Military rulers know US decison disaster

[Asian.Century]

Actually it was Patreaus and Bush are to be blamed and all Zionists and Neocons to be blamed for this big Disaster=- LOLz.

Military leaders know Obama’s decision is a disaster
By Robert Kagan

The press is reporting that the top military leaders have “endorsed” President Obama’s Afghan troop withdrawal decision. With all due respect to the fine reporters, that is not the news. Under our Constitution, military leaders have no choice but to endorse the president’s decision after giving him their best advice. They could resign, of course, but to have the entire senior military leadership resign over a president’s decision contrary to their advice would be a disaster, and not least for the troops on the ground.

Make no mistake, however. The entire military leadership believes the president’s decision is a mistake, and especially the decision to withdraw the remainder of the surge forces by September 2012. They will soldier on and do their best, but as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, put it, in characteristic understatement, they believe the decision will increase the risk to the troops and increase the chancethat the mission will not succeed. It bears repeating that the deadline imposed by the president has nothing to do with military or strategic calculation. It has everything to do with an electoral calculation. President Obama wants those troops out two months before Americans go to the voting booth.

This may prove a disastrous political calculation, too, however. If the war is going badly in the summer and fall of 2012, it will be because of the decision the president made this week. Everyone will know he did it against the advice of his commanders. Everyone will know he did it for political reasons. So if the war is going badly a year from now, whom do you think the American people will blame? There will still be 70,000 American troops in Afghanistan, but as part of a losing effort. Will Americans reward Obama at the polls under those circumstances?

This was a shortsighted decision from every perspective. There is still time for the president to fix it. He just needs to say that the deadline is flexible and depends on circumstances on the ground. That would go some way toward repairing the damage he has done.

Military leaders know Obama’s decision is a disaster - PostPartisan - The Washington Post

 

[Asian.Century]

lolz domestic fight starts between democrats, republicans and military n pentagon.

Admiral Mike Mullen says withdrawal plan is a risk


America's top military commander has distanced himself from President's Barack Obama's plan to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by next September, branding it as hastier and creating "more risk" than he had advised.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen appears before the US House Armed Services Committee Photo: EPA
By Toby Harnden, Washington7:19PM BST 23 Jun 2011
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, used prepared testimony before the House Armed Services Committee to reveal a significant breach between Mr Obama and the senior officers he charged with defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The remarks came as General David Petraeus, Nato commander in Afghanistan, was preparing to testify before a Senate committee after it was confirmed that he opposed Mr Obama's plan, which drew heavily on advice from Joe Biden, the vice president.
"The president's decisions are more aggressive and incur more risk than I was originally prepared to accept," Adml Mullen told a House of Representatives committee hearing.
"More force for more time is, without doubt, the safer course. But that does not necessarily make it the best course. Only the President, in the end, can really determine the acceptable level of risk we must take."

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, said: "Petraeus loses, Biden wins. And I respect the vice president, but I think that we have undercut a strategy that was working. I think the 10,000 troops leaving year is going to make this more difficult."

 

[Asian.Century]

Above article continued...........

In his speech, Mr Obama, who did not mention Gen Petraeus, told Americans that "the tide of war is receding" and that after a decade of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan "these long wars will come to a responsible end".

Now that "the light of a secure peace can be seen in the distance" in Afghanistan, it was "time to focus on nation building here at home".
Adml Mullen's comments were carefully phrased but clearly calculated to express a rare public disagreement between Mr Obama and his top brass.

A rift with Gen Petraeus, who commanded the successful Iraq surge, is revered by many members of Congress and has been floated as a potential
Republican presidential candidate in 2016, could have serious political ramifications for Mr Obama.

The Pentagon fought a rearguard action to prevent the surge force ordered into Afghanistan by Mr Obama in December 2009 from being pulled out by early spring next year but the withdrawal plan announced by Mr Obama, which had initially been tabled as a "compromise" by Robert Gates, the defence secretary, was not supported by Gen Petraeus.

There were reports of heated discussions during the month before Mr Obama's prime-time speech on Wednesday night.

White House officials, aware of the soaring costs of the war and its questionable progress could be a political liability in the 2012 election, are said to have clashed with Gen Petraeus, who argued that with more time he could repeat his success in Iraq.

Mr Obama rejected the Petraeus proposal to shift thousands of troops to from southern Afghanistan, which has been largely pacified, to the east in order to build a counter-insurgency campaign there. He also refused to bow to Gen Petraeus's request to keep some of the 33,000 troops in Afghanistan until 2013.

