President Barack Obama is expected to announce this week that 30,000 U.S. “surge” forces will be fully withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2012, an administration official has told CNN.

via Obama to announce plan to pull 30,000 troops out of Afghanistan – CNN.com.

Here’s Obama in 2008, almost 3 years ago to the day:

Sen. Barack Obama said Sunday that United States needs to focus on Afghanistan in its battle against terrorism.

“The Afghan government needs to do more. But we have to understand that the situation is precarious and urgent here in Afghanistan. And I believe this has to be our central focus, the central front, on our battle against terrorism,” Obama said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Obama said troop levels must increase in Afghanistan.

“For at least a year now, I have called for two additional brigades, perhaps three,” he told CBS. “I think it’s very important that we unify command more effectively to coordinate our military activities. But military alone is not going to be enough.”

via Obama calls situation in Afghanistan ‘urgent’ – CNN

He did what he said he would with regards to Afghanistan and now the President must begin to execute a plan to extract our military from Afghanistan without a total descent into chaos.

I wonder where all the resources went? Oh …right:

Mr. BAER: Well, let me put it this way, Egyptian Arabic is peculiar, a peculiar accent, and it’s difficult to learn especially, you know, the familiar Arabic. And it would take an officer two years of studying Arabic, three years on the ground mastering Arabic, and about 10 years to get a grasp of a society like Egypt. That’s ideally what happens. You know, it’s very difficult for someone to devote a career of 20 years on a single country like Egypt, especially when you’ve got two wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has just sucked resources and people and – mainly in support of the military and these two countries. So the CIA is truly – the bench strength is very, very thin. And you can see what’s happened that this expertise – it’s just been drawn away by these two wars and, you know, how you get it back, it’ll take years.

via A Covert Affair: When CIA Agents Fall In Love : NPR.

 

Rolling Stone gets McChrystal to give his honest opinion of members of the Obama Administration.

Gen McChrystal also appears to joke in response to a question about the vice-president.

“Are you asking about Vice-President Biden?” McChrystal asks. “Who’s that?”

An aide then says: “Biden? Did you say: Bite Me?”

Another aide refers to a key Oval Office meeting with the president a year ago.

The aide says it was “a 10-minute photo op”, adding: “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was… he didn’t seem very engaged. The boss was pretty disappointed.”

Gen McChrystal himself says: “I found that time painful. I was selling an unsellable position.”

Another aide refers to national security adviser, James Jones, as a “clown stuck in 1985″.

Of an e-mail from US special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, Gen McChrystal says: “Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke… I don’t even want to open it.”

Last year’s Afghan strategy review by the new president was detailed and drawn out, with Gen McChrystal finally getting an additional 30,000 US troops from Mr Obama.

Analysts say Gen McChrystal disagreed with the pledge to start bringing troops home in July 2011.

Meanwhile the US congressional report says that trucks carrying supplies to US troops allegedly pay the Afghan security firms to ensure their safe passage in dangerous areas.

The convoys are attacked if payments are not made, it is alleged.

via BBC News – US general McChrystal sorry for Rolling Stone ‘error’.

Sound familiar? Remember McChrystal’s speech in October 2009 speech in London?

An adviser to the administration said: “People aren’t sure whether McChrystal is being naïve or an upstart. To my mind he doesn’t seem ready for this Washington hard-ball and is just speaking his mind too plainly.”

In London, Gen McChrystal, who heads the 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan as well as the 100,000 Nato forces, flatly rejected proposals to switch to a strategy more reliant on drone missile strikes and special forces operations against al-Qaeda.

He told the Institute of International and Strategic Studies that the formula, which is favoured by Vice-President Joe Biden, would lead to “Chaos-istan”.

When asked whether he would support it, he said: “The short answer is: No.”

He went on to say: “Waiting does not prolong a favorable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely, and nor will public support.”

The remarks have been seen by some in the Obama administration as a barbed reference to the slow pace of debate within the White House.

via White House angry at General Stanley McChrystal speech on Afghanistan – Telegraph.

It seems the White House aide may be the naive one and McChrystal is an upstart who understands Washington politics well enough. Or maybe McChrystal is the angry guy who vents every smoke break. Either way, his disdain for the strategy he has been tasked to execute needs to be dealt with by the Administration since he cannot deal with it himself.

UPDATE: Looks like it’s being dealt with.

