George Will calls for pull-out

Source: Politico

George F. Will, the elite conservative commentator, will call in his next column for U.S. ground troops to leave Afghanistan, according to publishing sources.

“Forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters,” Will writes in the column, scheduled for publication later this week.

Obama ordered a total of 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan in February and March, and casualties have mounted as the forces began confronting the Taliban more aggressively. August saw the highest monthly death toll for the U.S. since the invasion in 2001, the second record month in a row.

Will’s prescription – in which he urges Obama to remember Bismarck’s decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870 - seems certain to split Republicans. He is a favorite of fiscal conservatives. The more hawkish right can be expected to attack his conclusion as foolhardy, short-sighted and naïve, allowing, potentially making the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/26628.html#ixzz0PnWqaVPa


Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/26628.html

:rofl:

He is right, this is a war that cannot be won. It is Vietnam. Someone tell Obama to end this war before he becomes LBJ.

Do the Repukes want to reverse the politics? Make this Obama's war?

I wish this had come from a Democrat.

and bring all the troops home.

But every now and then it happens.

They should get the Fuck out now.

but until somebody can explain just what it is we are hoping to achieve there I also believe we should just get the fuck out rat now. It makes less sense for us to be there than it did for the USSR and look what it did to them.

i've held the same position for awhile.

to Afghanistan?

Will is right. I don't care for him, but even a stopped watch is right twice a day.

We never should have gone there in the first fucking place, at least not in any main force. The whole narrative at first was to get OBL. Having failed that for reasons I can't fathom, the whole goddam mess morphed into regime change, nation building and face it, now nobody knows what the fuck we're doing there.

Blood, treasure, time, all wasted in the graveyard of empires.

I wouldn't have objected at all if they'd sent in some of the more badass special forces to take out the bad guys using some reliable intelligence. But no. We had to go and repeat every single mistake by foreign invaders ever made in that place since the Mongols decided to give it a wide berth, and be sure to read Kipling and your Flashman for a taste of the British colonial success there.

It's not our country, we don't understand its ways and apparently don't have much interest in learning them either.

If it were up to me, and clearly it's not, I'd say spike the fucking cannons, pack up all our shit and come home now. If it makes anybody feel better, monitor the place from Google Earth and maybe the occasional flyover. Sure the Taliban are fucked up but there's not a damned thing we can do about it except shun them here and everywhere. They're no threat to anyone except themselves and the women who have to put up with sickening conditions. If I could change that, I'd do it in a fucking heartbeat, but a fundie is a fucking fundie no matter what stripe.

I hoped by now we'd be out of Irak, too.

This whole thing was bullshit.

When I read the weekly In Memoriam post on crooksandliars every Sunday, I look first at the ages of the dead. They're from all over the country, mostly kids, wasted for nothing. We can't even begin to count the number of maimed and dead among the "natives".

It's a crime.

We're trying to impose a "nation-state" model on a geographical area that is nothing more than a collection of different tribal groups who don't even have a common language or culture.

It's absurd. And as you said, a waste of "blood, treasure, and time".

sw

This "war" has always been wrong.

--imm

First of all, kind thanks to scarletwoman for the welcome. I've been on DU since the 2000 Florida ripoff, and haven't chimed in much because sooner or later someone in the feedback would say pretty much what I would have said, and usually better than I could have, so I felt I had nothing much to add.

Now it's a different matter.

Folks on both sides of the aisle were rooting for this Afghan expedition, I was not. Fortunately, many were quick to point out that the motives behind the invasion weren't much different from those of the former USSR: access, oil, pipeline, money.

Invasion, occupation, natural resources, no one's ever thought of that before, right? The leader of the Northern Alliance mysteriously evaporated two weeks before the invasion. The one guy willing to at least talk with "us", zap, boom, tragic death. Now stuck with the leftovers, Bush and co. were willing to play dialing for dollars with their good ol' anti-soviet buddies, Mujahedeen and Taliban. None of this shit added up.

