Losing Afghanistan?

Last week in Afghanistan, in one engagement with the Taliban, nine US troops were killed and 15 wounded. The press and Obama jumped on the news as proof that we’re losing in Afghanistan – because we can’t be completely successful. If we’re winning in Iraq (against the predictions from the Left) we must be losing elsewhere. Then to compound the tragedy of the engagement, Times Online reported later in the week that the unit “abandoned” the untenable position.
Well, Zero Ponsdorf sent me this article from Stars and Stripes on Saturday that he found over at the Free Republic.

But the attack is not a sign of conditions worsening in the country, he said.

The battle occurred just after dawn at a temporary vehicle patrol base near Wanat. A platoon-sized element of Chosen Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment (Airborne) soldiers and a smaller Afghan National Army force were occupying a hastily built area as they had done many times over the 15 months they’d been in country, [Brigade Commander, Col. Charles “Chip”] Preysler said. The soldiers were there on a reconnaissance mission to establish a presence and find a good location to connect with the local government, populace and Afghan National Police, he said.

The small outpost had been built just days before the attack and consisted of protective wire and observation posts surrounding strategically placed vehicles. “That’s all it was, a series of vehicles that went out there,” Preysler said.

“People are saying that this was a full-up [forward operating base]/combat outpost, and that is absolutely false and not true. There were no walls,” Preysler said, latter adding, “FOB denotes that there are walls and perimeters and all that. It’s a vehicle patrol base, temporary in nature.”

But that doesn’t mean the soldiers were not prepared to take on the enemy, he said.

“Now, obviously when you halt, you start prepping your defenses, and in this case we had [observation posts] and protective wire, we had the vehicles deployed properly to take advantage of their fields of fire, and we set up like that all over the place, and we do it routinely,” he said.

The Army did not “abandon” the base after the attack, as many media reporters have suggested, Preysler said.

But that won’t stop the incident from being a bloody shirt for Obama to wave. In fact, everywhere I looked yesterday, that one incident has made the fact that we’re losing in Afghanistan a foregone conclusion in every discussion. Funny, but the troops don’t think we’ve lost.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Politics, Terror War