For John, BLUF: Afghanistan is to be reduced as a US commitment, but it isn't going away. Nothing to see here; just move along.
Afghanistan is not going away in 2014, as US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made clear after two days of meetings with NATO allies at the NATO Headquarters in Brussels.
BRUSSELS, June 5, 2013 - The United States will be the largest single contributor to the follow-on NATO operation that will replace the International Security Assistance Force mission in Afghanistan in 2015 and beyond, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said at NATO headquarters here today.So, there will still be deployments beyond the 2014 turnover of responsibility to the Afghan Government, just not as large as in the past.Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel describes the post-2014 mission in Afghanistan during a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, June 5, 2013. Hagel told reporters during a news conference that today's defense minister meetings brought some clarity to the "Resolute Support" operation NATO will launch to train, advise and assist Afghan forces after those forces have assumed full security responsibility by the end of 2014.
Hagel said U.S. support will include “new, expert, professional assistance to the [Afghan] army in the area of contracting and fuel support, not just soldiers.” He added, “We intend to be there for the long haul, and I made that commitment very clear today.”I wonder if my Spec4 Grandson, who deploys tomorrow, will be able to get two tours out of Afghanistan before it is all over? I wonder what his wife thinks? Especially considering someone wants to cut commissary privileges.
Regards — Cliff
One of the absurdities of the current commentary coming out of the Administration is that we will "turn over responsibility (for security) to the Afghan government." When did we assume responsibility for another sovereign state...as a matter of national policy? Who do we think we are??
ReplyDeleteMoreover, there is not a single thinking person who thinks that anything will change in Afghanistan once we have left.....as if we've changed much of it anyway. All we've done is to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into a rocky hell hole and moistened it with gallons and gallons of precious American blood. For what? What is better for our involvement? If "peace" was the objective we've certainly failed. If getting rid of the Taliban was the objective we have failed unbelievably.
American needs to stand back and contemplate why it is that for over 50 years, we have insisted on involving ourselves almost non-stop in stupid conflicts in one or more regions of the world. In each of the conflicts, we have impacted the long term and the end state imperceptibly....if at all.
Our very definition of war has been so badly perverted that we no longer know why it is we choose to engage in it. War should be decisive with a clear end state that favors our expenditure of national resources.
More important, we've become so confused in our projection of national power that we've quite literally been run out of every conflict we've fought since WWII. I'll cede Grenada.