Lara Logan’s keynote speech
We talked about this speech other day, but you need to watch the whole 20 minutes. She makes points that have never occurred to me. I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in Washington as committed to the War Against Terror as this young journalist.
She says that comparisons to the Vietnam War are absurd because the Vietnamese weren’t intent on bringing the war to our country after we left, they didn’t have a global strategy, they just wanted us out. We aren’t going to be that lucky when we leave Afghanistan.
Honestly, I don’t see anything changing in our strategy even if we get a new President, but we certainly don’t need this one to continue lying to us about what a great job he’s doing over there. I blame the American public and their complacency. Their complacency which is what elected this president in the first place.
I watched Obama bragging this morning about how he ended the war in Iraq and how he’s ending the war in Afghanistan. Ending a war isn’t the same as winning a war. I wonder where the American people are going to send troops the next time their complacency is disturbed.
Category: Terror War
Lot of good it does for us to end the war in Iraq and end the war in Afghanistan if the war follows us home like a rabid, stray dog.
Just read on Drudge. We just sent troops to Jordan.
Um’ I’ll bet you … “Um, I’ll take “Middle East” for $1,000 Alex.” DING DING DING DING DING. It’s the DAILY DOUBLE!!!!
The American public and its elected leaders lack the understanding of this type of enemy, and they lack the intestinal fortitude to call an enemy an enemy….we like to say we don’t negotiate with terrorists, but we do. We are negotiating a retreat that will allow the Taliban to reclaim Afghanistan because we are leaving behind an inept, corrupt Karzai government that, exactly like South Vietnam, is unable to defend itself and that government will fall exactly like that of South Vietnam.
Once the Taliban has the nation again under control, then yes unlike Vietnam, they once again will export terror to the great western satanic infidels…..the Taliban understands our history better than our current leadership does, fight a war of attrition losing 10-20 times as many of your guys as Americans and you can outlast the will of the American government and its people. The Americans have no stomach for prolonged warfare and their moral code prevents them from exterminating their enemies. That is lesson that irregular warfare forces learned about the US in Vietnam. Obama is teaching them their understanding is correct.
Until our mission is the complete and total extermination of all things Taliban and AQ wherever they reside we will be condemned to repeat this process in limited engagements as we try to prop up weak puppet governments that are doomed to fail.
I saw a similar comment over on Blackfive WRT “losing” the war in Afghanistan. It disappoints me a little to see the tired Vietnam cliche of “the politicians won’t let the soldiers win!” being recycled for my war now.
Two things about that:
1. As we all know, in our country the military works for the civilian government. That’s the way it’s always been and God willing, always will be. When you raise your right hand to serve, you are volunteering to become an instrument of US foreign policy, whether you agree, disagree, have a better idea, or just flat out don’t care what that policy is.
You are volunteering to be a stone in the US governments sling, and if that’s not to your liking, don’t join up. It’s not like there’s a draft or anything.
So, ignorant civilians are giving the military orders that prevent them from being effective? You know what, it’s ALWAYS been like that. Seriously, you can go back and read accounts of the Mexican war of 1848, the Civil War, the various Indian wars across the plains and you constantly see the military being given orders that are just bizarre, by their civilian masters. ’twas ever thus and ’twill always be.
2. Regarding “winning” in Afghanistan, what would that even look like? I think we have to remember why we’re there in the first place: Because Afghanistan was used as a staging area and training area for attacks on our homeland. As long as that’s not happening, I call it a “win” and anything beyond that (like a semi-functioning government or even a broken central government with a bunch of corrupt little warlords controlling various parts of the country) is just gravy.
I think we do a lousy job of defining the mission. The parallels are clear to our enemies regarding our actions in this and preceding events and they will spin this as a win for terrorism because they will tell the story they drove us out by outlasting our immoral infidel army. I think other terrorist/irregular warfare enemies will draw a similar conclusion. Start a conflicy with the US and be willing to stick it out over the long term and you will achieve a result that involves the Americans not lasting as long as you can.
I agree that keeping them from launching another serious attack has been a great positive, but once we leave nothing stops them from staging another in this area. I think just leaving with a power vacuum in place creates many questions as to security, and if we ask and answer the questions that’s great but I don’t think we are even having that preliminary discussion on a political level anywhere. Certainly not with our current political leadership.