Once the Caspian Sea turned out to be a flop, we turn our attention to the original plan: Irak. Be afraid, people. Tony Blair assures us that we have 45 minutes before complete annihilation.

In another universe, William Rivers Pitt and Scott Ritter summed up the WMD situation cogently, revealing that 98% were either destroyed or deteriorated beyond all repair, and no delivery systems were operative that could have threatened anybody "we" care about. Saddam was a shitbird and it is credible that he gassed thousands of Kurds, but how many Americans even knew what a Kurd was until it became expedient to the Cheney Corporation?

A few aluminum tubes and model airplane anthrax drones later, we bomb the shit out of Irak. Cheney gets a deferred salary from Halliburton and a pile of stock options. Martha Stewart got 6 months because her broker said "sell" at an opportune moment.

I won't defend the leadership of Irak for a second, but before we came along there was running water, fairly dependable electricity, universal health care, women's rights, and a secular society. No First Amendment to be sure, but at least you could have a beer in peace. All gone, along with a few million dead and exiled.

Paul Bremer. Fratboy staff. FUBAR.

This was no "war". There was an illegal invasion, a hostile occupation, and a crime.

It's over if you want it. Pack up and come home now.

That tragically and crudely sums it up, with eloquence.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

You mean all this time Afghanistan hasn't "mattered"?!

Tell that to all the dead Afghanis, and all the dead US soldiers!

But you gotta like the cleanliness of using "drones" and hitting them from offshore. No more (or fewer) US body bags. A pristine war in which only the "enemy" and assorted women, children and old people get bloodied up. People who "don't matter."

I wonder what he means by "matters." Pakistan has nukes? Pakistan has better heroine routes? Pakistan is a bigger fish--not some rathole of a country that Alexander the Great couldn't even hold onto, the people are so onery and backwards, and lacking in appreciation for Greek culture? Pakistan has modern assets worthy of our global corporate predators' attention--things worth appropriating to our purpose or stealing? Afghanistan has nothing--except its poppy crop. It also has part of the transit route for The Pipeline, but that can be taken care of with drones from offshore. Is that why this ikon of US corpo/fascists (George Will) thinks that Afghanistan doesn't matter? A waste of US "cannon fodder" who could be used for some other theft that our corpo/fascists have in mind? (Venezuela's oil maybe?)

I'd be very wary of this devil's advice.

One other thing: I was just reading the other day about some top US commander's plan (in Afghanistan) for US soldiers to stop shooting people and start talking to people. Maybe that's what George Will is trying to prevent. I can't remember all the details, but it was both serious--maybe has been implemented; not sure--and also kind of amazing--that the Afghanis are not our enemy, that we should extend a friendly hand to them, that making war on them is a fucked up policy (he didn't exactly say that, but that was the implication), and the mission of US soldiers should be completely altered from making war to constructing peace. So maybe this is the thing, about Mr. Devil Will. Obama has had an impact. Commanders are now free to speak their minds. They see that policy behind this nearly 10 year war has been very wrong. It has been Cheney/Rumsfeld killing and chaos, all greatly ill-intended; nothing at all to do with stopping Al Qaeda, keeping us safe or helping Afghanis. The policy has been aimed at subduing the population for bad purposes--war profiteering, heroine profiteering, The Pipeline. And they want to somehow make amends, stop the war, stop killing people, and do something positive. And the Pukes don't want that to happen--and their "intellectual" whore, George Will, is trying to keep it from happening, and of course deny Obama any credit for it, by NOW saying "withdraw the troops" (and bomb them from a distance!). He's had almost ten years to figure out that this war is a loser, and he's only saying it NOW, that Bush/Cheney are out?

Something very fishy about this. Beware!

-----------------------

Disclosure: I have opposed this war from the beginning, and would like nothing more than to see all US troops brought home from everywhere, and the Pentagon's budget cut by about 90%. But George Will is a fascist shit of the first order. I don't take anything he says at face value. He does not mean well. There is bad motive here. I don't know if I've fingered it. Maybe somebody else can get at it. But it needs deep analysis.

Premature ejection....:rofl::woohoo::hi: