If we leave Afghanistan without Bin Laden, then terrorists will KNOW that we're not committed to bringing about justice... even after one of the worst terrorist crimes ever were perpetrated against us.
If we stay in Afghanistan, more soldiers will surely die, and Obama will be blamed.
If we leave Afghanistan and we're attacked... and we'll surely be attacked again if we leave... then whether or not Obama is still in office at the time of the attack, he'll be blamed.

WASHINGTON — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the president of Afghanistan, gets regular payments from the CIA and has for much of the past eight years, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
The newspaper said that according to current and former American officials, the CIA pays Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the CIA's direction in and around Kandahar.
The CIA's ties to Karzai, who is a suspected player in the country's illegal opium trade, have created deep divisions within the Obama administration, the Times said.
Allegations that Karzai is involved in the drug trade have circulated in Kabul for months. He denies them.
Critics say the ties with Karzai complicate the United States' increasingly tense relationship with his older brother, President Hamid Karzai. The CIA's practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.
Some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, a central figure in the south of the country where the Taliban is dominant, undermines the U.S. push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw.
"If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves," Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan, was quoted by the Times in an article published on its Web site.
Ahmed Wali Karzai told the Times that he cooperates with American civilian and military officials but does not engage in the drug trade and does not receive payments from the CIA.
Karzai helps the CIA operate a paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspected insurgents and terrorists, according to several American officials. Karzai also is paid for allowing the CIA and American Special Operations troops to rent a large compound outside the city, which also is the base of the Kandahar Strike Force, the Times said.
Karzai also helps the CIA communicate with and sometimes meet with Afghans loyal to the Taliban, the newspaper reported.

CIA spokesman George Little declined to comment on the report.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/27/karzais-brother-on-cia-pa_n_336279.html

We have a bigger problem then Afganistan it's Pakistan with it's nuclear weapons, we have to make sure that Pakistan remains stable, I do not know what would happen if we withdraw from Afganistan would our departure destablize Pakistan. Is there another way to ensure the stability of Pakistan,

Is it Time to Bring the Troops Home?

Contributing nations

All NATO members have contributed troops to the ISAF, as well as some other partner states of NATO. The numbers are based in part from the NATO; when more recent numbers are available they are given.

ISAF is also being backed by the 90,000 troops of the Afghan National Army and 80,000 Afghan policemen, who are described by the British Ministry of Defence as "fully equipped and trained".

Summary of major troop contributions (42 nations, 23 July 2009):
(I came up with over 68,600 even though the article only states 67,700 ... perhaps they didn't update the total as they updated the numbers for the individual countries.)

ISAF total - 67,700.
United States - 31,855
United Kingdom - 9,000
Germany - 4,245
Italy - 3.827
France - 3,070
Canada - 2,830
Netherlands - 2160
Poland - 2,025
Australia - 1,200
Spain - 1000
Romania - 990
Turkey - 820
Denmark - 750
Norway - 600
Belgium - 510
Bulgaria - 460
Sweden - 430
Czech Republic - 340
Hungary - 310
Croatia - 295
Lithuania - 250
Albania - 250
Slovakia - 230
New Zealand - 220
Azerbaijan - 184
Macedonia - 165
Latvia - 165
Estonia - 150
Finland - 130
Greece - 125
Portugal - 105
Slovenia - 80
United Arab Emirates - 25
Ukraine - 10
Luxembourg - 9
Singapore - 8
Iceland - 8
Ireland - 7
Jordan - 7
Austria - 4
Bosnia and Herzegovina - 2
Georgia - 1

Looking at it as rationally as possible, time to clear out.

So, why does the military want to stay? It seems irrational.

Perhaps, it's not so irrational, as emotional.

9/11 happened on the current militarys watch. It is a stain on their honor.

To expunge that stain, every Taliban, and every Al Quaeda, must die.

Since that is not possible, the military needs to do the next best thing, stay in Afghanistan, the nation that launced the attack, for a generation, so that none of the Taliban can return in their lifetimes. They will die in exile, hunted, living in caves.

This, I beleive, is much of the militarys reason for staying to fight in Afghanistan. So of course, it looks irrational.

There is another componenent, and that is China, and communism. The Afghanistan occupation is also very much a covert action against China. Or, at least, to keep an eye on China, and help certain people in China, who want the communists to go away. It's convenient. It's also an unresolved issue, from the Vietnam war, which was also really a war about China. The US won that war (oh, you thought we LOST? :) ), so certain people may try the tactic again.

