Charlie Rose

NeilMacCallister  06/20/2011 06:38 AM Report

The questions of "How many soldiers do we keep in Afghanistan?" and "When do we bring them all home?" cannot be answered until we first agree on why we are there.

Likewise, without first describing what our goal in Afghanistan is, and then electing our strategy to achieve that goal, how can we know if what we will do should be called a "counter-insurgency" or a "counter-terrorism" effort? ..and does it really matter???

I'll bet Washington knows what it's objective is, ..why can't we just announce it?

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Aren't we in Afghanistan because Pakistan has dozens of nuclear warheads under unstable security, and now Iran is racing to throw a few of their own nuclear missiles into the Middle Eastern mix?

Aren't we over there just trying to "Keep our enemies closer"?

How long will THAT take???

This war could be stopped tomorrow by an end of the enmity (..Hah!!), or the removal of those warheads!

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Our choices are:

1) Stay in Afghanistan and work to prevent those nuclear warheads from ever being captured by the terrorists (..a counter-Insurgency policy)

2) Leave Afghanistan, and wait until those Pakistani or Iranian bombs are captured and/or used by the terrorists or their host nations, at which point we just send in a retaliatory nuclear-armed drone to obliterate the entire nation which we decide is the most responsible for the use of those nukes (..a counter-Terrorist policy).

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I prefer the first (counter-insurgency) option, if we can still afford it!

Yes, a hundred billion dollars a year to keep us there is very expensive,..

But don't we have to weigh that cost against the cost of letting those warheads get loose, and then being used against a large-population city? ..and then the cost of the retaliation, and the lives and the dollars destroyed there too??

Costs in dollars! ..Costs in human lives!! ..Don't we need to decide which strategy towards the goal bears the lesser costs?

When will we talk about that??

robdverity  06/14/2011 05:27 PM Report

PBS pledge drive preempted this - so this is somewhat unfair. Think I agree w/REM, (sans Touc. n Fouc. - they're out of my league).

Martha in the past has always come off as media wordsmith spouting the expected jingoism of the times. Stay the course, bad as it is, we can't send the message that the great super-power isn't really that super, or that powerful. Osama, after all was successful (to break the US chasing his shadow), where Obama is not (we're broke).

That kind of defeat is too subtle for the likes of Raddatz (and prob. CR). The Af-Pak defeat will be further marked by the net increase in enmity and enemies when we do depart (particularly if we stay another 10 yrs).

You don't have to have your head up your butt to get in lock step with the our war mongers, but it seems to help.

REMant  06/14/2011 10:48 AM Report

From what I read even in erstwhile pro-admin sources the effort there is not going as well as Mr Rose would have it. And I'm sure, ladies, those fire support bases are where they are because they are on Taliban infiltration routes, not as pin cushions or police stations. If they aren't then then they were set up as the equivalent of some kind of special forces outpost. There is something wrong with that and always has been. The govt intends I believe to transfer all this stuff to the CIA where it will be even further out of public view and control than it is now, and conduct covert wars throughout the Middle East in violation IMHO of the Constitution. I'd say it is another example of the kind of technocratic bent critics like Tocqueville and Foucault have repeatedly warned about in "democracy."