If you win every battle, like Vietnam, but you leave and your puppet collapses any impression of winning or successful outcome dissolves with your puppet government. Once we leave Afghanistan it will quickly become a staging area again, the deep question here is what can be done about that? What level of force of arms are we willing to use to achieve the goal of preventing them from ever again attacking us? A bunch of corrupt warlords running bits and pieces allows the Taliban and AQ to use the territory of any friendly or purchasable warlords to train and stage.
I’ve seen some of the places she’s gone. She has bigger balls and more common sense than most in Washington do.
Seriously though. I don’t see this as winnable. We’re capable of “winning” it, but we won’t.
It’s not because of a lack of confidence in our forces. I see them as being imminently capable.
It’s because the will of the people isn’t there. The American people don’t have the stomach for doing what is needed in order to secure a “win”.
Well, when we are drawn into another war, maybe I’ll be able to get back in
@8: I’ll reiterate: What does “winning” look like? Serious question.
Kill every single Taliban/AQ? Never gonna happen. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that shooters and suicide bombers are a dime a dozen, and not really even worth that in terms of the “global jihad.” One crazy guy with a suicide vest is not a threat to our republic or our way of life. In fact, a hundred guys with suicide vests and AKs aren’t a threat to our country or our way of life. Without the infrastructure needed to bring those attacks to the US, they can’t do anything except murder each other in their own shitty countries.
As for Afghanistan becoming a staging area for terrorists again, I doubt it. You can’t turn back the clock. Before 9/11, the enablers of AQ could have told themselves “America is a paper tiger. The American people lack the stomach to engage in a war in a distant land. They will complain, launch a few impotent drone strikes, and then go home.” They would have said that based on the performance of Clinton and his predecessors in office.
But all that changed on 9/11. Now, the people who would have to enable that know, from painful experience, just how much of a shit storm we can rain down on them if they harbor a terrorist attack against the US, and unlike the
“democratization” or “civilizing” of these countries, that kind of defensive mission would be supported by the American people, no matter who’s in office at 1600 Penn. Ave.
@10
I don’t know about that. What they have learned is, stage in one area. Launch an attack, then fade off into a completely different area. We spend our time stomping out targets where they launched from, as they’re off somewhere else planning their next move.
WRT 9/11, I think it’s high time we called that attack exactly what it was: Not a “brilliant” or “daring” or “brave” assault, but a sucker punch, plain and simple. The bad guys found a weakness, and they sucker punched us.
But here’s the thing about a sucker punch: You can only sucker punch somebody once. So if your opponent is bigger, stronger, and more heavily armed than you, and you don’t put him down with that sucker punch, you’re in a world of hurt.
Remember the Global Jihad? The bad guys were going to hit us, and then we would strike back with impotent rage, which would both show us as the paper tigers that we were, but also show the would-be jihadists of the world that they could, indeed, strike at the Great Satan and win. Even if we responded with nukes or B-52 strikes, all it would do is solidify the opposition against us.
Didn’t work out that way, though. Yeah, we had our setbacks. Afghanistan looked good at first and then started to fall apart, ditto with Iraq. But all those armies of young islamists that would be spontaneously rising up against the Western world never materialized. Instead, they turned their rage on their own corrupt and dysfunctional despotic governments in North Africa and then in Yemen and Syria.
As for terrorist attacks here in the US, it seems like every one was a keystone-cops type operation that was quickly busted by the FBI and other government agencies. Which just shows that the cream of the crop has been sent off to their 72 virgins and we are now playing against the bad guy’s B (or more likely the C, D or F) teams.
“One crazy guy with a suicide vest is not a threat to our republic or our way of life.”
I’m not sure I agree. One guy with a vest probably wouldn’t cause us to make a whole lot of changes. But if it happens, I seriously doubt it will be one guy. And enough guys in suicide vests will cause us to change as a society. The 9/11 attacks caused some pretty significant changes in selected aspects of American life.
Our society is very open and trusting – perhaps too much so. My guess is that a series of suicide attacks here in the US causing a substantial number of casualties would have a much greater impact on the America we have today than did 9/11. The DC sniper certainly got people’s attention – and that was IMO small potatoes compared to what would happen after a series of suicide bombings at malls/schools/sporting events/(insert any place with large numbers of people). Whether the resulting changes in our society would be a net good or a bet bad thing, I can’t say. But, frankly, I don’t want to find out.
