Did We Just Lose?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Blogging, Discuss, The War On TerrorismMichael Reynolds (aka sideways) wrote a great post last week about Pakistan’s surrender to the Taliban that got a lot of attention around the web. More than 12,000 people viewed the post thanks to the site reddit.com.
Given that, I think we should take a look at the post again, as well as the followup, and talk about the WoT and what it means given this new development.
And if you want, take a look at the comments over at reddit.com. Worth a peek.
Discuss.
This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 and is filed under Blogging, Discuss, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 15th, 2006 at 9:20 am
Last time I checked, no U.S. cities had gone up in a flash of light and a mushroom cloud, and the Constitution is still (at least nominally) the supreme law of the land, not shari’a law. So I would guess that no, we haven’t lost this war. Not yet, anyway.
September 15th, 2006 at 9:39 am
Meanwhile, Captain Ed is wondering whether Musharraf is already so deeply in bed with the Taliban and al Qaeda that the U.S. may soon no longer care whether he stays in power or not, and act accordingly against al Qaeda in Pakistan.
September 15th, 2006 at 10:24 am
This situation is enough to make me cry.
As much as I despise bush for how he screwed up the war on terror, I am left with the fact that I still live in the USA and my fate is linked to his. I keep thinking of the movie “A Bridge Too Farâ€Â?. It’s about Operation Market-Garden during WWII. When we started diverting resources from Afghanistan to Iraq we ended up overextending ourself. Now we are going to loose both conflicts.
The only viable solutions I can think of are :
1)Reinstate the draft and fully mobilize the country for war. (a political non starter)
2)Abandon Iraq and redeploy all forces to Afghanistan. (Something bush’s ego will never allow)
3)Abandon overt military action in both countries then heavily invest in covert operation in both countries. (Also not politically feasible)
September 15th, 2006 at 11:08 am
Joshua:
I must have missed something. Were the Taliban developing nuclear weapons? Pretty sure the answer is no.
As for Captain Ed’s notion that we can be indifferent to Musharraf’s fall, he does have nukes. Real ones. So, no, we’re not going to be careless about Musharraf.
September 15th, 2006 at 11:37 am
I think we started losing from the very beginning in Iraq. Whatever happened to “Shock & Awe”? The way to win a war is to demoralize your enemy to the point that he doesn’t want to fight anymore. Our approach of reactive – not proactive, only emboldens them. We’re losing on all fronts because we’re just too darn nice.
When intelligence says that an area is a hornets nest, we need to bomb the bat-crap out of that area. Sure, civilian lives will be lost, but isn’t that what happens in all wars? After a while, civilians won’t allow those people to infilitrate.
IMO – If we don’t start now, we’ll end up fighting on a much larger scale in the next 5 years. And then, we won’t have any choice but to use “Shock & Awe”.
September 15th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
To me, the problem is an inability to distinguish what, exactly, the war is.
If the war was about al Qaeda, and OBL — who had, in fact, initiated violence against the USA, then yes… I’d say that if we haven’t yet lost, we’re in difficult defensive position now.