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US in Afghanistan for 'A Few Years'
The US defence secretary has said there is a possibility of an increased military presence in Afghanistan, but warned that such a move would stretch military resources and could lead to a possible Afghan backlash.
Gates expressed concern of an Afghan backlash if US troops deployed to the country increase. [EPA] Speaking to reporters in Washington, Robert Gates painted a bleak
portrait of the prospects for the US mission in Afghanistan, noting
that Taliban fighters had a firm hold on parts of the country and
defeating them would take "a few years".
His comments comes amid intense speculation that General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, is preparing to make a case for more troops in the fight against the Taliban.
Afghanistan has seen an escalation in Taliban attacks in recent days as the country prepares for next week's presidential elections, with at least three separate attacks on Thursday alone.
Speaking at the Pentagon Gates said that he and Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had told McChrystal, that "[they] want him to ask for what he thinks he needs", adding "I think you have to allow your commanders that freedom."
But with about 132,000 troops currently in Iraq, Gates said there were constraints as to how many extra troops could be sent to Afghanistan at least until after Iraq's elections in January.
Military 'footprint'
Gates also repeated his concerns about too big of a US military "footprint," in Afghanistan, saying at the moment, local residents see the coalition of forces as "their partner".
"I just worry that we don't know what the size of the military presence might be that would begin to change that," he said. Barack Obama, the US president, has made Afghanistan one of his top foreign policy priorities and has already ordered an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan.
That will push the number of US forces in the country to 68,000 before the end of the year.
His administration, however, is struggling on how to refocus on Afghanistan, while withdrawing US troops from Iraq.
In a report released this week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warned Obama that unanswered questions about continuing US involvement in Afghanistan could frustrate the public.
"The administration has raised the stakes by transforming the Afghan war from a limited intervention into a more ambitious and potentially risky counterinsurgency,'' the report said.
"These core questions about commitment and sacrifice can be answered only through a rigorous and informed national debate."
- Posted in
24 Comments so far
Show AllBy a few years, he really means a few decades.....
he's fired,
absolutely NO retirement plans, NO healthcare insurance,NO medical,
NO drug, NO dental, NO vision plans, for you or your family.
Mr gates you're fired..
or prove to the american people, all of us,
that you are really worth a dime, keeping you on.
then maybe, you can keep your job..
proof is what you can do,
not only talk, I want action..
this sounds tough, but I want to see him help our soldiers, for a change,
not only his moving his mouth...this is now like weightlifting...I need to see it to belive it..
I need to see action..
I also noticed quite a few generals retired during the bush years...they got some cushy jobs also..
example:
"NYTimes reported that Richard Perle was taking money from GLOBAL CROSSING to lobby the Pentagon to approve his clients dealings with Hong Kong and mainland China. And according to the Center for Public Integrity, 9 of 30 members from Rumsfeld have ties to defense and security-related companies..
want to see more? here is the article: "Richard perles corporate adventures"
by Tim Shorrock...check that out..
Who owns Global Crossing, anyway?
Same old same old - why don't we have a new SecDef instead of this CIA retread? Why don't we have a Democrat in this critical post? Granted, the last Dem in this position, Georgie "Slam-Dunk" Tenet, did not cover himself in glory, unless you count the Bush-awarded Medal of Freedom.
We need a Dept of Defense that is just that - not the military wing of an empire-expanding hydra that the USA has become. Bring ALL our troops home from EVERYWHERE (Iraq, Germany, Japan, Cuba), cut the fleet and the AF, cut 20% out of the "defense" budget IMMEDIATELY, and we have no National Debt in 5 years.
Afghanistan and Iraq were Bush/Republican mistakes...the only way out is complete and immediate US withdrawal. Anything else makes them Obama's mistakes.
Taliban fighters had a firm hold on parts of the country and defeating them would take "a few years".
When those of you out there in your 20's or 30's get your third set of false teeth, we'll still be in Afghanistan. President George Wanker Prescott Bush will say he will not countenance the slightest talk of defeatism. The Patriot Act, Version 17, will give the government the right to execute anyone "not with the program". Those will be the exact words and Attorney General Vlad "The Impaler" Yoo, grandson of John Yoo, will ruthlessly enforce that clause and the Supreme Court will repeatedly uphold it. Eventually, challenges to the Patriot Act, Version 17, will cease because those who might bring such challenges will all have been murdered. That's the future of Serf City, formerly known as the United States.
