Wikileaks exposed hundreds of Afghan informants

When McChrystal first accepted his assignment and composed his Afghan Report for Obama (who seemingly couldn’t read unless from a teleprompter) THE MAIN POINT was that America lacked sufficient intelligence on the ground. The entire exercise of obeying the Karzai 12 Rules of Engagement was to convince Afghans to trust the American/NATO “nation building” war effort.

ALL THOSE LIVES SPENT AND SACRIFICED IN AFGHANISTAN have been defiled by Wikileaks. Wikileaks’ exposition of all Afghan informant names succeeded in ruining any further involvement in Afghanistan.

Obama couldn’t thank them enough. Reward? Wikileaks will be involved corrupting elections on behalf of the Left Democrats, with no fear of prosecution from this utterly corrupt president.

maverick muse on July 28, 2010 at 9:58 AM

He wondered aloud if we will see a public execution….

Lady Logician on July 28, 2010 at 9:51 AM

They’ll begin too soon in Afghanistan.

maverick muse on July 28, 2010 at 10:01 AM

NukeRidingCowboy on July 28, 2010 at 9:59 AM

Yesterday I came across two Mark Steyn articles at his blog (under Politics and War) referencing US/Afghanistan, both succinctly potent. The Weak Horse (Obama) and Rule of Unengagement

The toppling of the Taliban was an operation conducted with extraordinary improvised ingenuity and a very light U.S. footprint. Special forces on horseback rode with the Northern Alliance and used GPS to call in air strikes: they’ll be teaching it in staff colleges for decades to come. But then the Taliban scuttled out of town, and a daring victory settled into a thankless semi-colonial policing operation, and then corroded further under the pressure of the usual transnational poseurs. After 2003, Afghanistan became the good war, the one everyone claimed to have supported all along, if mostly retrospectively and for the purposes of justifying their “principled moral opposition” to Bush’s illegal adventuring against Saddam. Afghanistan was everything Iraq wasn’t: UN-approved, NATO-backed, EU-compliant. It’d be tough for even the easiest nickel ’n’ dime military incursion to survive that big an overdose of multilateral hogwash, and the Afghan campaign didn’t. Instead of being an operation to kill one of the planet’s most concentrated populations of jihadist terrorists, it decayed into half-hearted nation-building in which a handful of real allies took the casualties while the rest showed up for the group photo. The 2004 NATO summit was hailed as a landmark success after the alliance’s 26 members agreed to put up an extra 600 troops and three helicopters for Afghanistan. That averages out at 23.08 troops per country, plus almost a ninth of a helicopter apiece. As it transpired, the three Black Hawks all came from one country—Turkey—and within a year they’d all gone back. Those 600 troops and three helicopters made no practical difference, but the effort expended on that transnational fig leaf certainly contributed to America’s disastrous reframing of its interests in Afghanistan.

And so here we are, nine years, billions of dollars and many dead soldiers later, watching the guy we’ve propped up with Western blood and treasure make peace overtures to the Taliban’s most virulently anti-American and pro-al-Qaeda faction in hopes of bringing them back within the government. Being perceived as the weak horse is contagious: today, were Washington to call Moscow for use of those Central Asian bases, Putin would tell Obama to get lost, and then make sneering jokes about it afterwards. Were Washington to call Islamabad as it did on Sept. 12, the Pakistanis would thank them politely and say they’d think it over and get back in 30 days. The leaders of Turkey and Brazil, two supposed American allies assiduously courted and flattered by Obama this past year, flew in to high-five Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The new President wished to reposition his nation by forswearing American power: he thought that made him the nice horse; everyone else looked on it as a self-gelding operation—or, as last week’s U.S. News & World Report headlined it, “World sees Obama as incompetent and amateur.”

If the Taliban return to even partial power in Afghanistan, the unctuous State Department spokesmen will make the best of it. But the symbolism will be profound, and devastating in what it says about American will.

**

If finding Obama “not engaged” is now a firing offense, who among us is safe?

Likewise, on Afghanistan, his attitude seems to be “I don’t want to hear about it.” Unmanned drones take care of a lot of that, for a while. So do his courtiers in the media: Did all those hopeychangers realize that Obama’s war would be run by Bush’s defense secretary and Bush’s general?

Why, a cynic might almost think the “anti-war” movement was really an anti-Bush movement, and that they really don’t care about dead foreigners after all. Plus ça change you can believe in, plus c’est la même chose.

Except in one respect. There is a big hole where our strategy should be.

It’s hard to fight a war without war aims, and, in the end, they can only come from the top. It took the oil spill to alert Americans to the unengaged president. From Moscow to Tehran to the caves of Waziristan, our enemies got the message a lot earlier – and long ago figured out the rules of unengagement.

maverick muse on July 28, 2010 at 10:12 AM

coldwarrior on July 28, 2010 at 9:52 AM

The only online communications that will ever be prosecuted by this administration (or any administration given the powers of the DHS) will be against conservative rule of law abiding citizens. Socialist Cyber Czars drop legitimate cases established against Marxists and terrorists in favor of persecuting/prosecuting pro-US-Constitution conservative US citizens.

It won’t likely be over “leaks” but contesting free speech, probably with falsified online records. Who can actually hire the forces necessary to contest a fabricated case “documented” online by the federal Marxist powers of the DHS against an individual citizen who posts legitimate comments (constitutional legitimacy not being politically correct)?

maverick muse on July 28, 2010 at 10:26 AM

Baxter Greene on July 28, 2010 at 10:24 AM

Yes, that’s Mark Steyn.

We should not fail to recall that Reagan empowered the Taliban with arms and military training as a US ally.

The US is simply an inconsistent political system even according to Reagan’s administrative neo-conservatism motivated to destabilize whoever our enemy of the day is while nation building.

Neoconservatism just f8cks Americans in the Middle East on grounds to defend America’s interests. What all sounds so good just isn’t reality when juxtaposed into Islamic position. The Republicans will explain their neoconservative misplaced virtues that just result in disaster. But a lot of Republicans refuse to recognize the nose on their face seen by others.

maverick muse on July 28, 2010 at 10:36 AM