Our Muslim President doesn't want to.
To those who think that this is an unfair slam, please ask yourself, "If
he really WAS a Muslim President, what would he do differently?"
Bearing in mind all of the other constituencies that he has, I think
that he is doing the best he can as a good little Muslim. Now Holder
comes out and says we cannot do "religious profiling." Gee, I wonder why??
David
"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it
costs when it's free
"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it
costs when it's free."*---P. J. O'Rourke*
On 2/2/2014 2:15 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Our Wasted Effort in Afghanistan
*By* *Steve Chapman*
<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/authors/steve_chapman/> - February
2, 2014
realclearpolitics.com <http://realclearpolitics.comThe>
The United States government and the Taliban don't agree on much, but
they have found one point of convergence: Both think someone needs to
get a hose and put out the flames engulfing Hamid Karzai's pants.
The Afghan president has often criticized the Americans for carrying
out drone strikes that kill innocent bystanders. But over the past
year or so he has started blaming us for things we didn't even do. He
has gone from understandably prickly to irrationally hysterical.
Last month, he welcomed Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to Kabul by
publicly accusing the U.S. of collaborating with the Taliban in
bombings that killed 17 people. "Those bombs that went off in Kabul
and Khost were not a show of force to America," he announced. "They
were in service of America."
His latest claim goes further, accusing the U.S. of actually mounting
insurgent-like attacks against his forces.
"Karzai has formalized his suspicions with a list of dozens of attacks
that he believes the U.S. government may have been involved in,"
reported The Washington Post. "The list even includes the recent bomb
and gun assault on a Lebanese restaurant in Kabul, one of the
bloodiest acts targeting the international community in Afghanistan."
American commander Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr. called the charge
"ludicrous." We have to assume that Dunford coordinated his response
with Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid, who said the group has taken
credit for many of the incidents because "those are attacks that have
genuinely been carried out by our forces."
In Karzai's mind, Barack Obama has obvious motives for this brazen
treachery. One, relayed to the Post by an anonymous Karzai aide, is
distracting everyone from the civilians killed in American air
strikes. Another is undermining Karzai because he is too protective of
his people.
Then there is the most powerful of all: our desire "to keep foreigners
longer in Afghanistan," as Karzai puts it.
He evidently is laboring under the misimpression that we have
sacrificed more than 2,000 lives and vast sums of money because we
enjoy occupying a poor, inhospitable, violence-prone country with
which we have almost nothing in common.
In his State of the Union speech Tuesday, Obama saluted Army Sgt. Cory
Remsburg, who "was nearly killed by a massive roadside bomb in
Afghanistan." But, the president noted, "he's learned to speak again
and stand again and walk again -- and he's working toward the day when
he can serve his country again."
If so, we can hope his country will find better purposes than propping
up a regime headed by someone who sounds as hostile and extreme as our
declared enemies in Afghanistan.
Remsburg's sacrifices were made in support of an ally that tied for
the most corrupt on Earth in Transparency International's latest
rankings. A new report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for
Afghanistan Reconstruction, The New York Times said, warns against
continuing to provide hundreds of millions of dollars a year in
development support when "none of the 16 Afghan ministries could be
counted on to keep the funds from being stolen or wasted."
It's hard to see the value of our mission there when our partners are
so impervious to our best efforts. The Special Inspector General
reported that we have gotten a pitiful return on a $200 million
literacy program for the Afghan army. The exceedingly modest goal --
getting all of the Afghan soldiers to read at a first-grade level and
half of them to read at a third-grade level -- turns out to be
"unrealistic" and "unattainable."
Just inducing the soldiers to stick around is often impossible. Their
current attrition rate is between 30 and 50 percent. The Afghan army
"is actually far from ready for transition at the end of 2014," warned
Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington last year. The national police, he concluded,
are worse.
With the best of Afghan leaders, it would be hard to overcome all
these deficits. Instead, Afghans as well as Americans are stuck with
Karzai, who negotiated a deal to keep some U.S. forces in the country
after this year but has refused to sign it. The longer he waits the
harder it will be to make the arrangements so we can stay, laboring to
turn failure into success.
Here's another option: We could acknowledge that there are some things
even the world's sole superpower can't do, and fixing Afghanistan is
one of them.
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