I always wondered how Yoo would look with his nuts in a vice. He must have taken rhetoric classes from Gingrich.
And also, I wouldn't mind seeing Taliban fighters have a firm hold on parts of Gates' anatomy. All's fair in love and crushed nuts wars, as Yoo would say.
As one of my bumper stickers accurately notes:
"We Are Creating Enemies Faster Than We Can Kill Them"
"We Are Creating Enemies Faster Than We Can Kill Them"
NO,No,No...
My dear fellow, we are past good and evil in our brave new world. We don't label people as good or bad or friends and enemies. You see, we are a corporatocracy. Corporations have business models suited to obtaining and securing present and future profits. The people in these places are "consumers". We make the weapons and they consume them at a high enough rate but not to high (we have to have more targets, you know). So the "consumers" who don't get enough of our "product" invariably look for ways to make our military do some consuming also (competitive capitalism at its' best!). Our military is adroit at spoting these folks who want to make us consumers and sends more "product" their way. If things are too quiet we can always sell some "product" to the Taliban consumers through the "discrete" (we don't call it black no more) market. Its' really a self perpetuating business. What makes this a real growth industry is that the Moslems have one of the highest birth rates in the world so we always mention that in our corporate annual report and prospectus. Smile, future "product" consumer. We are making consumers faster than we can supply them with product! What a deal!
I hope Colbert reads this.
AGG
Well said. Chris Hedges makes basically the same points in his most recent and well written book Empire of Illusion: The End Of Literacy and The Triumph of Spectacle. For example, he notes in Chapter V-The Illusion of America, that:
"The corporate power that holds the government hostage has appropriated for itself the potent symbols, language, and patriotic traditions of the state. It purports to defend freedom, which it defines as the free market, and liberty, which it defines as the liberty to exploit. It sold us on the illusion that the free market was the natural outgrowth of democracy and a force of nature, at least until the house of cards collapsed and these corporations needed to fleece the taxpayers to survive. Making that process even more insidious, the real sources of power remain hidden. Those who run our largest corporations are largely anonymous to the mass of the citizens. The anonymity of corporate forces-an earthly Deus absconditus-makes them unaccountable. They have the means to hide and to divert us from examining the decaying structures they have created. As Karl Marx understood, capitalism when it is unleashed from government and regulatory controls is a revolutionary force."
Robert "Uncle Bobby" Gates, the Bush family crony. Is Bush still the President too?
The bloodthirsty imperialist needs those occupations and violence to continue without end. After all, there are still no-bid contracts and the pigs lining up to the taxpayer trough. We have already spent over 5 trillion (see: Joe Stiglitz) and counting on these wars, there is a lot of free money at stake here, not to mention the pipeline and more profits, my precious.
This is a win, win situation for corporate America, and as we all know they own the place.
I guess that we all remember when we were young and asked mom who was in a different room: "mom can I have a few cookies"? When she said "yes" we took them all.
That is all you have to know to understand Gates.
Why is the press and public showing so little discernment over past and present administrations' stated purpose for invading, then escalating Afghanistan? The public was traumatized by shocking images on television of jets flying into buildings, then was told that a few Arabs in caves masterminded 9-11. Do my fellow progressives and peace activists buy into this? Since when has any administration told the truth when it manufactures public consent for a military intervention? Recall that George W. Bush originally picked Henry Kissinger to head up the 9-11 investigation. Please join actor and peace activist Ed Asner in demanding a real investigation of 9-11. www.septembereleventh.org: 9-11 Visibility Project
rcane
Well said. Keep alive the government's duplicity concerning the events of 9/11 before it totally goes down the memory hole.
Feed the monster before it devours us.
What are we doing in Afghanistan???????????????????????????????????????????? Are we there to liberate the Afghani women????????????????????????????????????????? Let is liberate the Saudi women first. Are we there to fight the Taliban??????????????? What is our beef with the Taliban??????????????????????????????????
A war for no purpose can have no conclusion. This war doesn't even help build or defend the rest of the American Empire. It's just madness and short-term profit grabbing. I'm glad the ship is sinking; I just wish I wasn't on it, and I am sorrowful for all the innocents our armies are killing on the way down.
