Post of Mine From Military.com titled: The New Orthodoxy on Afghanistan

Posted Sun 20 July 2008 02:38 PM on Military.com

I get nervous when both candidates and the current Administration seem to agree on a new strategy regarding anything; in this case it is the idea of surging more troops into the Afghan Theater.

Most Americans had been led to believe that the Afghan adventure was a success. Now, out of the blue, we are being told that a sudden re-emergence of Taliban/al Qaeda military activity is taking place, resulting in US casualties and possibly signaling a renewed insurgency in that country.

We are being told that elements of the Taliban and al Qaeda have established a sanctuary in the largely ungoverned FATA territory in Pakistan, allowing them to flow troops into Afghan to create general mischief and death.

Obama, a late-to-the-party McCain and Bush all agree more troops are needed in theater, ASAP. Their solution is more US soldiers, and more effort--military effort--by the Pakistani government to neutralize the Qaeda/Taliban enclaves in FATA.

I am a civilian, but a civilian old enough to remember the Viet War, and when Nixon accepted the view that the war could not be won unless the US cut off the flow of North Viet men and materiel traveling through Cambodia. That produced widening of the war into the latter country, at enormous materiel and human casualty costs, without winning the war in the end.

What do you military guys think about this latest--and late--concern with the Afghan Theater? Do you think surging more Americans, most of them coming from the Iraq Theater, into harms way in Afghan is a viable strategy? Is the US occupation of Afghan doing any good in the overall War on Terror (WOT)?

Is the Afghan culture even more primitive than what we encountered in Iraq, as far as tribal wars, clan feuds that have gone on for centuries, warlords and drug cartels? In other words, does Afghan society make Iraqi society look like a model of modern thinking in comparison.

I ask these questions sincerely.

I do not want more US soldiers used as expendable pawns in mis-begotten stretegies of our civilian leadership.