I predict, Obama will move towards a withdrawal...and then...something...will happen, to make that withdrawal impossible for the short term. This will happen again and again. It will be a kind of coup, the military simply will not leave. It's emotional.

If the gloves came off, the war would be over in a month.

McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay .............


In 2008, Gen. David McKiernan, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, asked the Bush administration for more troops, a request that was denied.
..............................

As late as December 2005, despite official warnings about the Taliban resurgence and a lack of U.S. resources for critical reconstruction programs, the Bush administration planned to reduce the 19,000 U.S. troops then in Afghanistan by 2,500 soldiers in order to bolster hard-pressed U.S. forces in Iraq.

And even after seven years of war _ and the deaths of 630 U.S. service members, more than 400 other coalition soldiers and thousands of Afghans _ the Bush administration lacked strategies for dealing with the al Qaida and Taliban safe haven in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where it backed a military dictatorship, or building Afghan security forces, according to the Government Accountability Office.

If the gloves came off, the war would be over in a month.

[...]
STEVE COLL, Author, Ghost Wars: This could not be a more complicated war. If you think about it, the United States is essentially waging a war against its own ally. The Taliban are a proxy of the government of Pakistan. We are an ally of the government of Pakistan. We are fighting the Taliban. In the end, the Taliban will be defeated strategically when the government of Pakistan makes a strategic decision that its future does not lie in partnership with Islamic extremists.

MARTIN SMITH[reporter/narrator]: The United States continues to pour money into Pakistan, $2 billion to $3 billion in military assistance and $7.5 billion in civilian aid over the next five years.

[on camera] Does it give you pause to hand them billions of dollars?

Lt. Col. JOHN NAGL: I absolutely have to hold my nose when I work with the Pakistani government. But I don't have a better alternative than continuing to work with this Pakistani government and continuing to nudge it forward toward taking more effective action against the Taliban.

MARTIN SMITH: [voice-over] On August 20th, Afghans went to the polls to choose a new president. The Obama administration had high hopes that whoever the winner, the election would validate the Afghan government.

Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, President Karzai's main challenger, ran on an anti-corruption platform.

Dr. ABDULLAH ABDULLAH: [subtitles] I want to rescue Afghanistan from a corrupt government. I want to rescue Afghanistan from a cruel government that the people don't trust.

MARTIN SMITH: But the election results were tainted by clear evidence of fraud. It was a disaster for the American project.

STEVE COLL: The United States is investing blood and treasure to support the government of Afghanistan. And if that government engaged in fraud in order to perpetuate itself in power calls into question the very basis of these American investments and sacrifices. I think it's appalling.

MARTIN SMITH: The U.N. has overseen a recount. At a time when Afghanistan most needs a government, the nation is paralyzed.

VALI NASR, Adviser to Amb. Holbrooke: We have to have an Afghan government that is functioning in Kabul. But if the Taliban have strategic depth in Pakistan, they can continue to threaten Afghanistan. And if they threaten Afghanistan, then terrorism of one form or another will be back.

MARTIN SMITH: So what does America do now? Are more troops the answer? Or should the focus shift eastward to the tribal areas of Pakistan?

Col. ANDREW BACEVICH: There seems to be some presumption that Afghanistan is jihad central, that if we can simply succeed in pacifying Afghanistan that the problem of violent Islamic radicalism goes away. It won't. All we care about is that al Qaeda not use the place as a sanctuary, and you don't have to occupy the country in order to prevent that from happening.

MARTIN SMITH: Proponents of a counterinsurgency war, on the other hand, argue for a much larger deployment.

Lt. Col. JOHN NAGL, U.S. Army (Ret.), Fmr. Adviser to Gen. Petraeus: By classic counterinsurgency measures, success in Afghanistan would require 600,000 counterinsurgents. We're well below half that right now.

MARTIN SMITH: [on camera] Are you saying there have to be more American troops on the ground?

Lt. Col. JOHN NAGL: Initially, there need to be more American troops on the ground. The long-term answer, and our exit strategy, is more Afghan troops on the ground.

MARTIN SMITH: [voice-over] In late August, General McChrystal submitted a grim assessment to President Obama, warning that America is in danger of losing the war if more troops are not sent. He requested as many as 40,000.

[...]

MARTIN SMITH: President Obama put the troop request on hold. His administration is split over the way forward.

[...]

MARTIN SMITH: McChrystal says he welcomes the debate.

