Barack Obama's wars without end

Smoke rises following a Taliban attack on the British Council in Kabul, Afghanistan on Friday. Nine people were killed.


Barack Obama's wars without end
Mehdi Hasan
guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 August 2011 22.30 BST

Another day, another attack. On Friday, the Taliban celebrated Afghanistan's independence day with an audacious assault on the British Council office in Kabul, which killed nine people. The day before, insurgents killed at least 25 people after a roadside bomb ripped through a minibus in the western province of Herat and a suicide car bomb exploded at a US-run base in the eastern province of Paktia.

~snip~

A decade on from 9/11, bloodshed and chaos continue to plague Afghanistan and Iraq. A US state department report published on Thursday revealed that the number of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan had jumped by 55% last year; in Iraq, attacks were up 9%. The US-led invasions and occupations of both countries have been a dismal failure – thousands of lives lost and trillions of dollars squandered. The presence of western troops in Muslim lands has provoked more terrorism than it has prevented.

~snip~

Why does an intelligent politician such as Barack Obama have such difficulty understanding this? The US president has much to answer for. Yes, he inherited two bloody and costly wars from his predecessor. Yet, in Afghanistan, against the advice of his vice-president and his ambassador in Kabul, he escalated the conflict by sending an additional 30,000 young Americans to kill, and be killed by, the Taliban.

Putting more boots on the ground was a gross misjudgment. More US troops have died fighting in Afghanistan during Obama's two and a half years in the White House than in Bush's two terms in office – and, despite the recent decision to start bringing troops home, there will be more US military personnel fighting the Taliban at the end of Obama's first term in office than at the start.

my full text from this morning does not now show up.

It is misleading because Bush pretty much ignored Afghanistan, and diverted the troops to Iraq. President Obama, as he stated he would do, and greatly reduced the number of troops in Iraq, and increased them in Afghanistan...So, of course the casualties will increase there, but enormously decrease in Iraq. Withdrawal from Afghanistan has been scheduled. Now, if President Obama should actually extend that withdrawal schedule, without sufficiently explaining why, then I will be very disappointed. But this article is very misleading.

then I will be more convinced. Speculation is not enough.

And only a few more than in Japan. Obama campaigned on that, and escalating Afganistan. At the time it was a pretty popular notion.

The design of the prosecution of that is however a sore point for many, myself included.

and the risks are much greater in Iraq than in Germany or Japan.

It's a fact some people may not be aware of.

:thumbsup:

I haven't checked recently, but the last time I did, there were more 'Private Contractors' than US Troops. The law, airc, states that 'private contractors' or 'mercenaries' are in a 'supporting role' to US Troops.

If the troops are withdrawn then the mercenaries have no legal right to be there. But leaving a relatively small number of troops there, even if not in combat, justifies the army of Mercenaries.

I think we are being fooled as usual and will be in Iraq 50 years from now, with maybe ten thousand regular troops which politicians will use to say we 'left' but who knows how big Blackwater's mercenary army will be. And because the average American who gets their news from the MSM has no idea about these mercenaries we now use in all of our wars, (see Pakistan also) they think we are 'drawing down' the troops.

Forever war and forever profits for the MIC. Until we have a Congress that makes mercenaries illegal, something many people think is the case, as I once did.

If he does not end them in his four years I will not vote for him again. I will not vote at all. He is waiting for the generals to tell him when the war is won and we both know the generals love their wars.

There will have to be a great moral reckoning on the left for it. Thank god anti-war went mainstream and high-gear under Bush, but all the more shame that it folded under Obama. Endless war is evil with an R or a D after it.

The drones, in particular, are sickening.

especially serious: "There will have to be a great moral reckoning on the left for it"

It's a sell out, we will NEVER be the same!

of private military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan?

More than in Germany and Japan to be sure.

It is the way they start/continue/expand the wars, off the books so to speak.

What evil.

time on their hands to be posting against the only Dem candidate for Pres? Hmmm...

exercise.

Instead, more lives, more destruction, more money, wasted for "tough on terror" PR.

It's the definition of insanity. We are not going to achieve a different result. We need to get out NOW.

when he said during the campaign that this is what he planned to do?