Two military officers with close ties to Petraeus told "National Journal" that Gen Petraeus disagreed with Mr Gates's compromise proposal and had not endorsed Mr Obama's drawdown plan.

A third officer said: "No one is talking about succeeding or winning ... the phrase [used on Wednesday night] was bringing this war to a 'responsible' conclusion. I'm not really sure what that means."

Seeking to avoid an ugly public row, Mr Gates confirmed that Gen Petraeus had wanted a slower drawdown by added that he was "not aware of a single general ever in history that did not want more troops and more time". A spokesman for Gen Petraeus declined to comment.
Nearly 70,000 American troops will remain in Afghanistan even after the reductions announced by Mr Obama. This is twice the number when he took office in January 2009.

Michele Flournoy, Undersecretary of Defense, told members of Congress: "Clearly, this is not a 'rush to the exits' that will jeopardise our security gains."
Mr Obama's speech was warmly welcomed by America's Nato allies. Speaking in Afghanistan, William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said: "We welcome President Obama's announcement and it is in line with our own thinking. There is clearly progress being made in Afghanistan and I've seen that for myself on this visit."

Mr Hague confirmed that there were talks with the Taliban. Contacts do take place," he said. "The United Kingdom will assist in that when it can."
Speaking to senators in Washington, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, described the contacts as "very preliminary outreach to members of the Taliban", adding that "this is not a pleasant business" but an essential element of ending the insurgency.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France announced a pullout "in a proportional manner and in a calendar comparable to the withdrawal of American reinforcements" while Guido Westerwelle, Germany's Defence Minister, said that his country hoped "to be able to reduce our own troop contingent for the first time" by the end of 2011.

 

[Asian.Century]

General Patreaus feels the defeat a rare one though!

Gates Beats Out Petraeus in Fight Over Afghanistan Withdrawal

JUN 23 2011, 12:05 PM ET2

President Obama sided with his outgoing Defense secretary over his top general

Senior White House officials wanted all of the 33,000 U.S. "surge" troops to withdraw from Afghanistan by next spring. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Kabul, was adamant they stay until the end of 2012. The deadlock was broken by outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who sold Obama and his top civilian aides on a compromise plan that will leave most of the reinforcements in Afghanistan through next September but ensure they're back well before the November elections.

Obama's prime-time address Wednesday night offered little indication of the heated behind-the-scenes battle over Afghanistan that consumed the president and his war cabinet for much of this past month. The debates pitted White House aides wary of the war's high costs and uncertain progress against a high-profile general who brought Iraq back from the brink of defeat several years ago and was confident he could do the same in Afghanistan if given enough time. This account is based on interviews with multiple officials with direct knowledge of the internal deliberations.

Petraeus had sold then-President George W. Bush on the Iraq surge and helped persuade Obama to overrule some of his closest advisers--including Vice President Joe Biden--and deploy 33,000 new troops to Afghanistan in December 2009. When it came time to decide when those troops would come home, however, Petraeus suffered a rare defeat. Obama rejected the general's proposal to shift large numbers of troops to eastern Afghanistan in order to mount an expansive counterinsurgency campaign there. And the president was ultimately unwilling to budge from his belief that the surge troops needed to fully withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of next year.

Gates, meanwhile, will retire from public service next week with another big bureaucratic win under his belt. During the initial Afghan surge debates in the fall of 2009, Gates was similarly successful in mediating between the White House and the uniformed military. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the top U.S. war commander, had joined Petraeus in arguing for deploying as many as 80,000 new troops to Afghanistan to reverse the Taliban's battlefield momentum. Biden, backed by other civilian aides, wanted to deploy 20,000 new troops and adopt a far narrower mission than McChrystal and Petraeus wanted. Gates ultimately crafted the winning compromise: a surge of 30,000 troops paired with a commitment to begin withdrawing the forces 18 months later. Gates's compromise is the reason the first surge troops will begin leaving Afghanistan in July.

As word of the Obama's decision reached Petraeus's allies, word of the commander's disapproval reached the White House. Two military officers with close ties to Petraeus said in separate interviews Wednesday night that the general disagreed with Gates's compromise proposal and had not endorsed the drawdown plan. A third military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to avoid publicly criticizing the president, said of the White House: "No one is talking about succeeding or winning... the phrase [Wednesday night] was bringing this war to a 'responsible' conclusion. I'm not really sure what that means."

