Andrew Tilghman, Military Times: What comes next for Obama's unfinished mission in Afghanistan
Odds are, The next President will have to figure out how America's longest war ends. Here's why.
As President Obama prepares to make his final major decision about the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan, there's a growing sense he is likely to halt a planned withdrawal of American troops and let the next president decide how to end the 15-year-old war.
The top commander now in Kabul, Army Gen. John “Mick” Nicholson, is concluding a review of the situation there and will send his recommendations up the chain of command by June 1, defense officials say. He is likely to conclude that the conditions in Afghanistan are worse than predicted in 2014, when the U.S. declared an official end to its combat mission.
“He believes that, over the last year, the security situation has deteriorated,” Army Brig. Gen. Charles Cleveland, a deputy chief of staff for NATO's Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan, told Military Times.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: Here is my prediction .... the Afghan war is going to last a long time .... probably involving a few American Presidents before it finally winds down. (I give it 50 years).
6 comments:
I thought America's longest war was its own civil war.
Quit wasting time and money and get the hell out of there now
US Civil War lasted 4 years and roughly 1 month.
If you include Reconstruction, where in the attempt was made to bring in equal rights and defeat slavery, while the revanchists attempted to defeat equal rights and reintroduce slavery in new forms, which the revanchists won, that adds 12 years to the conflict, making it roughly 16 years,
If you include the Continuation struggle, then it lasted 107 years,
Measured in other ways, it's still ongoing.
The US is trapped in it's own Tar Baby, of it's own making.
At the first Loya Jurga, rather than allowing the reformers, moderates and tribal elders to start to build a "grassroots" functional democracy, the US put the same Jihadi, War criminal, corrupt Warlords who destroyed Afghanistan with their Civil War , and lead to the rise of the Taliban, in charge.
Then, with drone strikes, raids, assasinations, kidnappings and assaults, they restarted the War with the Taliban leaders and factions that had accepted the Amnesty, returned home, put their weapons away and were starting to get involved with the political process.
To make matters worse, they introduced massive levels of corruption, turning genocidal, war criminal Warlords from millionaires to multi-billionaires, and became "muscle for hire" in their War Lords squabbles and their intertribal wars.
If the US leaves Afghanistan, the Taliban win.
No US Administration can try a military surge, due to domestic war fatigue at home.
No US Administration has either the mandate or the will to "fix" the Afghan political corruption, nor do they have Afghan support, and the criminals they put in charge, are too strong.
All the US can do, is keep enough troops and airpower in Afghanistan to keep the Mayor in Kabul and keep kicking the can down the road to the next Administration.
Oh, BTW,
"A senior figure from a Syrian rebel group with links to al Qaida was allowed into the United States for a brief visit, raising questions about how much the Obama administration will compromise in the search for partners in the conflict.
Labib al Nahhas, foreign affairs director for the Islamist fighting group Ahrar al Sham, spent a few days in Washington in December, according to four people with direct knowledge of the trip and who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of U.S. relations with Syrian rebels.
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article78962527.html#storylink=cpy"
You really think America is going to last 50years?20 at the most given current mismanagement and mass immigration
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