AfPak Perspective
Reuters checks out some milblogging regulars for an optimistic look at the long war that everyone else always seems to want to wail doom and gloom about. via Small Wars Journal, your go-to place on how it’s done.
AP notes that there are insufficient Marines in Helmand for the job: A few hundred trying to interdict Taliban supply and communication lines across thousands of square miles abutting Pakistan. Hey, maybe they’ll get some help when Gen. Obama’s three-quarters surge shows up … or maybe not. Sounds like the president’s precisely measured-out ration of troops is spoken for elsewhere.
Well, if you can’t chop up the snake, then aim for its head. Some good news, via LA Times, use of special ops in targeted hits on Taliban bigs, plus efforts to co-opt the Taliban, has quadrupled in recent months under McChrystal, which is not a big surprise given that was his specialty in Iraq.
On the subject of Taliban bigs and AfPak border issues, Mullen’s in Pakistan leaning on the Paks to expand their campaign on them and AQ where they live. Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
OK, time for some news of the weird. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen … you remember him, the Eurocrat who gives a better war speech than the president of the United States … is in Russia asking the Ivans for a hand in Afghanistan. Helicopters, training and parts. No shortage of irony in that, or this:
Rasmussen told former Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin, who is now a powerful prime minister, that Afghanistan should become the centerpiece of NATO cooperation with Russia.
Putin said simply at the start of the meeting that cooperation with NATO could yield good results.
No kidding. But how much more cooperation do they need than a blind eye re Georgia and eastern Europe under the bus? Just asking …
Speaking of perspective, Afghanistan and special ops, lunch yesterday in downtown Boston with a group of crusty old combat vets that included a young Ranger with four Iraq/Afghan tours, conducting raids on “high-value targets.” He had a couple of stories, including a big firefight in the midst of a pre-dawn exfil encountering difficulties, during which the brush around him started burning. That’s when he realized he was pinned down and dodging shrapnel in the middle of someone’s pot field.
Book suggestion from lunchpal Larry Gwin, 2/7 Cav Ia Drang vet, originator of A Combat Vet’s Reading List and author of Baptism: A Vietnam Memoir. It’s an embedded reporter’s surge account, The Good Soldiers by Washington Post scribbler David Finkel. Sounds like it might make a good on-the-ground companion to Tom Ricks’ big picture, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008.
Mike Hu in comments on Dunkathon reminds us its the anniversary of The Bulge.
Topics: Afghanistan,Pakistan,military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:35 am Comments (0) on Wednesday, December 16, 2009
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