Gen. STANLEY McCHRYSTAL: Any war or conflict you enter where you are likely to lose more Americans is something worthy of very detailed debate. I know before an American soldier is put in harm's way, I hope that not just the political leadership but the American people give it a lot of thought.

[...]

Col. ANDREW BACEVICH: If we do indeed have a full-court press application of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, certainly more American soldiers are going to die. And I think it's very, very important to be absolutely certain that thereó that no alternative exists. And I think the people who insist that it has to be done through counterinsurgency have not seriously examined all the alternatives.

Lt. Col. JOHN NAGL: The president has said ó correctly, in my eyes ó that this is a necessary war. What we learned on September 11th was that vipers can grow in ungoverned spaces and that in a globalized world, they can harm us. This is a war that America needs to win. But there are no guarantees here.
[...]

[...]
In Lahore, Clinton told university students that their government had little choice in taking a tougher approach.

Dozens of students rushed to line up for the microphone when the session began. Their questions were not hostile, but showed a strong sense of doubt that the U.S. can be a reliable and trusted partner for Pakistan.

One woman asked whether the U.S. can be expected to commit long term in Afghanistan after abandoning the country after Russian occupiers retreated in 1989.

"What guarantee," the woman asked, "can Americans give Pakistan that we can now trust you — not you but, like, the Americans this time — of your sincerity and that you guys are not going to betray us like the Americans did in the past when they wanted to destabilize the Russians?"

Clinton responded that the question was a "fair criticism"[...]

Maybe you've been following the past couple of days, with Hillary Clinton in Pakistan...

From 1996, Sarah Chayes was Paris reporter for National Public Radio. She was dispatched to a number of conflict and post-conflict zones. Her work during the Kosovo crisis of 1999 earned her the Foreign Press Club and Sigma Delta Chi awards, along with her NPR colleagues.

Sarah left reporting in 2002 to remain in the field in Afghanistan. She co-founded Afghans for Civil Society, a grassroots Afghan-American democracy building organization based in Kandahar. Among other projects, ACS rebuilt a village, launched a radio station and created a successful women's income generation project. In 2004 she left ACS to focus on economic development, and since May 2005 has been running Arghand.

Sarah's book on post-Taliban Kandahar, The Punishment of Virtue (Penguin Press, 2006) is now out in paperback.

For more background on Sarah, and articles by and about her, please visit: www.sarahchayes.net.

..........Gen. STANLEY McCHRYSTAL: Any war or conflict you enter where you are likely to lose more Americans is something worthy of very detailed debate. I know before an American soldier is put in harm's way, I hope that not just the political leadership but the American people give it a lot of thought.


NO SH!T...........

Brookings Report on Drones Confirms High Civilian Death Rate and Misses the Point
2009 July 21
To their credit, the folks over at the Brookings Institution have become one of the first mainstream think tanks to recognize the horrendously indiscriminate nature of drone attacks in Pakistan. Brookings Institute scholar Daniel Byman wrote last Monday:
Critics correctly find many problems with this program, most of all the number of civilian casualties the strikes have incurred. Sourcing on civilian deaths is weak and the numbers are often exaggerated, but more than 600 civilians are likely to have died from the attacks. That number suggests that for every militant killed, 10 or so civilians also died.

I’ve been citing numbers that show a worse civilian-combatant ratio (15-1), but the Brookings citation makes the same point: drones kill far more civilians than suspected militants. Good for Brookings for bringing this to folks’ attention.

Unfortunately, though, Byman fails to really get into the details of what causes the high ratio, preferring instead to attribute them to the Evil Taliban:
To reduce casualties, superb intelligence is necessary. Operators must know not only where the terrorists are, but also who is with them and who might be within the blast radius. This level of surveillance may often be lacking, and terrorists’ deliberate use of children and other civilians as shields make civilian deaths even more likely.

The preceding paragraph demonstrates an amazing Fareed-Zakaria-like ability to take the vile and the shocking and transform it into a passive-voice bromide. Translation: “We need good intel to avoid killing noncombatants. We don’t have good intelligence. We don’t let details like that get in the way of firing the weapons, so we kill 10 civilians for every one suspected terrorist. Oh yeah the Taliban are bad.”

