Not only no, but hell no.

McChrystal really turns my stomach. The guy should be in jail as a war criminal, and yet he sails through confirmation, even though he’s known for running torture prisons, hiding them from the ICRC, imprisoning thousands of civilians and covering up the Pat Tillman murder. If you have the courage, check out the ridiculous fluff piece on him in Time. It’s absolutely disgusting. With this bozo in charge, Afghanistan is NOT going to go well.

On the same day that the NYT finally decides to dump a story they have had for some time. . . the US covered up a war crime in Afghanistan in 2001.

And they said irony was dead.

I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that there is war in Afghanistan and that the U.S. is behind it. /s

We don’t know one-tenth of it yet. We have met the enemy and he is us.

Someone needs to tell McChrystal that invasions and invaders of the Afghan never go well for those running in with lawyers, guns and money. I think that if he were to go hold a seance to talk to old Brits, recent Soviets and other who tried to occupy Afghanistan as invaders he’d find an overwhelming consensus that it’s just not the place to be.

The Afghan people did not attack us on 9/11. The previous group of incompetents at 1600 PA ave screwed up catching and destroying al-Q, and ObL specifically… there is no equivalence between the average Afghan and Al-Q, the Taliban was a tragically bad regime, but we have supported more of those than we have made war on since 1776.

Pouring more men, material and money into Afghanistan will not stop Al-Q… cracking down on Pakistan and a coherent, enlightened with foreign policy with respect to the Middle East and Islam will.

Someone needs to point that out to Obama, who seems out to lunch.

soon we will see a light at the end of the tunnel . . . and after that a Republican can run, and win, on campaign pledges to have a ’secret plan’ to end the self-evidently failed, missionless war, like Nixon did.

sure, then he got sucked down by his predecessors’ quagmire, but we know how worthless campaign rhetoric is anyway, don’t we? especially now.

Normon Solomon has an informative post up at Counterpunch:

http://counterpunch.org/solomon07092009.html

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that no limit has been set. Speaking to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he sounded an open-ended note: “There is not a ceiling on troop levels in Afghanistan.

”

Counterpunch, unfortunately, is not a Democratic Party online outreach forum, but maybe some firepups will pay it a visit anyway.

As the disconnect grows betwixt what the Pentagon wants to “resource and fund” and where the American national economy and a sputtering/myth based American economic engine is going it will surely come down to American militarism running out of “resources” or the American $ simply becoming pure fantasy currency with intrinsic value of Charmin TP.

Americans are in Iraq for the Oil.Will be staying for the Oil. Tom Engelhardt at http://www.tomdispatch.com currently writes about American Colonialism and Iraq. Americans are in and staying in Iraq for the Oil.

Americans are opening up Afghanistan to long term Israeli patterned American Occupation because of underlying energy access and transit interests WashingtonDC and the Pentagon are fronting for. The Taliban,the poppy farmers and OBL all provide convenient cover stories. Americans are in this Af-Pak invasion and occupation for the $$ to be extracted and banked.

One can accept that this is all part and parcel of American Empire–the one where Rule of Law (be it legal,fiscal,social,political) is all very much now a mirage we Americans think is there but evidently really is not anymore.

President Obama is sending killer drones over Asia to kill Asians who evidently are sub-human and not worthy of much or any note.

President Obama has put this American killer McChrystal in Afghanistan because he knows how to kill to gain the goals WashingtonDC and this new Obama run WH seeks and wants.

If one believes in the wheel of life this will come in time to a most deserved come about.

President Obama should wipe that often seen grin off. Killing people for empire and resources and riches for some and horror for many is not funny.

and it played out before in SE Asia, and did not work out so well.

sounds like maybe you could handle Counterpunch – they are not afraid to refer to Empire.

Lots of recent spin from Washington has promoted the assumption that President Obama wants to stick with the current limit on deployments to Afghanistan. Soon after pushing supplemental war funds through Congress, he’s hardly eager to proclaim that 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan may not be enough after all.

