Obama rethinks withdrawal from Afghanistan
According to ABC News, the President is having second thoughts about slashing troop levels in Afghanistan this year like he’d planned;
British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said Wednesday that “Carter told us the troop numbers and the dispositions are being looked at again.”
The American reassurance to NATO allies comes on the heels of Obama’s decision last week to give the military wider latitude to support Afghan forces against the Taliban, both in the air and on the ground.
Far from ending the two wars he inherited from the Bush administration, Obama is wrestling with an expanded set of conflicts as his presidency nears an end, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Libya and Syria, with no end in sight. In Afghanistan, a Taliban resurgence has upset Washington’s exit strategy, which called for troop reductions from 9,800 to 5,500 by the end of 2016.
But Carter told reporters that Obama has indicated his willingness to re-examine force levels based on the intensified fight against the Taliban and Carter expects Obama to do that as the year goes on.
Yeah, Obama didn’t “inherit” the Afghan War from Bush, he inherited it from the Taliban, and the reason that there’s no end in sight to any of this mess is because this administration hasn’t taken the war against terror seriously for even one minute – except when they thought that it could benefit their own legacy. The Military Times says that the Taliban controls more of Afghanistan now than at any other time since 2001;
The Taliban’s warm-weather offensive has shown the insurgents to be bolder and better organized, holding more territory now than at any time since 2001, when their regime was overthrown by the U.S.-led invasion, according to recent U.N. estimates.
Past months have also exposed flaws in the Afghan military — weak leadership, lack of professionalism, complacency and corruption, analysts say.
Both Afghan and U.S. military officials expect the summer fighting to be deadly for Afghan troops, who suffered a 28 percent increase in fatalities in 2015, compared to the year before, when around 5,000 were killed.
They’ve been half-assing the war in Afghanistan since that non-surge in 2009, now all of a sudden, it’s a problem.
Category: Terror War
We were winning when I left.
Geez, how could this happen when the description of Afghan (and Iraqi, for that matter) troops is so spot on??
When I left Garmsir district in 2010, the Taliban had been whittled down to a guy named Sardar who tried to extort money with a stick, because he was terrified to carry a rifle. We annihilated those bastards (not decimated, annihilated). So yeah, ditto, when I left we were winning.
I’m literally wearing the tee shirt that says the exact same for Iraq, right now…
Deja vu?
Didn’t we have this conversation the other day?
The community organizer in chief is rethinking. That implies he actually thinks, of which i have strong doubts.
He thinks of which displays to showcase his Legacy in the Presidential Library constantly nowadays…
Far from ending the two wars he inherited from the Bush administration, Obama is wrestling with an expanded set of conflicts as his presidency nears an end…
Well of course he is-weakness emboldens! Foreign leaders and terrorists took the measure of our President easily enough and they have been reacting appropriately ever since.
SLACKER!!!!!!!!!!
And how many more generations will bear the burden of this moron’s trainspotting slacker crap?
The Legacy of Gives A Shit – Finest ever!!!
B. Hussein 0bama & Company have done all they can to cut and eviscerate the U.S. Military and now he’s “rethinking”? That crowd has given welfare flunkies and illegal aliens a higher priority than theMilitary and Vets.
But – but – butthead has to DO SOMETHING, API! SOMETHING!!!
He has a ‘legacy’, you know, or so I’ve been told. I know it’s around here somewhere.
I’m sure he’ll blame Bush in 3, 2,, 1,…
There will be a video display in the Library that shows him pulling forces out when he was first elected – I’m guessing the display for putting them back in will have a permanent “due to technical difficulties” sign taped over it.
His “legacy” will be people laughing and pointing out that he only had two successes in his life in that he was elected twice to an office he was not qualified or equipped to hold. He will be derided by future generations as a man who failed at everything, including his attempt to bring our republic down. Jimmy Carter is now America’s second worst president.
He will stand forever as the world’s greatest example of why Affirmative Action is, was, and always has been, a another silly liberal program that has turned out to be a worthless failure.
What Affirmative Action has to do with this? Unless, never mind.
May he be remembered as the incompetent idiot in charge who put the USA so deeply at risk, succeeding generations will be facing constant warfare and may never know what peace means.
