Afghanistan

I get really ticked off when I talk about Obama and the Afghanistan war. I have three friends in Afghan. Two have been going back and forth there since the war began. I've been tuned into that war from the beginning. The news media largely ignored this war. They were too busy trying to dog George Bush about Iraq. They were too busy glorifying the death count to turn the public against it. They were too busy glorifying Cindy Sheehan and her ten radical, ignorant Code Pink protestors to know jack squat about the war or what was happening there. They labeled it the "good war" so if it was the "good war" why would they cover it? It was of no use to them since they couldn't use it to attack the Republicans. Nancy Pelosi tried to cut off supplies once and everybody erupted so she gave in.

I recall talking to my friend, Kevin, one Thanksgiving while he was there. He couldn't eat Thanksgiving dinner at the canteen because Hilliary Clinton was there. I asked him why and he said "Because they have it all shut down while she is there...we're not allowed in." About 13 hand-picked liberal officers were chosen to eat Thanksgiving dinner with her for a photo op...everybody else had to eat rations, you know, the dog food in a box. That's showing compassion for the troops, don't you think?

Just a side note...when George Bush went to Iraq on Thanksgiving he got on the server line and served the troops...and nobody was cut off. Was it a photo op? Absolutely. But he kept serving after the cameras were off and he thanked every single military person who came through that line to eat.

Anyway, back to Afghanistan. My friend kept in touch with me every day. He would tell me things going on and there would be nothing on the news about it. Or if it was in the news it was wrong. Sometimes it would be sort of right but mostly wrong. Sometimes it's the military doing that. They will nudge the military to put out a story when they are trying to produce a reaction or cause a reaction out in the field. Those kind of things I understand. But I don't understand how the media can just ignore it altogether because politically it was not advantagous for them.

Until now. Of course now they want to whine about it. Obama seems to be listening. What I am reading is complete ignorance. Trying to run a war from Washington was the #1 mistake we made in Vietnam. Johnson tried to control the war this way and it resulted in tens of thousands of dead military people and civilians. There is a disadvantage for the military in this fight between them and Obama, obviously. The military has to be obedient...and they are. They can't fight back. They can't release information to the public to support their side. They can leak it....or do like McChrystal did...but they can't come straight out and give their perspective. Obama can and is lying and continues to do so to this day. We've had a very clear strategy in Afghanistan and Rahm Emanuel is full of crap.

They are stalling as long as they can to gauge what the far left is going to do. They want the three big elections going on in the northeast to be behind them before they announce their decision. I find it interesting that Obama can go golfing, go on David Letterman, go to three political fundraisers and go to Copenhagen to brown nose the Olympic committee but he can't sit down with the general HE PICKED to figure out what to do. You don't ask your generals to assess their mission and report to you and then say "Well...maybe I'll do something else."

I don't ask the lawn mower guy how to fix my washing machine.

Now their excuse....which is a new excuse every week now....is that the Afghan government is corrupt. YOU THINK?? Gee, I think if it had not been corrupt in the first place we wouldn't be there...DUH! Did we go to Iraq because we knew there was a government all ready to jump in and go to work? Did we attack Japan because we thought their government was just peachy and it was just the military we wanted to evaporate? What an IDIOTIC thing to say.

You don't get more corrupt than the Afghanistan people. As my friend told me, "We hire them and they work as guards to the base during the day and they go home at night and shoot mortars at the base." We hire truck drivers from Pakistan to drive in supplies for our troops. Sometimes the trucks make it...sometimes they don't. (It's actually quite a neat process how they secure the supplies that I'll explain more in detail on another day). The drivers take "heroine breaks" in the dessert sometimes and get lost. Or fall asleep. Or get attacked because Afhgan people HATE Pakistani people and they get beat up or worse. The truck drivers only get a sliver of the money we pay them. The money goes to tribal leaders. The tribal leaders are all warring against eachother. It's all about money and power in Afghanistan. They have no electricity or running water or TV sets. Maybe a very, very, small elite few have those things. These people we are fighting have no idea there is another world out there. They wouldn't know what a microwave oven was if you showed it to them. Donald Trump would be the guy with all the sheep. A group moves in and gives a village sheep, cooking oil and supplies for a promise they will protect them from other tribes and there you go....you just had an election. There is no sense of right or wrong. It's about survival.

For Rahm Emanuel to go on the news and say "Oh...we had no idea what we were getting into" is a big fat LIE. He's trying to simplify a situation in a political way because he knows the American people don't really know these things. Their best strategy has been to villainize Bush so that's what he is doing. It's popular and the people fall for it.

So my point is....Yes, we know Karzi is corrupt. The entire country is corrupt. We knew Iraq was corrupt yet we were still able to stabilize the country so a government could be put in place (with the Iraqi's choosing their leaders) and a system could be started. We trusted the military on the ground to do this because they knew how best to do it. It's the same thing in Afghanistan. The people will not vote if they do not feel safe. If the bad guys have all the sheep....they will win.

We have to show the Afghanistani's we have the most sheep....