Skip to main content

You need to read this assessment of our current quagmire in Afghanistan...

... because it makes points about this being an essentially unwinnable war that I have been attempting to make for months.

It's a McClatchy, and I am not going to excerpt it because you should go there right now and read the whole goddamn thing.

Here are three take-aways:

1) General McChrystal actually says we need 60-80,000 more troops to avoid a risk of defeat.

2) Even sending 45,000 more troops to Afghanistan only gives use a moderate chance of success [which is actually what a moderate risk of defeat is]

3) We don't have even 45,000 troops to send without risking the structural integrity of our armed forces. At best, military experts say, we could commit about 35,000 of the right kind of troops, and that would leave us with virtually no combat-ready uncommitted reserves.

Yet both nationally and locally there are folks who either ignore the whole issue or live in a fantasy world where we can just go in and win if we commit ourselves.

Get a clue: for years there were random people on both sides of the aisle warning Americans that the bill for fiscal irresponsibility in the banking industry would come due. We've just started paying that bill (admittedly in an idiotic fashion). Now there are a few people out there explaining (speaking slowly most of the time in words of few syllables) that the bill for our imperial hubris and military adventurism is going to be coming due very soon as well.

Comments

George Phillies said…
I encourage readers to read The Rise and Decline of the Dutch Republic --I need to find the exact title, but it is not in this part of the house -- where you will find the comparisons with our modern situation largely very familiar. And extremely alarming.

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 — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point:  Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo:  Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1.       Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...