But no amount of spin can change the fact that the U.S. military situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate. It would be astonishing if plans for add-on deployments weren’t already far along at the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, the White House is reenacting a macabre ritual — a repetition compulsion of the warfare state — carefully timing and titrating each dose of public information to ease the process of escalation. The basic technique is far from new.

In the spring and early summer of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson decided to send 100,000 additional U.S. troops to Vietnam, more than doubling the number there. But at a July 28 news conference, he announced that he’d decided to send an additional 50,000 soldiers.

Why did President Johnson say 50,000 instead of 100,000? Because he was heeding the advice from something called a “Special National Security Estimate” — a secret document, issued days earlier about the already-approved new deployment, urging that “in order to mitigate somewhat the crisis atmosphere that would result from this major U.S. action . . . announcements about it be made piecemeal with no more high-level emphasis than necessary.”

Forty-four years later, something similar is underway with deployments of U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

watch for Obama to replicate this strategy : “announcements (will be) made piecemeal with no more high-level emphasis than necessary”

dedicated commentators like Siun will probably catch every little escalatory scrap, but run-of-the-mill Obama supporters can continue to be blissfully ignorant of the escalation and slaughter committed by their candidate.

Hmmmm… You’ll be glad to note what CNN is saying about this McChrystal.

-Abigail
PS: And if you find you can’t sleep at night after reading all that, you can check my company’s website for more information on a great memory foam mattress

I came late to this thread. One of my entries for my Obama scandal list is on the doubling down in Afghanistan. I won’t bother to post it all here but there were two points I wanted to make.

First, as noted in this article: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/hom…..69322.html

the GDP of Afghanistan is $800 million. The original figure for building up Afghan security forces was put at $4 billion a year or 5 times its GDP. The new $7.5 billion number is 9 1/3 times its GDP. Does everyone see how unrealistic this all is?

My other point is that back on February 17, 2009 when Obama announced his troop increase before he had a policy or a strategy, McKiernan the then commander had been asking for 30,000 more troops. Obama sent 17,000. McKiernan was subsequently fired because he was not seen as aggressive enough. But now we have McChrystal and just like McKiernan, he is asking for those extra troops McKiernan was asking for. So that’s the same. As for strategy, the troops are supposed to protect more civilians but being more aggressive they are likely to produce more civilian casualties so the strategy seems at odds with its own tactics. Even McKiernan’s supposedly less aggressive tactics were producing unacceptable numbers of such casualties. So you really have to wonder what they are thinking, except you know that they aren’t.

And thanks for the WaPo link. I will add it to my entry.

How are troops going to protect the population if they don’t push out the people preying on them?

I don’t think the war machine will stop until every sector of this country is literally penniless and homeless. Maybe not even then.

In allowing (at the least) 9/11 to happen, the MIC via its Cheney junta and owned media ensured at least another generation of “war.” And any president who doesn’t have at least one “war” going, or wishes to stop doing these wars, will be shredded, eviscerated, vilified, considered a traitor/sissyfag/threat to your children, impeached, removed from office, and still blamed for every stubbed toe.

Until 1) some humans win back the television machine from the unfettered corporate death/fearporn/entertainment profiteer juggernaut, and 2) China decides we’ve fatally weakened ourselves to their satisfaction and finally freezes the credit card, this is how it will be.

We have a lot of financial commitments. We won’t be out of Iraq until some time in 2011. We need to be cutting military expenditures at just the time when we’re stuck spending more than we can afford.

I think we have to match our spending to our needs and OMB or CBO can figure out the $ amount based on what we’re doing. I don’t think that saying we need more money without relating that to what we will be doing in the next 18 months is very helpful.

How are troops going to protect the population if they don’t push out the people preying on them?

There are just so many things wrong with that question. We are not protecting the civilian population if we are killing more of them. In Afghanistan it is an open question who is preying on whom. We don’t want the bad old Taliban preying on the population but a warlord we have made a deal with is OK? Afghanistan has one of the most corrupt governments on the planet but I guess having them prey on civilians is OK too because they are our allies. And how does one push the Taliban out? As I and others pointed out years ago about Iraq and Iraqis, they live there; we don’t. So in 5 years or 10 years, who knows, we will leave. And guess what Taliban or their descendants will still be there. As the WaPo article reports, the Marines are fighting in Helmand, but they are only a few thousand. They can’t hold territory. There are no Afghan security forces they can turn things over too. So maybe you can explain to me how this is supposed to work because from where I’m sitting I can see lots of reasons why it won’t.