One of the benefits of fighting on foreign soil is that virtually all of the nastiness of war – the death, the destruction, the brutality, the suspension of liberties – is wreaked on someone else’s homeland. We haven’t fought a war primarily on US territory since 1865, so we’ve by and large forgotten that fact. IMO we definitely need to keep it that way.
Taking out the enemy in their homeland keeps them from coming to ours.
We have lost. We have not even made any effort to win. It is we who have altered our behavior to accomodate their wishes not the other way around.
Winning means that the threat is neutralized. Life, our way of life, life being lived the way we want to live it, continues unabated. Their does not.
Whether they must all die to accomplish neutralizing their threat is up to them. We only kill as many as it takes to neutralize their threat.
@13: Hondo: Don’t you think they’ve tried? Of course they have. And they’ve failed spectacularly, in part because of the very changes in policies and laws that so many are decrying, and in part because we’ve killed off so many of their competent leaders that the ones who are left are “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.”
As I said above: Shooters and bombers are a dime a dozen. What’s difficult is building up the infrastructure to support such attacks. It’s easier if you have a large, more-or-less disenfranchised population that is of the same ethnicity as the bombers/shooters, which is why they have these kinds of attacks in Israel, not to mention the Arabic countries where they can move around with relative impunity.
To put it another way, the most valuable person to a terrorist or insurgent group is not the jihadi with the AK or the suicide vest. That guy’s just cannon fodder. The most valuable person is the farmer who can hide escaping fighters in his hay loft. It’s the shop owner who can “lose” thousands of dollars worth of equipment. It’s the janitor at the police station who can “accidentally” leave the back door unlocked for a raid. Those are the people who are critical to any kind of terrorism and those are also the people who are most vulnerable to being turned/exploited/discovered by our security apparatus. Not to mention that if you win those people over, the terrorists are stopped before they even get started.
@14: How has our way of life changed? Mine really hasn’t, not even after 2 tours in the sandbox. We grumble about having to take our shoes off at the airport but beyond that, how have we changed our way of life?
@ #16 You are obviously quite young if you see no differences between the freedoms we used to have and the freedoms we now have. The idea that someone can even suggest that it is necessary to remove one’s shoes to fly is so unAmerican that it should not be necessary to explain it to anyone.
But alas, such is the condition these days. So many are so numb to the implications of all these “minor inconveniences” that they go unnoticed.
Sad.
martinjmpr: I’d be hard pressed to name a major ethnic/racial/religious group that doesn’t have a rather large population (in absolute terms) in the US. Case in point: the Muslim population of the US (which is multi-ethnic and consists of immigrants, US-born citizens originally of Muslim faith, and converts) has been estimated to be somewhere between 1.7 and 6.2 million individuals. Similar statements can be made about virtually any other major ethnic group or religion you want to name. For nearly any choice, a US population base exists today. What changes, you ask? Well, for good or bad here are a few – all of which have had impact on our society: 1. Creation of DHS 2. Patriot Act 3. FISA Amendments of 2008 4. Presidential Surveillance Program 5. Intel & Terrorism Prevention Act 6. Post 9/11 VEAA of 2008 7. Substantial expansion of legal domestic electronic surveillance and intel gathering activities 8. major changes in Federal regulations regarding transportation in general and air transportation in particular 9. changed requirements for access to and security at Federal buildings 10. proposed/pending Federal regulations concerning “critical infrastructure information” and various other aspects of the US information technology and electrical power industries These are just a few. There are many others. Individually, none of these have had a great impact on US society. Some of these changes may well have been needed, and many may be arguably long overdue. But most have impacted the nature of American society by making it somewhat less free and open. And collectively, the impact is larger than you probably realize. They’ve reduced previous expectations of privacy, as well as reducing one’s freedom of action through adding government oversight and regulation. Some would even say that selected Constitutional rights are being infringed – though I don’t think I would. Yet. Moreover, each of these changes adds to the capability and power of our Federal government. Continuing down that path much if any farther concerns me. As the late President Gerald Ford put it when addressing Congress on August 12, 1974: “A government big enough to give you everything you… Read more »
@17: Oh, that it were so! No, not young at all, turned 50 last year and 23 of those 50 were spent in the Army.
