Skip to main content

Time for Admiral Mullen to go...

Last week the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff discovered that our air raids were killing large numbers of civilians in Afghanistan to the point where those deaths could compromise our ability to win the war, but he couldn't think of anything better to do...

This week, the venerable Admiral has twigged onto the fact that our operations in Afghanistan are de-stabilizing Pakistan, and once again--predictably--he can't think of anything better to do:

Speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen insisted that the United States has “a clear national security interest” in taking on the Taliban in Afghanistan and that the 21,000 additional troops coming in the surge is “about right.” At the same time, Adm. Mullen cautioned that the attempt to reverse the Taliban’s gains in Afghanistan could have dire consequences for neighboring Pakistan.

“We can’t deny that our success in that regard may only push them deeper into Pakistan,” Mullen conceded, adding that “we may end up further destabilizing Pakistan without providing substantial lasting improvements in Afghanistan.”
The Admiral’s only answer to this seemingly enormous problem was to call for more military and economic aid to Pakistan.


In other words: we're not wining the war, our tactics are alienating the people supposed to be on our side, and our strategy may drive a nuclear armed nation over the brink into become a failed, radical Islamist state....

But Admiral Mullen's only response is to keep doing what we've been doing.

Now would be a very good time for some change I could believe in, at the top of the Joint Chiefs.

Comments

Anonymous said…
More and more soliders are speaking out about what they really did in Iraq and Afganistan as a result of these sadistic generals. One soldier claims he was told to "break down the doors, smash windows, destroy the kitchen, plumbng and the house.

The reason Obama now refuses to show the photos is because they have pictures of young children being sodomized in front of their parents. Those photos must come out is there is ever going to be an end to torture. Obama is continuing torture, as Jeremy Scahill reports. The Thug Squad at Gitmo are still torturing, and the CIA is still torturing in black sites around the world. Stop believing the Obama hype, its all bullshit. Obama is surrounded by generals who were a major reason why the torturing started in the first place. And the democrats, screw them too. They knew. Biden, Pelosi, Reed, Rockefeller, Clinton et al. They knew and they sat quiet for political reasons. Drag them all before a Nuremberg styled court.
Townie 76 said…
Anonymous you are full of crap. Clearly you do not know anything about the American military other than the bull pushed around on the anti-war blogs. I have spent 33 years in the military, I am proud card carrying liberal and democrat, and in my time in Iraq and Afghanistan I never once hear any Senior Officer order his men to do anything that was illegal or immoral. Our General's are some of the smartest people and have a genuine concern about the safety and well being of their soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. Unless you can name names and cite specific incidents then all you are doing is spreading malicious crap. If you can cite specific individuals and incidents I will assist you in getting it the right people so they can be investigated. Clearly you are not aware that the military has dealt harshly with those who have been charged with misconduct--I know of several Senior Officers and Non-Commissioned Officers whose promising careers have ended because of what they did in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

I can tell you that most of the General's have been the ones who have most objected to the harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA. General's understand that torturing the enemy in the ends gains you nothing in the end.

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...