You are right in that there are so many things wrong with that question but the saddest part is that it is still being asked.

“How many more dead will it take to make us safe?” would be a better question. Maybe the General knows the answer. Has anyone asked him?

I also can see lots of reasons why it can fail, but no reason why it must. i hope not to see civilians killed by us, and if we do kill civilians in near the number that the Taliban do, I’ll join you in thinking that we will fail.

I loathe the military!

heh, as long as the USA kills fewer civilians than the Taliban, thats good enough for you?

Least Worst-ism is so versatile.

McChrystal is just the latest (in a long line of) imperial wizards called upon to apply his special formula of the magic elixor. Or in other words, the magic formula of American exceptionalism as applied, that will liberate the little American held hostage deep in the soul of the Afghan people, and cause them to reject thousands of years of indigenous culture, religion, and tribal identity and suddenly develop a need to go shopping, watch a NASCAR race, or plan a trip to Disney World.
I’m afraid that we’re living in a new dark age of alchemy where the Powers That Be are demanding lead to be turned into gold through spreading the mythic belief and incantations of the American way throughout the world. Of course there are legions of true believers, experts, careerists, opportunists, charlatans, and hucksters all to willing to offer up their particular contribution to the simmering cauldron that we are “the last great hope for mankind”.
As far as I see it we’ll continue to mindlessly pour blood and treasure into this fools concoction until we stop believing that it will save us, or save Afghanistan, or save Iraq. There is no magic formula that will turn these people into us, never has been, nor ever will be.

I don’t have a problem with you disagreeing with what I do say, but if you disagree with I didn’t say, I’m at a loss.

ok, I see you also include that “I also can see lots of reasons why it can fail” and I wasn’t addressing that part.

but, to me, it has already failed, has no legitimacy, and the loss of innocent life is a fucking tragedy, whether missionless or not, and lets face it, there is no credible mission in Afghanistan.

so, what’s the framework? what is ’success’? is there a timeframe? 100 years and 9 trillion dollars and the Pashtuns are wearing khakis and golfing on irrigated courses?

10 years and 1 trillion and the USA controls pipelines through a dysfunctional kleptocracy?

Welcome to ‘the graveyard of empires,’ General.

i hope you enjoy your stay.

What I was concerned about was that you thought I was satisfied with us merely killing fewer innocent folks than the people we’re opposing.
My idea of what we can do is to pry the predators off the population and provide them with an opportunity to keep what they work for. I’m not quite dumb enough to think that Helmand is going to become Palm Springs, but it needn’t stay the way it has become.
Up to now, we sure as shit have failed, but i think we have a few things to do, that we owe, before we go.

allright, we are into a much wider discussion, which probably neither of us has the time for.

but, if this was chess, my next move would be:

any other ‘predators’ in this wide world of ours we should deploy aerial weapons against?

if this is some anti-predator mission, why are the Afghan people so lucky as to have us ‘helping’ them, rather than other afflicted people around the world?

or – how are these flyboys supposed to distinguish between Taliban ‘predators’ and the population from which they arise from the safe standoff distances they prefer?

and, how is this anti-predator project conceivably worth it to the American people, when California cannot pay the janitors to mop the floors of government buildings?

and so on.

and just tangentially, both ‘pry’ and ‘owe’ are somewhat galling, considering what is being done over there.

Afghanistan is not Iraq. I question not the morality of us being there, there is no question that we should be. The question is whether or not we can win.

Who’d a thunk it !!??

…never saw this a comin down the road…the guv’rnment wants more money for tanks and bombs??…hummm…must be gettin forgetful in my advanced age…hhuuhh…what are these dumb asses asking for in the next supplemental for the new war in iran??? Ahh..right now just more money for netanyaya….

McChrystal was in charge of the special forces troops who were working with Dostum when this atrocity involving the container full of people occurred.

And Obama promoted him.