The president’s speech, summarized (full text is here): 9/11 really sucked, after going to war with the people who were responsible in Afghanistan we got distracted by a sideshow in Iraq, the sideshow led us to neglecting Afghanistan, the surge in Afghanistan was a tough call but I made a promise we’d draw down forces this July, we are meeting our goals and starting this July we’ll begin the process of drawing down troop levels by 10,000 by the end of this year, and by next summer we’ll have taken out 30,000 troops, by 2014 the process will be complete and the Afghans are on their own, we’ve killed more than half of al Qaeda including “the only leader that al Qaeda had ever known,” al Qaeda is still crazy and we have to keep our eye on them, Afghan Security Forces have grown by almost 100,000 troops, next may we’ll have a summit in Chicago to talk to NATO and our allies about all this stuff, Pakistan is freaking me out, we have to keep looking for terrorist safe-havens in Pakistan, will will insist Pakistan keeps his promises, this has been “a difficult decade for our country,” we lost 4,500 Americans in Iraq and 1,500 in Afghanistan, thousands more have been wounded, some of them returned home haunted by demons, but “we take comfort in knowing that the tide of war is receding,” now we gotta do some nation building at home, blah blah blah American dream, blah blah blah God, the end.
Then Wolf Blitzer intoned, “A short but upbeat speech by the president.” (CNN, you hire the worst people.) “We have a lot to digest here in this hour.”
My stomach has a tough enough time digesting as it is. The last thing I felt like doing was digesting with Wolf Blitzer. So I called my brother, who recently got out of the Army after a tour of duty in Iraq.
He liked the speech, thought the president’s plan was sound, thought people don’t really understand how it works and why “it’s not good to just take everyone out.” He mentioned that when he was in Iraq he was part of a draw-down, so his company took over what a battalion had covered before, and after his company left a platoon took over what his company had covered. “And because of human nature, no one’s going to do something unless they have to do it, so the Afghan Security Forces will be like, ‘Oh shit, we have to do this,’ and that’s what the Afghan army will have to do.”
I asked him what it’s like being part of a war (Iraq) that will go down as a sideshow and a distraction from the more relevant war (Afghanistan). “Uhh, it’s kinda weird, but when I got there it was kinda like, ‘All right, we’re already in it.’ It almost doesn’t matter anymore because it’s like, well [the U.S.] already started it. But yeah, it’s kinda weird. When I was there it wasn’t like, ‘Yeah, I’m directly fighting the terrorists who attacked us.’ It was more like, ‘Oh man, this place is fucked up and we gotta help them.'”
He went on, “But I thought the speech was good—he had objectives, he’s on track to meet them, and if you’re on track it’s fine. Its the sporadic stuff you gotta worry about. It’s easier for people to say, ‘Just bring everyone back,’ but then it’ll go to shit, and then everyone’ll be like, ‘Why were we there if it was just going to go to shit?’ It’s just a delicate process.”
Mike has been out of the army since February and hasn’t found a job yet. He’s going to business school in the fall, but he’d like to get a job in the meanwhile, and it’s tough out there. He said, referring to the president’s speech overall, “And yeah I think it’s time to focus more at home. So I can get a job. That’d be great.”
So, to summarize your summary, at a cost of $1,000,000.00 per US soldier per year in Afhanistan, we will still be above the pre-Surge troop levels for at least one year, just so China and Russua can get cheap resources at US taxpayer expense … Not counting the dead or wounded or families?
…
Epic Fail
But … Great news for ABC’s new TV series Combat Hospital … Looks like they get at least eight more seasons from today.
@1 What cheap resources? Heroine?
I mean, yeah, the place is SUPER rich in mineral resources (especially lithium), oil and natural gas. But it’s also one the most forbidding geographical areas on the planet. The China Metallurgical Group only won their lease for mineral development in 2007 and the Aynak site is just now getting developed for copper. So far there’s not that much going anywhere. (BTW. There is only one refinery in the whole country.)
There are no cheap resources there yet. It’s still years away. And the Chinese are the ones pouring big development funds into the mining regions for infrastructure. Not us.
I suppose you could say we’re the world most expensive security guards. But frankly there won’t be shit anybody could do to prevent simple but effective sabotage to resource extraction infrastructure. Which is what the Soviets found out pretty quick with their natural gas pipelines.
Even so. Afghanistan needs that development in a big way so I’m not sure why anybody would worry about them selling resources to the Chinese? At our expense? Yeah. Well. It was us who fucked up their country for the last thirty years.
I’ve been saying for a long time that the only reason the US is allowed by the Chinese to “project its power” to nations like Afghanistan and Iraq is because they somehow believe it is in their interest to do so.
And when I say that the Chinese allow the US to project power, I mean in a financial sense. War’s expensive. It is in fact the single biggest piece of the pie chart in regards to what the US spends every year. Who do you think is paying for it? We’re in the hole, and to nobody more than China. If China had a problem with the way we’re using our military resources, they know exactly how to put a stop to it… just pull shut the purse strings.
Really striking quote in there… “When I was there it wasn’t like, ‘Yeah, I’m directly fighting the terrorists who attacked us.’ It was more like, ‘Oh man, this place is fucked up and we gotta help them.'””
… could it be this may be the first time we’ve sent troops to fight a war against the Different people, only to have them come home with greater empathy and sympathy, rather than hatred and distance? Did we maybe just get tens of thousands of more wordly, sympathetic soldiers back home? Too much to hope?
Most of you don’t remember what that region was like in 1993 when the first WTC attack occurred (or Iranian hostage, 1982). Black box. No one understood what went on…all we knew was that it was making money, developing arms, getting stronger. Whether it was Saddam or someone else, if we let it alone it would have gotten even more out of hand than it did.
