Obama’s Afghanistan Extended Commentary (B3N Roundtable)

It is good to see that sometime after you make a statement for a video, print source, or any other form of media that later on down the line someone higher up confirms you are right. They may not even know you made the statement or maybe perhaps they do. Regardless, it is good to know you know what your talking about. Maybe one day I’ll go viral on something important to people like Peter Schiff did on predicting the economic collapse of 2008 but till then I guess I’ll just keep working away here and on Big 3 News.

Now incase you don’t know what I’m talking about here is what is up. General Stanley McChrystal sent a report to Obama that he needs more troops in Afghanistan, but not to be fooled into thinking that just more troops will solve the problem and that their needs to be a rethinking of the strategy in Afghanistan. The strategy is elaborated in General McChrystal’s interview with CBS. It’s a simple one but it’s not going to be easy to execute for sure. General McChrystal outlined that the military forces in Afghanistan need focus on protecting the citizens and not killing the enemy. You would think that would be somewhat the same thing but it is a much different game. The Taliban have been using videos to give the elusion that military forces in Afghanistan are purposely maiming and killing civilians. While this isn’t true it works because it is almost inevitable that civilians are going to get caught in the crossfire because of where the Taliban targets troops and even targets civilians as pointed out in the CBS interview. It is a difficult thing to do, but as I pointed out in this video it’s the thing we need to do.

There are people, though I can’t remember there names or the name of the organization, that were shown on PBS who are going to the mosques and religious schools in Pakistan and teaching a less hardline doctrine to the people and it’s working. This I think is what the US strategy in Afghanistan should be. The should have people to work and talk with the civilians. The military should take more of an approach to protect civilians rather than attacking the enemy. They should stop the drone attacks which are largely ineffective and have attacked civilians which only undos the goal of the military in Afghanistan. If the military followed this strategy then there would be no need to fight the Taliban because it would fade away of it’s own accord because the people feeding it’s rank and file membership would see this fight for what it really is.

However this shouldn’t be the end of it. America needs to end its interventionist foreign policy. We need to only attack in defense of our nation. This doesn’t mean we have to downsize our military but it does mean that we need to stop getting involved everywhere around the world. We need to bring our troops home from outposts that are no longer needed. That way we end groups like the Taliban, who their main beef with us is that we are constantly involved in the politics and goings on in the Middle East. I wish I was their for the roundtable on General McCrystal’s report to Obama because I think I would have been able to bring home this point even better. Hopefully this will be the future strategy and we can bring our troops home.

Advertisement