Sipsey Street Irregulars: "Our Afghanistan Policy Ends in Failure."

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

"Our Afghanistan Policy Ends in Failure."

Jack Kelly is a former Army Special Forces officer who made the leap into another kind of excrement when he became a journalist. He's been a damn fine journalist at that, writing honestly and forthrightly about subjects. I know that because he has occasion to do a story on the militias in the 90s, and he interviewed me, quoting me accurately and treating the subject fairly. Now Jack applies the same instincts to Afghanistan and he's ready to pull the plug.

The war in Afghanistan effectively ended last week. We lost.

The last of the surge troops President Barack Obama sent there were quietly withdrawn. They did not leave in triumph. . .

To someone like me who has a son over there, this comes as no surprise. But I always like to view things from the bright side -- let's bring the troops home now, in time for a little R&R in the Land of the Big PX before they have to go back into action in the civil war that will likely break out after the re-election of Obama validates and accelerates his appetites for more of our liberty and property.

3 comments:

David Forward said...: I thought the politicians tied the hands of the military and totally misused us in Nam. But the modern politicians have put the Nam era politicians to shame as rank amateurs when it comes to having their collective heads up their asses. I've watched my son through deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan in amazement as they were constantly toyed with like political footballs. I'm just thankful that he's finished his tours and won't be going back.

One good thing to come out of the malfeasance in the handling our military is that a vast majority of both active soldiers and recent veterans have seen the light and know how corrupt our government has become.
dol/lal; October 2, 2012 at 9:34 AM
Ed said...: Jack Kelly concludes with "If George W. Bush were president, "there would be continuous coverage of the disarray in Afghanistan: the soldiers we're training are shooting us, the corruption is intensifying, and the opium trade spreading," said professor Walter Russell Mead, who teaches foreign policy at Bard College.

"These stories wouldn't be on the back pages," he said. "They'd be perceived as major news with profound implications for America's global position and the Sunday shows and nightly TV news round ups would be full of talking heads endlessly analyzing each wrinkle of the failure."

Defeat in Afghanistan is a big deal -- especially since we still have 68,000 troops in harm's way. It should have been reported -- even though it is embarrassing to President Obama."

No, the press cannot be about embarrassing Obama. That would be perceived as racist and would hurt ratings and readership levels, or at least 47% would think so.; October 2, 2012 at 2:41 PM
Anonymous said...: I've been following this for some time at the ThisAintHell blogsite. I and most of the other readers have come to the same conclusion concerning the green-on-blue attacks:
BRING OUR MILITARY HOME NOW, and then nuke that pitiful excuse of a country from high orbit with whatever is available - HEs, defoliants, poison gas, everything. Complete what the Russkies weren't able to accomplish.

OK - time to wake up now.

B Woodman
III-PER; October 2, 2012 at 11:38 PM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

"Our Afghanistan Policy Ends in Failure."

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