Yes, by all means. Since the Republicans and DINOs love the "U.S." stay in Afghanistan, you and the Clintons and the Bushes and all their friends in congress and the senate should be airlifted to Afghanistan POST HASTE. Learn Farsi and take some bhurkas for your wives. And stay there 10 or 15 years WITHOUT WEAPONS.
Well Mr. Gates? What are you waiting for? Go, already. Please.
Just a few more eons?
How many 'grannies' will Robert Gates starve to pay for his war on Pipelinestan?
U.S Afghan war strategies, as we all know, are grounded in the usual rational, selfish and nationalistic goals for the war profiteers and their structurally-institutionally well-corrupted federal politicians.
The current Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s call for a major national discussion on this escalating war and Secretary Gates’ ominous warnings about the likelihood of something that sounds like another Vietnam type War are signs now that the decade of Neo-Con global crusading policies for the New American Century have reached their Rubicon.
When President Bush 41 and his Ambassador in Iraq suckered Sadam into taking Kuwait,
Our policy makers were just mainly protecting and securing our oil supplies in the Gulf Area.
Since Desert Storm, the full-century imperialist policy planners have been driving much deeper up into areas where the USA and its allies will have large forward bases like those in Iraq.
American conservative imperialists have been advancing their military and diplomatic policies in Eastern Europe, while Liberal imperialist Hillary Clinton has been scouting the selling more U. S. nuclear technology to the newest nuclear super power India.
The current Obama Afpak team goal seems to be to leap out ahead in the wars that will likely occur as the industrial Western Nations move to take over and drain a potentially lion’s share of the petrol and gas of the most energy-rich former Soviet republics in central Asia.
The western neo-imperialists may meet big power resistance from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization of China, Russia and their smaller Islamic client nations.
They may also set off a major conflict between Pakistan and India if trans-Islamic anti- colonialism goes viral and is broadly ignited by culture-protective jihadist fundamentalists.
Because 90% of our fellow citizens have become mere spectators who understand and feel no responsibility for our now-seemingly permanent de facto genocidal wars in the Muslim world, the outlook for unchecked war escalation is frightening to all of us who connect the dots of evangelism, economic collapse and global triumphalism.
For my original articles on the psycho-analytical diagnostics of these trends, read the top articles on my website: www.psycho-imperialism.com
Nuances of the Quagmire: a Soldier, Dizzy in the Head, Speaks
More mud over here, sand over there, water in the middle, airbubble under the water. I told Colonel Jones I thought we could surge the water, use the sand for building supplies, use the mud to daub bee bites from the poppy crop, and he agreed. So we're going to turn the corner and make great progress in Afghanistan-- you mark my words.
Hey Bottle, That is a perfect imitation of the blather that the parasites learn in Prep school.
Who Owns Global Crossing?
Israeli Foreign Minister (Lieberman?) may be threatening to make premptive strikes on the nuclear enrichment program of Iran as Israel did in Iraq (1982).
Our President Obama is moving up sooner (Sept.) the review date for possible changes in pressure policies toward Iran.
George Bush's now former UN Ambassador is making predictions.
The televangelists who have been waiting for generations for the final solution to life on earth are still warning that the End is near.
Military strategists and their compliant U.S. presidents have long naively believed that they could control wars even after the wars have started.
(Read Andrew Bagevich's "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War" and Norman Solomon's "War Made Easy.")
If war is made on Iran, there is a possiblity that it will collapse the global economy by closing the Persian Gulf.
If our nation is attacked again as it was at Pearl Harbor or in some sort of new 9/11, this might set off WW3.
If that happens when our nation is militarily deeply occupying and conquering Central Asian republics, the evangelicals may get their wish.
Our fellow citizens need to be made aware that most well-informed, critical-analytical people in the rest of the world are fearful that the arrogant myopia of Americans believing that the USA can do no wrong is itself a likely possible catalyst for provoking a real nuclear Armageddon.
Why our nation is now surging militarily in Afghanistan and the skies over Pakistan is a question that will be looming as a major challenge of American analysis for the coming period.
Obama made the Afpak part of the "War on Terror" his major electoral campaign pitch. Can we be going deeper into that quagmire because he or his "handlers" made "politically" "productive" deals with the corporate/financial strategists of the military-institutional complex? That would be just a guess on my part. I do not have documentation for that.
If the current depression is like the one in the 1930's, specialists in economic recovery might cite the fact that it took WW2 to end the decade-long Great Depression. The Keynesian New Deal pump priming and government job-creation policies were very ineffective.
