Daniel Brown, Business Insider: The Air Force released new videos of A-10 Warthogs striking Taliban drug labs — and it shows why the US strategy is a game of 'whack-a-mole'.
* The US released two new videos of airstrikes on Taliban drug labs in Afghanistan.
* The US is quietly escalating the war in Afghanistan, and has released a number of similar videos of strikes on Taliban drug facilities and training compounds.
* But civilian casualties have also increased along with the strikes, and Afghan farmers say the drug labs only take three to four days to rebuild.
The Air Force recently released two new videos of A-10 Warthogs taking out Taliban narcotics production facilities in Afghanistan, as the Trump administration continues to quietly ramp up the US' nearly 17-year war in the country.
The videos are rather shocking. One shows several missile strikes that turned the black and white video nearly all-white for a few seconds before flames can be seen rolling up.
"The Taliban have nowhere to hide," Gen. John Nicholson, commander of Resolute Support in Afghanistan, said in February, after the Air Force dropped a record number of smart bombs from a B-52 on Taliban training facilities.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: The U.S. strategy against ISIS in Syria and Iraq was basic. Kill the leadership. Destroy revenue streams. Engage the enemy in their strongholds. But ISIS is not the Taliban, and Afghanistan is not Iraq/Syria. The Taliban leadership are hiding in their safe havens in Pakistan. The Taliban's command and control centers are disperse and hard to target. The strongholds are not defined. And their revenue streams are based on farming and processing a crop that is easy to grow and can be processed in a small building. And while I do believe that targeting the Taliban's revenue streams will have an impact .... the question that remains unanswered is how many labs are the Afghans and the coalition willing to destroy.
Update: The U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan believes there is hope (I do not) .... Afghanistan Is Not A Forever War, Its Ambassador Tells T&P (Task & Purpose).
3 comments:
All those Europeans, Russians, and Chinese thinking that the resurgent poppy growing is hurting the U.S. and call it blowback for poor policies.
What it is blowback for policies like Herr Merkel for providing a shoe string budget to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Well calling it a shoe string budget gives Herr Merkel too much credit.
The poppies in Afghanistan are providing the big boy belligerents and the European pols heroin through out Eurasia.
When you do not do the right thing, it bites you in the a__.
Hopefully, some of it is being offloaded in B.C., too.
"Mexico is the major source of heroin in the U.S"
https://heroin.net/types-of-heroin/by-area-of-origin/
"Mexican heroin is flooding the US, and the Sinaloa cartel is steering the flow"
www.businessinsider.com/sinaloa-cartel-sending-mexican-herion-to-the-us-2017-11
America’s Heroin Epidemic Starts in Mexico
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-03/america-s-heroin-epidemic-starts-in-mexico
A successful war in Afghanistan was always going to be a war in Pakistan with India and China being involved in some way. The rather limited intelligence in the Bush administration couldn't possibly grasp any of that though. And here we are.
At least here and there is the beginning of "the best that's going to happen is an accommodation" thinking. Maybe we can just declare victory and leave one day. There is a faint hope that maybe we learned something, but i thought that after Viet Nam.
"The rather limited intelligence in the Bush administration couldn't possibly grasp any of that though. And here we are."
All the U.S. needed was and is Pakistan. It does not need China nor India.
Bush did not desire war in Afghanistan. Somehow Jason did not get the memo.
Bush simply asked the Taliban to hand over Al Qaeda. Not handing over self professed murderers is casus belli.
If the U.S. has said " You are not handing over the murderers, Oh never mind"
You think things would have gone well then Jason?
Just WOW!
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