sides.
"They will say, 'We do not want the Taliban but then we would rather have that austere and unpleasant life that that might involve than another five years of fighting,'" Richards said.
Afghanistan is going through its worst bout of violence since the U.S.-led invasion removed the former Taliban regime from power five years ago. The Taliban has made a comeback in the south and east of the country and is seriously threatening Western attempts to stabilize the country after almost three decades of war.
"If we collectively ... do not exploit this winter to start achieving concrete and visible improvement," then some 70 percent of Afghans could switch sides, Richards told The Associated Press.

So, with the conflict in Iraq devolving into a deeper civil war involving ethnic and religious cleansing (read, slaughter between Sunnis and Shia for terrortory) and the Iraqi government crippled by a lack of political will to overcome a century of tribal hatred fueling the warring sects, our troops find themselves standing between three Iraqi factions (Sunni, Shia and Kurds – factions that we're depending on to stabilize that nation) that want nothing so much as they want to rip each other's heads off.
We're not fighting a war on terrorists in Iraq; we're fighting a war for survival – our troops' survival; a war that has no clear battle plan, no foreseeable political stabilization, no flexible command response to changing circumstances. For Bush to tell the American people that we're fighting a war on terror in Iraq is a lie, pure and simple.
But where we ought to be fighting IS in Afghanistan, where we would be engaging actual terrorists; the people who planned 9/11 and the people who promote Islamic jihad against Americans.
Though we cannot simply leave Iraq high and dry, we can reconfigure our deployment, reduce the number of troops on the ground there and put more troops into Afghanistan, where they will be doing actual good in the fight against terroists.
But will the president change his view and redirect the nation's effort to combat terror? Not likely. He's never altered his view of anything, even in the face of overwhelming, contradictory evidence.
So remember today and the news from Afghanistan. I believe that country will become a safe haven for al-Qaida, soon as the Taliban captures the government's leadership and makes a deal with the local war lords to allow opium production to continue. Sadly, Iraq appears to be an endless military mistake that is costing the lives of our soldiers, the pain of loss to their families and the promise this nation makes to its fighting men and women to use their abilities to protect and promote the nation's safety and interests in the world. A misdirected campaign, no matter how well it's executed, is folly and waste.
To argue for continued status quo in Iraq is to undermine the safety of our nation, the opposite of the administation's claimed aim.