The initial set of Afghan discussions had been marred by a series of leaks that infuriated Obama and led the president to accuse his military advisers of trying to box him in politically. Earlier this year, as the administration began to gear up for the withdrawal debate, Gates and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon sent out word informally that any leaks would be interpreted by the president as insubordination and as an attempt to improperly influence public opinion. The approach paid off: The withdrawal debate occurred almost completely out of public sight, with few details leaking and neither side making their case in the press. The second debate was also far shorter than the first had been. The president and his war cabinet held three meetings in the White House situation room over the past two weeks, with Petraeus laying out his troop withdrawal recommendations early last week, according to officials familiar with the matter.

The debate effectively boiled down to a matter of months. Petraeus agreed that 10,000 troops could be safely withdrawn this year, but he wanted to keep some of the remaining 23,000 troops in Afghanistan until the end of 2012 and to have the flexibility to extend some of their tours into early 2013 if conditions deteriorated, according to officials with knowledge of the deliberations. Obama's civilian advisers, pointing to intelligence assessments showing that the U.S. had killed 20 of al-Qaida's top 30 leaders in the region, wanted the final 23,000 surge troops to leave Afghanistan next spring, with the last of the forces returning home roughly around March.

For nearly two weeks, neither side budged. Petraeus made it clear he opposed beginning the drawdown during the summer, traditionally the time of Afghanistan's most intense fighting, according to an official familiar with his thinking. The general wanted his successor, Marine Lt. Gen. John Allen, to be able to move troops from southern Afghanistan, where coalition forces have pushed the Taliban out of many of their former strongholds, to eastern Afghanistan, where conditions have been deteriorating for months. Such a move would take time, and Petraeus argued that the surge troops should be kept in Afghanistan through the end of the year to ensure they had enough time to mount a full counterinsurgency campaign in eastern Afghanistan.

Obama's civilian aides pushed back hard, arguing that all of the troops could safely leave Afghanistan by next spring because of the successes of the stepped-up counterterror push inside both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gates, who felt the spring 2012 timetable was far too aggressive, proposed keeping the remaining surge troops in Afghanistan through next spring as a compromise. Obama ultimately chose--as he did during the surge debate--to side with the veteran Defense chief.

John Nagl, a retired Army officer with close ties to Petraeus who wrote the military's counterinsurgency field manual, said in a written statement that Obama's way forward gives "commanders impressive flexibility this year by linking the withdrawal of the first 10,000 troops of the surge to the year's end. But he inexplicably removed all such flexibility next year by requiring the remaining 23,000 surge troops to be withdrawn by the summer of 2012--necessitating their removal from combat at the height of the fighting season."

Nagl, who is now the president of the Center for a New American Security, said he believes "this problem of untimely diminished capabilities can be overcome by the commanders on the ground, yet opens questions about the nature of the calculus."

Petraeus, for his part, will almost certainly be asked about his views of the withdrawal plan when he testifies Thursday before the Senate panel considering his nomination to be the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The commander is known for his diplomatic skills, and it's not clear if he will be willing to publicly discuss any of his recent disagreements with the White House. Petraeus, who will retire from the military to assume his new post at the CIA, will need to decide whether to once again play the part of the good soldier.

Gates Beats Out Petraeus in Fight Over Afghanistan Withdrawal - Yochi Dreazen & Marc Ambinder - Politics - The Atlantic

 

[Asian.Century]

^^^ This domestic fight is shaping to be ugly now!!!!

 

[Asian.Century]

Americans crying after Defeat?

 

[Asian.Century]

Anyone know the real casualty count? means really real?

 

[Oldman1]

Obama is the Commander in Chief so the military leaders have to follow him. But he will be out of the office in the next election.

 

[Asian.Century]

Obama is the Commander in Chief so the military leaders have to follow him. But he will be out of the office in the next election.

Can you confirm that? why would he be out from next office?

 

[Asian.Century]

The Afghan war is lost. So now who'll take the blame?

There is no single villain. The military did the disastrous deed, but it was civilians who created and defined the mission

Julian Glover
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 12 June 2011 21.00 BST

For the want of three bombs we lost the war. In fact, Robert Gates's retirement speech as US defence secretary last week did not admit to defeat in Afghanistan. Not quite. He stuck to the one more heave, 10,000 bigger bangs, 100,000 more troops plan by which the American and British military are still marching to hell-and-gone. But his lament for Nato's future, and criticism of those soggy Europeans who want Yankee protection without fighting in Yankee wars, was really a confession of failure. Gates is getting his recriminations in early, blaming others before he's blamed himself.

He ought to be. So – up to a point and lower down the chain – should those cocky senior British officers with posh accents who talked so fluently of "cracking on in Helmand" and creating Garmshire out of Garmsir, and hoping a good war in Afghanistan might erase the stain of a bad one in Iraq. Trained to fight, to want every resource for their troops, and never to say it can't be done, such commanders made war seductive for civilians. Twice in Helmand I did the rounds of PowerPoint briefings in bunkers and helicopter flights dodging dry river gullies: more fun than war should ever be. Faced with such thrills, what politician dare question whether heroes – who really are heroes – are right?

