It’s a mystery to me, Spencer, why you still seem to want the U.S. to fight this war the right way when the U.S. shouldn’t be fighting this war (or any other) at all.

Joe Biden said next summer’s planned withdrawal would be more than a token reduction and that the U.S. would be out of the country by 2014 “come hell or high water.”

Biden’s prediction appeared to go further than statements by his boss, President Barack Obama, who just last month said there would be a reduced U.S. footprint in Afghanistan by 2014 but that the number of troops that would remain was still in question.

Even if President Karzai stopped complaining about U.S. strategy, his government would still be corrupt, illegitimate and unreliable. We now learn that Richard Holbrooke warned that COIN would not work in Afghanistan, and it’s reasonable to assume General Petraeus, of all people, knows this too.

Remember all the debates about “credibility” in Vietnam? Once credibility is gone, it’s gone. You can’t sacrifice lives to get it back.

The objective keeps changing. Nobody is being told the truth about this occupation. The government needs to come out of the closet with the pipeline and mineral reasons we are there.

It has nothing to do with 9-11, terror, or any other obsurd excuse.

You can not wipe out an insurgency using military force. Military force is what creates the insurgency in the first place. The war in Afghanistan is a money pit brought to us by the oligarchy for the purpose of war profiteering. Anyone who sends their son or daughter off to fight this war is crazy. Peace

How Biden expects to ensure we’re out of Afghanistan by 2014 “come hell or high water” is beyond me. Is he really delusional enough to think the Democrats, any Democrats, are gonna be in the Whire House in 2014?

Further, I see no point in being deferential to a corrupt stooge who was installed simply to grease the skids for a natural resources grab that oilmen have been drooling over since the 80s and who consistently loots our treasury posing as the head of state of a non-entity, like throwing federal funds at the mayor of Nogales.

More Taliban attacks in northern Afghanistan. The south gets the attention and the resources, the north and west deteriorate, and the east — the area most centrally important to the stated al-Qaeda-centric objectives of the war — is in a state of drift, as best I can tell.

This seems vaguely familiar. The enemy is all over the compass. Wait I remember, Rummy also discovered the enemy was everywhere.

“We know where they [WMD] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”

Amen.

Dean Baker has a fresh cross-post ready for our perusal: Saving Social Security: Stopping Obama’s Next Bad Deal

I keep getting the same impression. What’s up with that?