Where’s the Outrage?

Out of the thousands of terrible decisions that President George W. Bush and his administration have made, the worst has to be deciding to stop chasing the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. I guess that we can also lump in the decision not to send more troops into the Tora Bora mountains to encircle Bin Laden and kill or capture him at that time. Then there was the decision to push the Taliban and Bin Laden out of the capital city of Kabul instead of closing the city off and cornering all of Al Qaeda’s top leadership. All of these decisions were terrible. We are living with the consequences of these decisions now.

The Taliban attacked an American base in Eastern Afghanistan this week. Now, let’s ruminate over this for a second. American has the most powerful military in the world. Yet, the Taliban launched an coordinated offensive against us. They must have thought either they could win the battle and take the base or they could learn from the American response and use that knowledge in a future attack. Both scenarios are depressing. (They did overrun the base with their second attack.)

Over the last six years, the U.S. has spent billions of dollars in Afghanistan. What have we gotten for our investment? Heroin. Afghan farmers have produced more heroin under the Bush administration then they ever did under the Mullah Omar and the Taliban. Tons of this stuff have flooded the world market. Yet, the Bush administration has done next to nothing to stop it.

We are making the same mistake that former President Reagan made over 20 years ago. U.S. policy was to confront Russia everywhere, keeping the pressure on. When Russia invaded Afghanistan, we supplied weapons to the Afghan warlords and mujaheddin. Russia was pushed out. We declared victory and left. But we didn’t help rebuild the county. More fighting occurred. This time the fighting was basically a civil war. The Taliban won. We continued to ignore events until 9/11.

So, fast forward to late 2001 when we ran the Taliban out of Afghanistan. We left just enough troops to make sure that Kabul will not fall back into the hands of the Taliban as we went after those WMD’s. Afghanistan has been allowed to fester. We don’t have enough troops or money to build a society that respects the rule of law, much less a society that has telephones for commerce or roads to efficiently move produce to market. Six years after the Taliban were pushed out, they are back like Freddie Krueger.

Now the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is looking for more troops to send Freddie back to where he came from– but there aren’t any more troops. Unless Gates has the powers of Samantha Stevens, on the TV show Bewitched, twitching his nose is not going to produce any more troops. All of our combat units are either in Iraq or in Afghanistan or they have just come back from deployment. There are no good short term solutions.

I think that we need to pull a couple of combat units out of Iraq and send them to Afghanistan. We need to get control of this situation. We need to kill or capture the leadership of the Taliban and find Osama Bin Laden and end what he started.

I don’t think that I have said anything in this post that would be considered radical or left-wing or controversial. This should be the American stance but, as you know, it is not. Bush supporters somehow try to argue that Afghanistan really doesn’t matter. The really fight against terrorism is in Iraq.

Here’s Fred Barnes trying to make this case on Fox News Sunday:

Tags: Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Military by ecthompson
Comments Off

For the last three years, I have asserted that we need to get control of Afghanistan. We need to find the Taliban leaders and kill or capture them in order to destroy the Taliban. But, the Bush administration thought that a “surge” was not needed in Afghanistan but instead in Iraq. As a result, Afghanistan has been allowed to smolder while the Taliban has become more organized.

I find it interesting that the Taliban thought that they were strong enough to test an American military outpost. This is a bad sign of things to come. We need another 20 to 30 thousand troops in Afghanistan, now.

From the Washington Post:

Nine U.S. soldiers were killed in heavy fighting Sunday at a military base in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border, according to a Western official. The attack was the deadliest against U.S. forces in the country since 2005.

The clash began when insurgents in a nearby village attacked a joint Afghan and American military outpost in Konar province early Sunday morning, NATO said in a statement. The insurgents fired on the base with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades for several hours, injuring 19 Afghan and NATO troops. (more… )

Update: I was going to post a whole new story but this is really a continuation. The Taliban has overrun this outpost (near the eastern town of Wanat). U.S. forces pulled out. We only had 25 soldiers at this post and nine were killed a couple of days ago. Still, we need to take the fight to the Taliban. We need more troops. NATO ain’t it. At least not right now. NATO, like the rest of the world, looks to us to lead. Once, we wake up and truly engage the Taliban then NATO forces will also wake up.

The Bush administration should be ashamed that we have 25 soldiers on an island. That just isn’t right.

Tags: Afghanistan by ecthompson
3 Comments »

The great thing about being a trauma surgeon is that every day is different. It is never boring. The terrible thing about being a trauma surgeon is that every day is different and there is no predictability.

Because of one gunshot wound to the abdomen, my partner and I operated for the better part of two nights. The patient is looking better.

Now, off to Netroots.

Tags: Blogging issues by ecthompson
Comments Off

A recent New York Times survey shows Senator Barack Obama leading Senator John McCain by 45 percent to 39 percent.

Okay, no surprise.

But in reading the polling data, one question did stand out. People were asked what percentage of the country was black.

The Census Bureau reports that in 2006, 12.8 percent of the American public was black. That number added up to about 38.3 million people. In the New York Times survey, 32 percent of all people said America was between 20 and 30 percent black. An additional 32 percent said the black population was between 30 and 40 percent. And 9 percent of respondents said America was a majority black nation.

Both a majority of black and white folks in the survey got the question wrong. I guess I should stop being surprised at what people don’t know, but I really don’t get how people can figure the nation is 30 percent or more black.

Do whites get it wrong out of a fear of being overrun? Are blacks looking for strength in numbers? In any case, I don’t get what people are thinking sometimes. Don’t folks have any sense of the world around them?

Here is BlackDemograhics.com with information on blacks in the United States.

Tags: General by Texas Liberal
Comments Off

The above poster is from an exhibition of New Deal era Works Progress Administration posters on the web page of the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress.  

Here is a history of the Works Progress Administration.

Tags: Fun by Texas Liberal
Comments Off