That’s the legacy left behind by this incompetent ass: your children and children’s children get to clean up the mess he created.
He also received the Nobel Prize for Peace.
(I just threw up in my mouth a little)
I still wonder if Michelle O wasn’t artificially inseminated, ’cause our CiC doesn’t have a pair, and his head is so far up his anterior orifice looking for them he cannot find his way out, and he’s been that way so long he thinks he has a normal view.
YMMV
Sure. Leave Afghanistan. Pull every troop and every piece of equipment out of the place.
Then have our heavy bombers fly over and drop enough MOABs to turn every living thing into pink mist, and every structure into rubble. Then do it again to turn the rubble into dust.
My thoughts exactly.
Not one more U.S. life should be sacrificed for that place.
Oooo, upgrade!
Good idea. The best thing to ever come out of douschbagastan was the plane I was on when I left.
Gee, I guess the
group of naive tools and feckless fools running the show in DCcurrent Administration finally figured out that when it comes to war, the enemy has a vote too. And the enemy’s vote sometimes changes your plans.The enemy is obviously raysis and they don’t want Obama to have his legacy.
This must be false because I remember my .gov telling me that the Taliban are not our enemy.
Yep, we were even having peace negotiations with them at one time.
But hey, ISIS is also a JV team.
I’m confused as to who the JV team really is.
Hhhmmmm. .. you may have a point there.
They occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in D.C. there, Corn.
The news media and government act like a bunch of hysterical narcs. They want us to hate everything and blame everything on us. If it’s hot, cold, raining, in drought they say it’s all bad. If it’s the holidays, spring, summer or fall they say it’s bad.
Then they want us to only watch them as if nothing else is important.
Obama tells the FBI not to profile Muslims. Then when Muslims kill Americans he blames Americans for not going along with gun control. He allowed Orlando and San Bernadino terrorist attacks and told Americans the only way to stop them is with gun control. He refuses to stop them by having the FBI profile and arrest Muslims.
Yeah, everything is F’d up but you’d think that 8 years is enough time to get things at least headed in the right direction. You’d think they would eventually figure out their policies don’t work.
Profiling Muslims is wrong. Profiling gun owners is OK.
I’ll defer comment on the above racist and warmongering comments re King 4 Putt until I read the inevitable whining Obumba defense from Lars. /sarc
O is a cocksucker.
Bathhouse Barry
Netflix stream : Afghanistan-The Great Game.
2 episode documentary. Compelling.
Get the fuck out.
“Vozvrashchenie v ‘A’ ” is a Russian language movie produced out of Kazkhstan, about a Russian vet who returns to Afghanistan. It is worth watching. You can stream it online if you search for it, but have virus protection = on.
Hey guys and gals, I gotta tell you all. Before Obama, I had to listen to Carter jokes. You see he and I share the same last name. They have fallen by the wayside. Now, it’s Obama, the worst prez. Ever! Finally I get relief!
so instead of being the mold on the lizard shit that dropped to the bottom of the slimy stale water in the bottom of the barrel, your name is now equal to the lizard shit. Congratulations of the promotion.
His father should have thought about withdrawal.
I see what you did there.
Well done, very well done!
You want to know about the legacy left behind by the Slacker in a Suit, right?
Well, here it is: 51 State Dept. officials have signed a dissent channel cable saying that the US should try to get Assad removed from his seat in Syria with targeted military strikes.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-usa-cable-idUSKCN0Z3087
The Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov disagrees: “The liquidation of this or some other regime is hardly what is needed to aid the successful continuation of the battle against terrorism. Such a move is capable of plunging the region into complete chaos.”
A few questions at my end of the table:
1 – What exactly does Mr. Peskov (Vlad’s rep) infer is going on there now?
2 – How could it possibly get worse than it is already?
3 – Why is the Fool on the Hill unwilling to admit that there are far more than just 300 US SpecOps people over there now?
4 – Why hasn’t this been addressed from the very beginning?
5 – Are my questions too obvious for words?
Some idiots in Congress (yes, that is redundant) want to go after Assad and the make-believe is that this is independent of oBaMa, the guy who took out OBL. (He watched the live feed so it was just like he was there.) That’s all we need. Talk about a mess. That Arab Spring Fling really worked out great, as did the Red Line.