Afghanistan – “We’re f*#!ing losing this thing.”
Posted By JM Bell on June 27, 2010
Oh, the American Media, you always seem to find a way to focus on the parts of a story that are overwhelmingly f**king meaningless. You don’t really deserve your Constitutional protections anymore, because you never seem to do anything other than celebrity and entertainment news. You are killing yourselves professionally, and, for the most part, you deserve it.
Oh, wait … you mean there was MORE in that article than the military version of Mean Girls?
The first rule of counterinsurgency is: don’t engage in it if you have an alternative. Everybody in the military knows that the minimum requirements for a successful counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would have to include: (1) a national government with a claim to legitimacy; (2) half a million U.S. soldiers; and (3) at least another decade of fighting. Needless to say, we can’t meet those requirements.
The politicians all know, as CIA Director Leon Panetta said yesterday, that there are probably 50-100 al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan. Our stated objective is to destroy al-Qaeda, therefore we have deployed 1,000 Americans per al-Qaeda guy. At a cost of $1 million per soldier, that’s costing us $1 billion per year to chase each guy. Of course, there are also plenty of Afghans fighting us just because we’re in their country.