Watch U.S. Soldier Suicides Spike Even as Deployment Declines on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
The U.S. military’s top general met with senior officials in Afghanistan on Monday to attempt to stop a recent wave of attacks by Afghan soldiers and police against international forces in the country. [...] Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, landed at Bagram Air Field outside Kabul earlier in the day. Dempsey and the commander of U.S. Central Command, Marine Gen. James R. Mattis, met with NATO and U.S. Afghan commander Gen. John Allen in Kabul and discussed the progress of the Afghanistan campaign, a statement issued by the coalition said. [Associated Press]
AFTER THE escalation of green-on-blue killings, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey is making a trip to Afghanistan.
Mark Thompson discusses the situation on PBS “News Hour” in the video above, writing about it for Time magazine as well, which is excerpted below.
It’s plain that warfare is an unnatural state, and occupying a nation for more than a decade is going to send foes looking for vulnerabilities. We saw that with the rise of explosive-improvised devices in Iraq – the U.S. was woefully unprepared for their use – and we’re seeing it again in Afghanistan as a small number of its fighters sign up for military service only for the opportunity to kill their trainers.
We’re also witnessing its impact in the rise of soldier suicides as legions are sent off to war again and again. …
Both the green-on-blue killings and suicides have gotten a lot of attention lately, but no clear answers have surfaced. War, alas, has its own peculiar logic, and sometimes the world’s most costly military seems powerless to combat all of its challenges, whether on the battlefield or the home front.
Still looking for those flowers thrown at their feet?
What are we still doing, there?
GET OUT NOW!
I’ve been following this Taylor, and it is incredibly worrisome. The incidents of Blue on Green violence have increased year on year and have accelerated in the last year. What is worse is that the attackers are the men who have the closest contact with US forces. We have overstayed our welcome.
I sincerely doubt that the planned follow-on after the troops, the money being poured into the post occupation Afghanistan and the State Department efforts at nation building will also end in tragedy.
We need to pull the plug on Afghanistan, it is total loss. I weep for the people of that nation, especially for the women– it will be a Hieronymus Bosch painting brought to life and amplified past 10.
I hate being right, but I saw this coming a mile away. I saw this as Vietnam in Central Asia and got poo-pooed. But this was too much like Vietnam to miss the historical parallels. Afghanistan did not earn the epitaph of “The Graveyard of Empires” for nothing. Neither the Russians nor the British could crack the nut that was Afghanistan. It is hard land that grows even harder men. The geography is nightmare for any occupying force, and the local know how to exploit that terrain for all its worth.
Unless your willing to take on the tactics of the Mongol Hoards of Tamerlane or Genghis Khan, the tactics of untrammeled butchery, you are not going to “win” in Afghanistan.
I understand how the attack on 9/11 skewed our perceptions, but you don’t enter a military conflict without a cold assessment of the facts on the ground. To really control Afghanistan, to occupy the land with authority, you needed a million troops. You needed to smother the land with troopers and you would probably need a generational commitment of that level to make an impact. Anything else was pissing in the wind.
We never had that discussion. We never really considered what our mission in Afghanistan was. The Biden solution, never really tried until it was way too late, would have been a good answer to the conundrum. A small special ops campaign against the Taliban should have been the response from the beginning. Regime change, especially on the cheep was always a bad idea.
FBI was investigating Grimm….Sea of Galilee story was an adjunct subject
http://www.boston.com/politicalintelligence/2012/08/21/congressman-naked-swim-israel-was-not-the-target-fbi-probe/3CZh7Nu2OeYTZuLZNlLP3I/story.html