An angry President Obama summoned his top commander in Afghanistan to Washington on Tuesday after a magazine article portrayed the general and his staff as openly contemptuous of some senior members of the Obama administration.

An administration official said the commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, would meet with President Obama and Vice President Biden at the White House on Wednesday “to explain to the Pentagon and the commander in chief his quotes in the piece,” which appears in the July 8-22 edition of Rolling Stone. General McChrystal was scheduled to attend a monthly meeting on Afghanistan by teleconference, the official said, but was directed to return to Washington in light of the article.

via McChrystal Is Summoned to Washington Over Remarks – NYTimes.com.

That’s all well and good, being the opinion of someone—like yours truly—who has the luxury of unfettered Web access, warm dinners, and big opinions. It’s also diametrically opposed to the opinion of at least one soldier who fought at the outpost, losing half his platoon. “It confuses me, why it took so long for them to realize that we weren’t making progress up there,” he told the New York Times.

Let’s hope the right wing won’t join forces with Taliban yokels in second-guessing the generals over this business. As the Journal story made clear, our Army is now led by generals who do enough second-guessing for all of us, in terms that sometimes sound eerily similar to those the antiwar movement has used for eight years:

Asked about moving out of the valley after losing so many men here, Gen. McChrystal said: “I care deeply about everyone who’s been hurt here. But I can’t do anything about that. I can do something about people hurt in the future.”

via US Hands Base Over to Taliban | Mother Jones.

Basically, the costs did not justify the reward and US commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal believes that leaving this outpost will not make or break US efforts in Afghanistan. The area is a rural one, with a rare regional language being spoken and a generally anti-foreigner cultural orientation. McChrystal seeks to focus the forces around urban population centers. Al Jazeera reports on the Taliban movement on to this base:

IN the video below, NBC News’ Richard Engel profiles the Forward Operating Base demolition team charged with destroying the base, the strategic reasons for leaving as well as the need to decimate the outpost:

Sebastion Junger, a former embedded reporter in Afghanistan, let’s us in on how some of the soldiers who fought at this outpost for years feel about this strategic decision.

In that sense, the Korengal was literally sacred ground. Every man in Battle Company lost a good friend there, and every man was nearly killed there. These soldiers did not require “strategic importance” or “national interest” to give the place value — it already had that in spades.

Outpost Restrepo was named after Juan Restrepo, a platoon medic who was killed on July 22, 2007. He was one of the best-liked men in the platoon, and his death was devastating. The men took enormous pride in the outpost they built, and they can now go online and watch videotape of it being blown up by an American demolition team. It is a painful experience for many of them, and in recent days, e-mail messages have flown back and forth as the men have tried to come to terms with it. One man became increasingly overwrought from watching the video over and over again, wondering what all the sacrifice had been for. Another soldier finally intervened.

“They might have pulled out but they can’t take away what we accomplished and how hard we fought there,” he wrote to his distraught comrade. “The base is a base, we all knew it would sooner or later come down. But what Battle Company did there cannot be blown up, ripped down or burned down. Remember that.”

via Op-Ed Contributor – Farewell to Korengal – NYTimes.com.

Junger profiled now abandoned Outpost Restrepo for Vanity Fair in January 2008.

]]> http://www.luimbe.com/blog/2010/04/22/afghanistan-korengal-outpost-ceded-abandoned-ceded-to-taliban/feed/ 0 http://www.luimbe.com/blog/2010/03/16/americas-relationship-with-israel-is-important-but-not-as-important-as-the-lives-of-americas-soldiers/ http://www.luimbe.com/blog/2010/03/16/americas-relationship-with-israel-is-important-but-not-as-important-as-the-lives-of-americas-soldiers/#comments Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:18:30 +0000 Luimbe http://luimbe.com/?p=3493
photo credit: The U.S. Army

US/Israel relationship is getting a little less special.

Certainly, it was thought, Israel would get the message.

Israel didn’t. When Vice President Joe Biden was embarrassed by an Israeli announcement that the Netanyahu government was building 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem, the administration reacted. But no one was more outraged than Biden who, according to the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, engaged in a private, and angry, exchange with the Israeli Prime Minister. Not surprisingly, what Biden told Netanyahu reflected the importance the administration attached to Petraeus’s Mullen briefing:  “This is starting to get dangerous for us,” Biden reportedly told Netanyahu. “What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace.” Yedioth Ahronoth went on to report: “The vice president told his Israeli hosts that since many people in the Muslim world perceived a connection between Israel’s actions and US policy, any decision about construction that undermines Palestinian rights in East Jerusalem could have an impact on the personal safety of American troops fighting against Islamic terrorism.” The message couldn’t be plainer: Israel’s intransigence could cost American  lives.

