Sunday, July 04, 2010

Petraeus Into The Breach


Didn't see his white horse tho:

He landed in Kabul on Friday after his appointment was confirmed by the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives approved $33 billion in funding for a troop surge he hopes will turn the tide of the war.

The surge will bring to 150,000 the number of foreign troops in Afghanistan just as a new strategy takes root. It entails tackling the Taliban in their strongholds while relying on the government to simultaneously improve local governance and development.

I am perplexed over his "new" strategy of tackling the Taliban in their strongholds.

The Taliban are Afghanistan citizens. Their stronghold is Afghanistan. They are the same armed Afghanistan citizens that fought the Russian occupation for ten years, finally chasing them out.

The only Afghan citizens that are friendly to today's occupiers are the ones without the ability to shoot back, or the ones that we are paying handsomely to be "friendly".

If you believe otherwise, you need to find some new news sources.

I am beginning to believe that the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is to just outlast the Russian stay, so we can brag about how we did better than them.

Who can seriously believe that the United States would take longer to "pacify" Iraq than it did to win World War II? And that a backwater 12th century holdout like Afghanistan could stop us for nine plus years?

Our troops - as usual - have done magnificently... Considering the fact they are not allowed to fight effectively or allowed to win.

It's the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about:

War is profitable for the uber-rich, who keep the drums of war sounding and the general public totally ignorant.

Who amongst us actually believes that a single sub-sonic B-1 bomber should cost over a billion dollars? Or that a "troop surge" in Afghanistan should cost 33 billion dollars?

We already have the troops. They already have their weapons. They are already being paid, quartered, fed and trained. It matters not whether they are in Afghanistan or Boloxi, Mississippi. So the 33 billion is for travel costs?

It all reeks of greed, graft and corruption.

It would be a smart thing for us to find out where all those taxpayer dollars really go.

1 comment:

TheWayfarer said...

Right-on, though I suspect our chances of actually finding out where the money's going, are about the same as finding out how phat the corporate-Congress bribes were that got Pelosi DEATHcare passed.