My uncle was stationed in Afghanistan with the State Department back in the late 70's when Kabul was over run by the Russians...The unique situation on the ground in that region should not have come as a surprise to anyone. We've been dealing with it for how many decades?
But apparently and incredulously enough, it has caught GW by surprise.
Here's the rundown from Greenwald. Brilliant as always...
"We've been inundated with endless happy talk about how we shattered Al-Qaeda's infrastructure and have them on the run, impotently hiding in caves with no leadership (with the completely unimportant exceptions of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, the group's two top leaders for the last decade; but we sure did get their endless army of "number threes"). Yet all of that talk about how much we have crippled Al Qaeda is pure fiction, says Noam Chomsky the President's hand-picked CIA Director:
Hayden told the Senate panel that the Taliban, aided by al-Qaeda,
"has built momentum this year" in Afghanistan and that "the level of violence associated with the insurgency has increased significantly." He also noted that Karzai's government "is nowhere to be seen" in many rural areas where a lack of security is affecting millions of Afghans for whom the quality of life has not advanced since the U.S. military arrived in October 2001. . . . .
Hayden said yesterday that "the group's cadre of seasoned, committed leaders" remains fairly cohesive and focused on strategic objectives, "despite having lost a number of veterans over the years." Bin Laden himself, and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, continue to play a crucial role while hiding out somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistani border."
It get's worse. Picture this...A Bin Laden controlled Pakistan?
Greenwald continues...
"What is indisputably clear is that our current course is totally unsustainable. That's just reality. It isn't that things have progressed too slowly in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's that the situation has deteriorated in both countries, to the point where Al Qaeda now has not one but two countries (not counting a nuclear-armed Pakistan) in which it is more or less free to operate.
And the stronger they get, the more of our resources are needed to keep up. Yet we don't have the resources needed and aren't willing to make the sacrifices necessary to get them. But we pretend that's not the case by insisting on our divine entitlement to magical victory and depicting those who claim otherwise as people who hate the troops and don't want to win."
Some brilliant war on terror Bush has waged eh?
The whole post is here:
No comments:
Post a Comment