Escalation in Afghanistan

What is going on here? Is this being coordinated with Obama and his national security team? In any case, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen is talking about doubling the number of US troops in Afghanistan. See U.S. to Send Up to 30,000 More Troops to Afghanistan PBS Newshour 12/22/08 EEUU se plantea duplicar en los próximos seis meses su contingente en Afganistán El Mundo 20.12.2008.

El Mundo says that there are now 31,000 US troops in Afghanistan. It seems that every time I see a count, it's going up. And if the Pentagon carries out its current plans, that's going to be happening for a while. Mullen is talking about a 12-to-18-month time frame for this.

Without a new strategy, that includes a meaningful plan and timeline for an exit, and an exit in something less than the next 30 years or so, this is crazy.

I wonder if this is some scheme to lock in a Cheney-Bush strategy of some sort in a way they think will force it down Obama's throat. But Obama has said all along he intends to escalate in Afghanistan. So he's soon going to own the Afghanistan War, for better or worse.

Following the strategy that became part of The Surge in Iraq, the Pentagon is also talking about arming local insurgent groups in Afghanistan that are willing to ally with the US and NATO. You know, like we did in arming the Islamic terrorists brave mujaheddin freedom fighters in the Soviet Union's Afghanistan War. That turned into a Frankenstein's monster that gave us Al Qa'ida and jihadist groups from Afghanistan to India. This doesn't look like a promising approach to me.

President Hamid Karzai, to the extent he actually has anything to say about it, is not enthusiastic about putting any more US troops in his country. After a while, even a president totally dependent on the United States for his survival can get testy about repeated missile strikes on villages and wedding parties that kill civilian noncombatants.

Tags: afghanistan war

| +Save/Share | |