Lindsey Graham uses the news that eight American troops were just killed by the Taliban in a remote outpost to try and make it seem like President Obama doesn't support the troops if he doesn't bow down to Gen. McChrystal's request for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan on FOX News Sunday.
GRAHAM: Well, the one thing I can tell you for sure, without reinforcing our troops, you’re going to hear more of what happened today. General McChrystal said without reinforcements we cannot change the momentum that the Taliban has achieved, and the insurgency cannot be defeated in a year if something doesn’t change.
We had this very dilemma in Iraq. We didn’t have enough troops. Everybody thought Maliki was a sectarian prime minister. The country wasn’t governing itself. The security environment became terrible.
The one thing I can tell you, if we don’t add more troops, you’re going to see more of what happened yesterday. The security situation’s going to get worse. And any hope of better governance is lost, and the Taliban will re-emerge.
If you send troops in, we’ll have a second chance at governance. You need to put Karzai’s feet to the fire, or the next government’s feet to the fire, to do a better job. But it’s impossible to bring about better governance without security.
American troops have been getting killed in Afghanistan for a long time and Graham never made that claim before. Are their lives any less meaningful before McChrystal's request? And the troops were stationed in a position that would not be occupied by McChrystal's plan so Goober Graham is wrong on that front too if I understand the strategy correctly.
Eight U.S. troops died in tribal militia attacks on two remote American outposts in eastern Afghanistan Saturday, military officials said.
The attacks, which also killed two Afghan security officers, were the deadliest in months for American troops, The New York Times reported Sunday.
The coordinated attacks by tribal militia occurred in the Nuristan province, along the Pakistan border, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said in a statement.
The tribal fighters mounted the attacks from a mosque and a village in the Kamdish district in the eastern part of the province, and American forces "effectively repelled the attack and inflicted heavy enemy casualties," the U.S .military said.
U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal has outlined a new strategy to close down many of the remote outposts like those that came under attack.
And you'll never hear a FOX host or a republican talk about Iraq with any real honesty. A major reason why the violence went down in Iraq was because we paid off a whole lot of Sunni leaders with big bucks so they would stop the violence.
Now we put up a 100,000 Sunni militia on the American payroll, people who used to be shooting at the United States who are now on our payroll.
A google search helps me find this from a blog called Political Impressions:
In an April 2008 report, The Christian Science Monitor stated,
He (Abu Abdullah of the Islamic Army of Iraq) also maintains that while the US has succeeded in driving a wedge between AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) and Sunnis in Anbar Province, many of the tribesmen there who are now on the American payroll are still aiding IAI and other insurgent groups.
Members of these US-backed militias now number almost 91,000 and are paid a total of $16 million a month in salaries by the US. They are often lauded by President Bush in his speeches on Iraq.
Who do we pay in Afghanistan? Can the Taliban be bribed in different regions? I don't think so. The two countries are completely different in every way and so the comparisons of a surge between the two are absurd.
Don't forget abput Blue America's Afghanistn action called "No Means No!"
