The moral cowards governing us today have handed Afghanistan to Bin Laden. Instead of sending a half-million troops to that country, sealing its border with Pakistan, annihilating anyone who fought us, and then coming home, President Bush listened to then-CIA director George Tenet's promise that bribery and a few CIA and U.S. Special Forces officers would win the war. Tenet's recipe let about 60,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters go home with their guns and missed Bin Laden at Tora Bora.
Contemplate this raging idiocy the next time you wonder why we were caught flat-footed on 9/11.
Afghanistan is run by our ally and bin Laden sits in a Pakistan cave trying on fake beards to keep a JDAM from waxing him.
We could never have afforded to send as many troops as Scheuer calls for to Afghanistan given that 500,000 is more men than we had on active duty in the Army on 9/11.
How we'd get them into Afghanistan and then supply them is beyond me.
As for who we'd have to annihilate, that would be Pakistan. We wouldn't be coming home soon unless we pursued al Qaeda into Pakistan. And half a million would not be enough to occupy that country. So I guess we wouldn't be coming home soon no matter what.
Oh, and tell me how we pay for a war where each trooper would cost about four times in Afghanistan as much as supplying one in Iraq.
And what has Osama achieved against us since 9/11? He seems to be spending most of his efforts just staying alive.
Scheuer is an idiot. No wonder he is interviewed on NPR so regularly.
Here's some links to the fool's history. Here's one link's summary:
I have previously written about Scheuer’s bizarre ideas and behavior in the pages of COMMENTARY. In the latest Weekly Standard, I examine how the CIA’s own Inspector General has evaluated Scheuer’s work as a counterterrorism operative. It turns that as the CIA officer charged with the principal responsibility for countering Osama bin Laden, Scheuer was a walking calamity.
Osama bin Laden has a collection of excellent reasons, it would seem, for praising this American spy turned pundit.
In the real world, we waxed our enemies in Afghanistan rather than turning the place over to al Qaeda (that's what the place was before we invaded, remember that whole planning of 9/11 thing?), and in the bigger picture we are winning the war against Islamist terrorism:
Had Al Qaeda known that 9/11 would lead to the toppling of its Taliban protectors, the strangling of its financial network, and the death or detention of thousands of its lieutenants and foot soldiers, would it have gone forward? Having reaped the whirlwind once, would it be more inclined to risk it again? Or less so?
It is a contrarian thought, but Daniel Pipes argues that "terrorism does radical Islam more harm than good." That is partly because "it alarms and galvanizes Westerners," stiffening their resolve and intensifying their counterterrorist efforts, and partly because "terrorism obstructs the quiet work of political Islamism" - it impedes the radicals' long-term goal of making Islam ever more dominant within Western society.
What is in the enemy's mind we cannot know for sure. What we do know - what 9/11 made brutally clear - is that we are at war. The enemy is in this till the finish. We had better be, too.
I'm sure one reason we are winning is that those like Scheuer who were in charge of our struggle are now gone and on the fawning media circuit touting their superior knowledge.
But Scheuer can get away with this because the media has even less of a clue than Scheuer and his ilk. My God, the fool was in charge of protecting us from bin Laden! At least now he is just a talking calamity.