There are important and powerful lobbies in America: the NRA, the American Medical Association, the lawyers — and the Israeli lobby. But no lobby is as important, or as powerful, as the U.S. military. While commentators and pundits might reflect that Joe Biden’s trip to Israel has forever shifted America’s relationship with its erstwhile ally in the region, the real break came in January, when David Petraeus sent a briefing team to the Pentagon with a stark warning: America’s relationship with Israel is important, but not as important as the lives of America’s soldiers. Maybe Israel gets the message now.

via The Petraeus briefing: Biden’s embarrassment is not the whole story, by Mark Perry | The Middle East Channel.

Barack Obama will announce this escalation in Afghanistan eight days before picking up his Nobel Peace Prize In Oslo.

via FDL News Desk » Obama’s Tuesday Speech To Have A Non-Exit, Non-Strategic Exit Strategy.

Remember this debate? Then Sen. Hillary Clinton was all: Meet me in Ohio! and then Sen. Barack Obama was all: fine then.

Monday November 23, 2009 Dave Winer.
I assumed that because we elected Obama to end the war in Iraq that it went without saying that the war in Afghanistan would be ended as well.

Apparently not so.

via No escalation in Afghanistan. (Scripting News).

This is a rather odd assumption considering Obama’s own pro Afghanistan escalation rhetoric throughout his campaign and Presidency. Obama even said it was his job to scale down the “uneccessary” war in Iraq to have the proper resources to devote to the “necessary” fights in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan.

I have been very clear in talking to the American people about what I would do with respect to Afghanistan.

I think we have to have more troops there to bolster the NATO effort. I think we have to show that we are not maintaining permanent bases in Iraq because Secretary Gates, our current Defense secretary, indicated that we are getting resistance from our allies to put more troops into Afghanistan because they continue to believe that we made a blunder in Iraq and I think even this administration acknowledges now that they are hampered now in doing what we need to do in Afghanistan in part because of what’s happened in Iraq.

Now, I always reserve the right for the president — as commander in chief, I will always reserve the right to make sure that we are looking out for American interests. And if al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad. So that is true, I think, not just in Iraq, but that&’s true in other places. That’s part of my argument with respect to Pakistan.

via The Democratic Debate in Cleveland – New York Times.

Can you oppose Obama for escalating the war in Afghanistan and not pulling out of Iraq fast enough? Of  course. Can you say you didn’t think an escalation was coming? No. President Obama as a candidate made clear he wasn’t a peacenik. Even in his anti-Iraq war speech as a senator, he distinguished between his idea of a worthwhile war and a mistake.

Good afternoon. Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.

The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don’t oppose all wars.

My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain.

I don’t oppose all wars.

After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this Administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.

I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income?—?to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

via Barack Obama’s Iraq Speech – Wikisource.

At an anti-war rally and made it explicitly clear he was anti-Iraq war, not anti-war. That was the famous speech in 2002 that endeared him to war skeptics across the nation and was derided as Obama’s only qualification by then candidate Clinton. If one thing Winer can take comfort in, his opposition to ever getting involved in Iraq has been as consistent as his support for Afghanistan.

The more President Obama examines our options in Afghanistan, the less he likes the choices he sees. But, as the old saying goes, to govern is to choose — and he has stretched the internal debate to the breaking point.

It is evident from the length of this deliberative process and from the flood of leaks that have emerged from Kabul and Washington that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision — whether or not it is right.

via David S. Broder – David S. Broder on Obama’s Afghanistan choices.

Jamila, left, plays on a seesaw with children of other female inmates on the prison yard of Pul-e Charkhi prison in Kabul, Afghanistan April 17, 2008. Jamila, age 7, and her mother Najiba who is serving a seven year sentence for adultery, have been in prison for 10 months. There are 226 young children in Afghanistan’s prisons, including many who were born there. They have committed no crime, but they live among the country’s 304 incarcerated women. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder)

via Captured Photo Collection » Photographer Collection: David Guttenfelder in Afghanistan Photos

I didn’t know that Afghani prisons also imprisoned the Children along with the mothers. (h/t Images Of War – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.)