Since we have the world's greatest armaments industry, the greatest military budgets, the greatest global nuclear technologies
industries, and the largest number of weapons customers and recipients around the globe,
it is just "natural" that we would be following what Naomi Klein calls "Shock Doctrine Capitalism" by stirring up religious, ethnic, and econ-class civil wars wherever our
federal government can make them, spread them and sustain them.
When we invade nations or bomb them, their citizens usually react like bees whose nest has been bashed by a hungry bear.
Then we get to teach them democracy, free trade, privatizing resources and opening up their nations to globalization.
Our fellow citizens and those of many of our allies in majority have actively or passively supported these processes as noble or profitable policy crusades.
As critical thinkers like Klein, Solomon and Parenti have told us, those groups (econ-classes) who control the content and slantings of the news and analysis of the corporate mass-media professionals also control the thinking or lack of thinking of what is so far is the vast majority of our fellow citizens.
So far, most of our compatriots are not even aware, or too fearful to admit that both major political parties and the executive branches are financially and ideologically bonded together as co-conspirators for almost all of the major domestic and foreign policies of our nation.
It is even called called "bipartisanship," and any group that tries to explain the dishonesties and frightening dangers of this
one-point-of-view, one foreign policy system is likely to be resented and accused of being "divisive.
Even at the UnitU Fellowship, I get accused of "undermining Obama" when I talk on the subject of the millions of innocent victims of our predatory genocidal military policies.
RKM
www.psycho-imperialism.com
Our military personnel are occupying Afghanistan not only to secure an advanced foothold in the up-coming Energy Wars for the virgin natural gas and oil of Central Asia.
There has been, since the time of early Persian Zoroastrianism (circa 580's BCE) a great tri-millennial struggle between imperialistic salvation crusaders who developed virulent cultural strains of militaristic
reassurance by which each "chosen" group of devoted religious warriors could prove that they were spreading the "Good" of Ahura Mazda or Gd or Allah or Christ by converting heathens or heretics, spreading the "True Faith" and destroying all "Evil Faiths" outside and inside their communities, empires and hearts.
Victory was a sign that the winners and their martyrs were destined to be granted eternal salvation from animalistic earthly mortality.
The emotional horror of total personal or group annihilation by natural un-martyred or cowardly death was militarized and terrorized by the Persians, the Christians and the Muslims
Being eternally tortured or burned by the Devil was imprinted into the hearts and minds of believers and non-believers.
Supernatural patriarchal terrorism became the winner in the cultural/natural selection competition of civilizations in the imperialistic stages of history because what was at stake for each combattant was eternal paradise vs. eternal turture and humiliation.
This is real simple culture-history to understand.
The organized religious aspects of mortality-terror culture-history are not taught in modern secular schools because the most rigidly and fiercely defensive denominations of the religious organizations each have traditionally wanted their own "sacred" version of the emotional control of their children, communities and nations to be "pure good," while the non-supernatural or foreign-supernatural faiths were to be avoided, degraded or eliminated.
Our current age of limited religious toleration has not yet been fully embraced by those millions or billions who are still traditional in being terrorized by Hell-threats, or by the ideas of empiricists who believe according to verification by scientific standards of evidence.
One of the reasons we should not be sending our armed forces into Afghanistan on missions of major culture-building, nation-building, and globalization is the fact that our occupations are threatening, humiliating, destroying, and degrading cultural death-defense mechanisms that Muslims will go to any lengths to defend, especially against arrogant modernist conquerors.
In our self-absorbed and self-righteous arrogance, we are
stripping relatively helpless peoples of their main cultural dignity.
Their leaders know that when Iraq was destroyed by "Shock and Awe," on command, our troops guarded the Oil Ministries very efficiently. But they allowed the millennial cultural centers to be looted and burned.
The eternal burning-in-Hell type of terrorism of imperialistic-evangelical patriarchal religious crusaders, be they Christians, Muslims, Zionists or Hindus, is still standard operating methodology when the wrath of their mortality-horror defenses and delusionism explode.
The global spread of nuclear weaponry technology has long been a secret American business, but the officials involved deny it and are still protected from inquiries by their successors in office.
Holocausts are like massive nuclear fires that may be brought to us by emotionally dangerous immortality religions.
RKM
www.psycho-imperialism.com