Americans should be terrified and horrified that CIA operators use a weapons system whose ability to avoid killing innocent men, women and children depends on “superb intelligence” when such intel does not exist. Essentially, what the CIA is doing is analagous to a police sniper aiming into a bank crowded with hostages with a sniper rifle whose barrel lacks rifling, pointing at a suspected robber and pulling the trigger. When the bullet goes astray due to the lack of a key feature that makes the sniper rifle accurate–the rifling– and kills a hostage, the police officer shrugs. “The robber used human shields.” If the public found out that our hypothetical police sniper knew in advance that he had, oh, say, a 90-percent chance of killing a hostage rather than a robber and he pulled the trigger anyway, they’d be howling for his head on a platter. Butthis kind of vile nonsense is exactly what the administration asks the American people to accept through further escalations of the CIA’s undeclared war on the Pakistanis unlucky enough to be living near our national enemies.

I repeat:
The strikes have caused such carnage that leading British legal experts “said the aircraft could follow other weapons considered ’so cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance’ in being consigned to the history books,” likening them to “cluster bombs and landmines.”

****Byman’s analysis of the problem, though, ultimately misses the point. It may be true that the high civilian death rate is bad because it undermines our counterinsurgency efforts to win hearts and minds. However, the real problem is not the political consequences of these deaths, but rather the deaths themselves. Even if the 10-1 civilian-combatant death rate had zero political consequences, it would still be immoral to continue the use of drones.

As I said on July 14,
“The worst effect of all this talk about counterinsurgency is that it has reduced the civilian populations of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan to mere means to the end of our strategy. They’re not. Drones may be awful in part because their use leads to more terrorism, but the worst effect of their use is the slaughter of people whose right to life exists independent from our goals for the region.”****

Get those drones on the ground, now.
UPDATE: Despite its problems, the Brookings article shows that the CIA is lying to the American people about the drones. Here’s Leon Panetta in a May 2009 speech:
“[Drone] operations have been very effective because they have been very precise in terms of the targeting and it involved a minimum of collateral damage.”
Very simply, Panetta lied.

UPDATE II: The Long War Journal just published an analysis of drone strike activity in 2009 compared to 2008 [h/t/ Noah Schactman at Danger Room]. Their study shows that compared to last year, drone strikes have been more frequent and have killed more people, with the total number of deaths for 2009 already exceeding the 2008 total :
…In 2009, the frequency of Predator strikes in Pakistan has continued to trend upwards. There have already been 31 Predator strikes in Pakistan this year (as of July 18) – nearly matching the total of 36 strikes for all of 2008.
If air strikes continue at the current rate, the number of strikes in 2009 could more than double the dramatic increase in Predator activity seen in 2008.
…Using low-end estimates of casualties (including Taliban, al Qaeda, and civilian) from US strikes inside Pakistan, we have determined that air strikes resulted in 317 deaths during 2008. Already, the air strikes in 2009 have surpassed that total, with 365 killed in 2009 as of July 18.
…Another indicator of the increasing lethality of US air strikes inside Pakistan is the rising average number killed per attack. So far in 2009, the average casualty rate has been 11.77 killed per strike, compared to 8.81 in 2008.
So, to summarize:
• CIA drone operators lack the “superb intel” needed to prevent civilian casualties, but are firing their weapons anyway, causing them to kill ten times as many civilians as suspected terrorists.
• CIA Director Panetta, however, continues to lie and/or propagandize about the drones’ accuracy and “minimal collateral damage.”
• Despite their indiscriminate and inhumane nature, the U.S. has doubled the rate of drone strikes and is killing more people per attack in 2009 compared to 2008, which has caused the death toll from these weapons so far in 2009 to exceed the death toll for all of 2008.
History will not be kind to us if we continue to use these indiscriminate weapons that kill ten times as many civilians as suspected combatants.

I predict, Obama will move towards a withdrawal...and then...something...will happen, to make that withdrawal impossible for the short term. This will happen again and again. It will be a kind of coup, the military simply will not leave. It's emotional.

If we withdraw, more than likely Usama Bin Laden will probably come out of hiding and take back Afghanistan.

Wait just a minute. It wasn't all that long ago I was being told by every Obama supporter on this board and the media too, that his Cairo speech "reset" relations with the arab world and various non-governmental arab organizations.

And wasn't it Obama who kept endlessly claiming Afghanistan was a "war of neccessity" during his magical mystery tour run to the white house. And wasn't it president Obama in March who announced, a "comprehensive new strategy" ...... "We've consulted with the Afghan and Pakistani governments, with our partners and our NATO allies, and with other donors and international organizations" and "with members of Congress. " All to end "long years of drift" (said last Monday) in Afghanistan. Or was all that just more reading from a telepromter by an empty suit.