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Keep those poppy fields safe! (ISAFMedia photo April 9, 2011)
Sounding less like a military leader than a long-suffering Cubs fan, Joint Chiefs Chair Admiral Mike Mullen made remarks in Afghanistan Tuesday as he prepared for meetings in Pakistan on Wednesday and Thursday. Remarkably, Mullen tried to tell us in a news release at the Joint Chiefs web site that the first eight and a half years of fighting in Afghanistan don’t really count:
Although the United States has been in Afghanistan for 10 years, the chairman said, only over the last 18 months has the effort been resourced correctly.
Those first eight and a half years don’t count because we didn’t resource the effort correctly. Kind of like when the Cubs blow their draft or trade away talent on washed-up big names. And we even get the Cubs’ yearly refrain of “Wait until next year”:
“The Taliban had a really tough year last year, and will have a tougher one this year,” he said. “I think we’ll know a lot more as to where this all stands … at the end of this fighting season.” The fighting season typically runs from spring through the end of September or early October, when colder weather closes in.
Does Mullen even understand how many lives and how many resources are being wasted in this ridiculous losing effort?
Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper sees a central part of Mullen’s discussions in Pakistan to be on the efforts to disrupt the Haqqani Network despite its ties to ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence service):
The US Embassy says Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will spend Wednesday and Thursday meeting with Pakistani leaders.
Admiral Mike Mullen’s trip follows a visit to Afghanistan a day earlier in which he told reporters he would raise ongoing concerns with Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff website.
Mullen praised cooperation between US and Pakistani troops in working jointly to combat the militant Haqqani network who target NATO forces in the Afghan east, but acknowledged “strain” caused by the insurgents’ ties with ISI.
Yup, if we can sign the free agent ISI, this could be the year! If only the stakes were merely bragging rights over the World Series instead of widespread death and destruction…
25 Comments
Well done Jim White. I like sardonic.
“we’ll know a lot more as to where all of this stands…at the end of this fighting season.” Can it get any more detached, any more twistedly sick, than what is revealed by that choice of words?
Thanks. I probably should have gone to some Cubs press releases from Spring Training and could have found almost exactly the same language…
Does this mean we can look forward to occupying Afghanistan for at least another hundred years?
Probably. I think Steve Bartman is headed over there now to make sure.
[http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/playoffs/2003-10-15-the-fan_x.htm]
Really nicely done. They get away with this because we don’t see the deaths and we don’t see the carnage. But we don’t like to lose wars either, so reminders that we lost two in the last decade create some drag on the system.
Like the drunk at the party, who thought that if he only said it one more time, and a little bit louder, surely everyone would understand.
One more “fighting season” = 6 months = a Friedman.
Sadly, they can get away with this because so few people care about the war. D-Day has a post up reporting that Howard Dean has finally turned against the war. I’d like to think that this will wake people up, but it won’t.
Exactly. And it’s time we took his keys and called a taxi for him…
Maybe Mullen was thinking in terms of hunting seasons – just different targets.
Do you think that we will ever be able to extricate ourselves from
Viet NamAfghanistan with ‘honor?’ This is like an endless loop: we have to destroy the country in order to save it. Meanwhile, we are bankrupting our nation and establishing a military-corporate total takeover of the government. citizens united has officially given us a government that is on the auction block.They love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like victory.
They don’t make Friedman units like they used to.
There seem to be no real reasons they use to continue this war on terror. With our country swirling around the drain, they want to keep killng and creating more enemies across the globe.
I wish there were some way to get the point through to somebody that would stand with the citizens and say ENOUGH! End it NOW!
Last summer, I yelled at Congressman Hinchey, formerly a solid citizen but firmly confined to the veal pen after O was elected, about his pro-war position. He argued that all the U.S. needed to do was to train the Afghan army. I said we’d been doing that for many years already and it hadn’t worked. He countered that W hadn’t done it right, but O surely would.
Just another excuse for staying. So let’s not forget that in addition to “getting the Taliban,” who have never done anything bad to the U.S. except to try to get U.S. troops out of their homeland, “training the Afghan troops” is also futile but justifies staying around.
When I get those cspan emails on congressional votes, every time there’s a vote on the war, like funding, I send Hinchey an email: How’s that Afghan troop training thing working out for you now?
What would a ‘win’ in Afghanistan possibly look like? I mean, where we can say we ‘won,’ and then bring the troops home instead of always asserting that we ‘continue to win’ there?
Does Mullen’s boss, the commander-in-chief have an answer? The buck stops on his desk, so, ultimately, he’s the one who keeps us there. (Are we ‘winning’ the future, too?)
It’s always “Springtime for Petraeus”.
perpetual war is the business model for our corporatist parties
Heh. http://cubsinsider.blogspot.com/2010/09/2011-offseason-outlook.html
I had a conversation recently with someone who’s son had been deployed to Afghanistan. His son has already been scheduled for another deployment in 2013. I said that this suggests we cannot expect to win the war until after 2013.
Michael Whitney has a fresh post up: Pentagon Plans Indefinite Detention of Bradley Manning (Video & Transcript)
That smell is not from napalm, it is from the corruption of our military and the tricks they use to minimize the fact that we are getting our asses handed to us by the Taliban.
What is happening to Bradley Manning is a sign of how far our ideals have sunk. The repukes turned America from a loving free country to the world’s police department. We, the people, do not want that job.
Yep, we lost in Vietnam because the public stabbed us in the back, because the politicians didn’t let us bomb ‘em back into the Stone Age, because we left the gloves on. As with arguments about illegal “enhanced interrogations”, such self-serving Dolchstosslegende sound better in the original German.
Yep, thank god Petraeus is in charge now and we’re winning. Petraeus obviously learned his craft by extensive study of successful generals such as George Custer and William Westmoreland. The Peter Principal, alive and well at the DoD.
“Those first eight and a half years don’t count because we didn’t resource the effort correctly.”
Ah, this is like Ali McGraw calling for a do-over in “Goodbye Columbus.”
Like they don’t know how to fight !
Ask the former USSR if they have a clue on how to fight to defend their country from foreign invaders.