What is going on in Afghanistan ? Ten French soldiers were killed this week in an ambush. Is that a sign the Taliban is gaining ? Probably not. The Taliban are religious school students from Pakistan. They may be able to hire experienced fighters in the tribal culture of Afghanistan but they, themselves, are not much good except as suicide bombers. Suicide bombers are always outsiders, not Afghans. Attacking NATO troops is a strategy to affect the European press , which will raise a howl about any casualties. The funding is largely from heroin sales as Afghanistan’s cash crop is poppies. Robert Kaplan, in his 2005 book, Imperial Grunts, quotes Special Forces officers on the foolishness of trying to eradicate poppies in Afghanistan. Better we should just buy the crop and either destroy it or use the morphine for legal medical uses. It would be cheaper and would probably be a bargain.
Posts Tagged ‘Taliban’
Afghanistan
Friday, August 22nd, 2008Why Afghanistan will much harder to hold than Iraq
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008This report summarizes the situation in Afghanistan where Pakistan is the key. If we lose Pakistan, and we probably will, Afghanistan cannot be held. Of course, if we lose nuclear-armed pakistan, Afghanistan will be the least of our problems.
Obama has never supported our troops in Afghanistan. On the contrary, he said on August 14, 2007–less than a year ago–that our forces there are mostly committing war crimes:
“We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”
Obama has been so uninterested in Afghanistan that when he went to Iraq and other countries in the Middle East with a Congressional delegation in January 2006, he skipped the opportunity to continue on to Afghanistan, which was taken by others who made the trip with him, including Kit Bond and Harold Ford.
And Obama does not know what language they speak in Afghanistan.
[I]n an embarrassing gaffe, Obama claimed on May 13, 2008, that we don’t have enough “Arabic interpreters, Arab language speakers” in Afghanistan because they are all being used in Iraq. Obama thereby demonstrated the intellectual laziness and incuriosity that characterizes his campaign: they don’t speak Arabic in Afghanistan, and, anyway, interpreters are drawn from local populations, not shipped around the world.
Not Guantanamo
Monday, July 14th, 2008
The political left, and the usual European-based scolds, are constantly complaining about the “awful” captivity of suspected terrorists in the Guantanamo Bay naval base. I see few complaints however, about this sort of thing. The Associated Press, source of anti-American diatribes almost on a daily basis, has an “embedded” reporter with the Taliban. On July 12, he provided the AP with a “snuff film” of the execution of two Afghan women accused of prostitution. I am still waiting to see the outraged reaction from Amnesty International or the other usual suspects who accuse us of torture.