@18: Do you suppose someone could have compiled a similar list of “infringements” as a result of WWII or the cold war? I’ll bet they could have and like you, I’m a cold war vet as well as a veteran of the GWOT. And as for the inexorable march of government regulation, that’s something that started long before 9/11/01 and would undoubtedly have happened even if the 9/11 attacks had not. Furthermore, while those changes do get liberals’ panties in a bunch, it’s also true that they’ve been instrumental in thwarting many of the half-assed plots that have been launched against the US in the wake of 9/11. And many of them have been tested in court and found to be completely consistent with the Constitution.
My point with all this is to say that these terrorists are not 10 feet tall and covered with hair. In fact, outside of their own little shitholes, they’re pretty ineffective. These guys don’t pose an existential threat to our way of life the way the USSR did at the the height of the cold war. Even Iran and North Korea on their worst day aren’t 1/100th the threat to us that the Soviets were, and these sad-sack terrorists don’t even have a state.
@20 Martinjmpr, it’s never ever a good idea to become complacent. Even if the Cold War is over, it does not mean things cannot happen. That was one of the lessons of 9/11/01.
Just because a crime has never happened in your neighborhood, it does not mean it cannot EVER happen.
How can we ever win a “war” against our enemies when our politicians and generals lack the balls to wage a REAL war.
I mean, scorch the earth and take no prisoners type of mentality.
Unfortunately in this P.C. age, micro management and minimization of civilian casualties (to the detriment of troop safety) have sapped the fighting spirit out of our troops.
We don’t need to win the hearts and minds of people. We need to instill fear in our enemies and those that surround them. That is the only language they understand.
Get rid of ALL of the rules of engagement NOW!!
I also don’t see anything changing in our strategy, but that’s because I didn’t think we had a strategy.
Tman, Karen House, the author of “On Saudi Arabia”, said recently on one of the Sunday news discussions that the USA is neither respected nor feared in the Middle East.
I don’t think that will change until or unless we have a government that takes these people for the very serious threat that they represent. When a Tunisian children’s magazine publishes an article on how to make explosives, aimed at 5 to 15 year old kids, what does that say about the mentality going on there? (Article re: explosives was on the news today.)
@martinjumpr, re: “What’s difficult is building up the infrastructure to support such attacks. It’s easier if you have a large, more-or-less disenfranchised population that is of the same ethnicity as the bombers/shooters, which is why they have these kinds of attacks in Israel, not to mention the Arabic countries where they can move around with relative impunity.” (What you said above.) Think back to the riots that erupted last year in London, UK, with mobs of young people setting entire neighborhoods on fire, mostly just to cause trouble. Same thing in France, with disgruntled young people, mostly Algerian immigrants, doing the same thing several years in a row. And in Detroit, every year now on October 30, Devil’s Night, in which abandoned houses and buildings are set afire — EVERY year. Not just fire, either, but flash mobs invading stores and stealing everything they can get their hands on, overwhelming the clerks; causing riots at the Wisconsin State Fair and the Iowa State Fair last summer; or unruly mobs whose team loses a soccer game, going into a frenzy and crushing people to death, just because their team lost. Or how about unruly fans at a baseball game running onto the field because a local DJ decided to blow up disco LPs — yeah, that happened in the 1970s at a White Sox game, when Steve Dahl blew up disco records during a break in the game. Ethnicity has nothing to do with it. Large numbers of the rioters in London were Brit kids, not immigrant Pakis. The morons that broke up the White Sox game were all Chicago residents who followed Steve Dahl’s radio show, and about half of them were in full punk mode, mohawks and all. No infrastructure, no support, just mobs of people looking for trouble. The Arab spring events last year started with the suicide of a fruit vendor in Libya and spread from there. Ethnicity was not involved in any way, and more than it was in the slaves’ revolt led by Spartacus against the Roman government. The French peasants’ revolt against the silly… Read more »
This lady would make a mean Sec State.
Is she a citizen? If not, I am sure Obama could fix that. (If he wanted too)
As the Marines said:
“America is not at war. The Marine Corps is at war; America is at the mall.”
You are right Ex-PH2.