So: all the military's fault, then? No, not simply, and not entirely. Simplicities about the past will misinform the future. Confronted with what is in effect defeat in the camouflage of success, we may come to persuade ourselves that Afghanistan was only the military's war.

It's easy to see how this impression could grow. There is a flavour of it in Sherard Cowper-Coles's outstanding new account of his time as British ambassador in Afghanistan, Cables From Kabul. The book attacks what he calls "the hopeful vocabulary of stabilisation and the eager-earnest syntax of counter-insurgency". Conflict acquired its own momentum. Some generals acted like politicians while others – Richard Dannatt – tried to become politicians. Blinking in body armour, fresh off an RAF flight from Muscat, civilian visitors were led blind on a tour of battle in which success was always just around the corner. "The formula for such visits was unchanging. I am not sure how much senior visitors, who often seemed close to collapsing from exhaustion, really learned." Having shared a room one night at Kandahar airbase with a sleepless Nick Harvey, now the armed forces minister, I see Cowper-Coles's point.

Among many sad anecdotes, he notes that 27% of British helicopter flights in Helmand carried (mainly military) VIPs, while politicians were being denounced for under-equipping the forces. The RAF spent £70m widening taxiways in Kandahar so it could fly Tornado jets for which there was no call beyond the spurious claim they might cheer up the British squaddies they overflew. Or the tale of the commander who joked that injuries would work wonders for Britain's Paralympic team in 2012. Cowper-Coles restates the claim that troops were sent to Afghanistan in a bid to "use them, or lose them" to Treasury cuts.

Few visitors asked, as Cowper-Coles recalls one Estonian doing, the only appropriate question: "What the are we doing here?" Fair enough. But that was something the military could never be expected to answer. Whatever went wrong – and has yet to go wrong – in Helmand, failure was only a subset of political and diplomatic mistakes. It was civilians who created and defined the mission. Cowper-Coles's wounding indictment of the can-do military response explains but does not entirely exonerate the behaviour of those who could and should have taken a second opinion.

There is no single villain. Gordon Brown and David Cameron (suggests Cowper-Coles) meant well; so, even more, did David Miliband. A fortune in money, effort, intelligence and goodwill was squandered in an absurdist circus. He paints Kabul as a city in which foreigners engaged almost exclusively with one another, launching ever-more elaborate holistic strategies to save a nation whose citizens they feared to meet. Spies, diplomats and "tree-hugging" aid workers whirled around with splendid intentions, promising that this time their plans really were joined up and would work. And it never happened.

Cowper-Coles adds that the international diplomatic effort, which he joined, was worse. Everyone sought favour at the court of King Karzai. One small story is indicative. When the Afghan president decided to make an exhibition of some prisoners on death row, the execution ground was found to be locked and the luckless men driven round the city until a patch of ground on which they could be gunned down was found. "I was privately appalled at what had happened, but rather ignobly chose to say nothing," Cowper-Coles writes. "My American colleague … told the president, without the slightest of irony, that the executions had been a 'beacon of hope for the future of Afghanistan'."

Cowper-Coles's is, subtly, a bitter critique. Had this book been written a few years ago, he would have been ostracised by a diplomatic establishment whose instinct is to belittle former colleagues who go rogue. How telling, then, that last week's book launch in London was packed with confident, clever people in expensive suits: the pick of the diplomatic establishment.

They know the Afghan war is lost. The coming battle is to deal out – and dodge – the blame.

The Afghan war is lost. So now who'll take the blame? | Julian Glover | Comment is free | The Guardian

 

[Juice]

Damned, AU is having a very heated convo with himself!

 

[cheekybird]

Obama is the Commander in Chief so the military leaders have to follow him. But he will be out of the office in the next election.

Arn't you all going to to elect him again to office after all he got osama (sarcasm)ofcourse they didnt get obl

 

[Thomas]

Can you confirm that? why would he be out from next office?

odds are he will be out next election. most people are fed up with his handling of the economy and his healthcare law which he passed agianst the wishes of the majority. Not to mention he has little back bone when it comes to foriegn policy.

 

[Asian.Century]

^^ Any chance who will assume office after next on next presidential election?? since, US economy, and debt crisis is not being handled at all rightly!

 

[Asian.Century]

31 US troops, 7 afghan and 1 dog dead in helicopter shot down near kabul. Is Kabul will be lost soon?