As far as who got to fight…I say in proportion to your assets. Send Zuckerberg over to drive the Humvee. He gets the most dollars…let him defend them…proportionally.
@6- “No one understood what went on…”
YOU didn’t understand. A lot of people had a good idea what was going on, like we knew Saddam was neutered after the first Gulf War and it was the USA that had made him dangerous in the first place. We knew Afghanistan was a shithole run by fanatics and that nothing good was going to come out of there and maybe we shouldn’t have just abandoned the place when the Soviets pulled out. We knew that we were hooked on oil and the oil economy propped up a bunch of non-democratic regimes.
It’s amazing how much a lot of people (they’re called liberals, mostly) knew about what was going on and how the majority of Americans just didn’t want to know.
#7
We also had a President, Bill Clinton, who was more concerned about defanging the military (even after 9/11) and reducing the bad ol’ CIA that harassed his hippie friends, so that even as WTC I was happening (while Hillary was attending a Broadway performance of “Godspell”) so that a bad situation — international terror — was allowed to grow and get worse.
Now we have a President who wants to reduce troops without really qualifying what difference there is there between now and 2009 when he doubled the number. And a President who, when presented with the advantage coming from all the effort — nascent democracy in the Arab world — chooses to sit on his hands and allow the dictators to have a fighting chance.
8a. Supplemental
In first paragraph replace 9/11 with 2/93 (month/year of the first WTC bombing).
Thank you, Christopher. Good post.
I’m so glad you’re brother’s out, and hope he finds that stopgap job before he starts business school. This post is a good companion to the NYT piece about the economic abyss the Afghans may face once our war economy there starts packing up in earnest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/world/…
@8. Got the screws on the headgear a little tight?
The freshman senator from New York was GASP, in New York on 9/11? And what Broadway theatre was playing in the early morning? If you have a point you’re trying to make, provable hyperbolic lying won’t work.
Obama’s policies in Afghanistan have been every bit as useful as Bush’s policies in Iraq. And as he “draws down” to twice the number of troops as were there under Bush, the drone attacks will continue. The checkpoint killings will continue. Innocent men, women, and children will continue to be killed by our forces. But they won’t be American civilians, so we’ll be patient.
@ 5,
That entire statement is utterly insane.
Our soldiers helped murder nearly a million people–they were only following orders, of course–and maybe now they’ve developed empathy and sympathy??? The horrid people of our deranged kuntree are truly psychopathic.
Yes, @5, too much to hope. Frizzelle’s soldier brother sounds as though he has come back with more empathy, but someone official (can’t remember who) estimated today that one-quarter of them are coming back with PTSD. There don’t seem to be any jobs for Frizzelle’s brother, and there certainly won’t be any jobs for men or women with PTSD and whatever other damage they may have sustained. And Obama says 10,000 will be out by the end of the year. Only 10,000. The surge was 30,000.
BREAKING NEWS – SUPREME RULER OF THE UNIVERSE DECLARES WAR ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE, DECLARES NORMAL SYNTAX AN “AXIS OF EVIL”. DETAILS AT ELEVEN.
@6 The Iran hostage crisis was not in 1982. It ended right as Reagan was inaugurated in January 1981.
I can’t say his speech made me feel any better about the situation. *shrug* we’re wasting all the money we don’t have, because our political leaders are too busy playing politics to focus on the people, and this is just more of the same from a regime that wants to justify endless war without the approval of congress. It’s not like he could have said anything to make me go, omg I should stop caring about politics because everything is ok, but his words aren’t comforting. For an administration that has seen poppy production tripled, an administration hell bent on working with some of the most corrupt leaders ONLY because they take the blame when we bomb indiscriminately in their country? I don’t see what anyone sees in this president’s foreign policy other than, ‘it’s a democrat how bad can he be at heart!’ It was mainly the wikileaked cables that show the unbelievably corruption in our own ranks that turned me off from all this. Sure, I’m NEVER EVER going to argue that it’s impossible for military action to have a net positive effect in Afghanistan, but this military action, at this time, is counter productive on multiple levels. We have hundreds of thousands of troops in the middle east and the link between their actions and the security of the united states grows larger with every action. I’m not trying to sound ungrateful that our president ‘got’ the ‘leader’ of the terrorist group most responsible for the largest single attack on our nation, but this idea that we’re being made more safe by working with people FAR MORE CORRUPTED THAN KADAFFI (who we’re trying to assassinate? fucking balls on this president I tell ya) you’ll absolutely NEVER convince me of no matter how many draw downs or whatever fancy terms you have for NATION BUILDING go through our heads. We are being lied to just like before, it’s just as disrespectful and I don’t believe Obama should get to be commander and chief if he wants to go to war without congress. Period. I do believe this is an impeachable offense but like all impeachable offenses that don’t involve a penis the case will never see a court room of any kind. Democracy is dead, long live the king republican or democrat, who rarely differ on small social issues and will ALWAYS strong arm the government as much as possible for as much war as possible.
Nixon gave the same speech in 1970 about another endless war. And yeah, the told one of his advisers that he “really has a way with the young people”.
History doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does tend to rhyme.
There’s going to be a surge of people looking for jobs when the soldiers return to Ft. Lewis.
@8: our military needed a good defanging. still does. to the tune of 1/2 to 2/3 of their total budget.
that will fix the fucking deficit right quick, and end our desire to bluster and conduct futile imperialist adventures.
@20 yes, there will be a surge in jobs – VA hospitals are overflowing.
@8- So America can bomb democracy into the Middle East? Have you noticed that the “democracies” we’re propping up in Iraq and Afghanistan are complete farces?