Bouhammer's Military Blog » Political Opinions

Its all political now

Bouhammer — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:43:20 +0000

Back in 2001 when we went into Afghanistan, it was for a noble cause. We were attacked as a country and lost thousands of our citizens because Afghanistan allowed the terrorist to train and thrive there. After we eliminated the enemy we began the process of rebuilding the country. It has been decimated starting with the Soviet occupation and then after that as the Taliban took control.

From 2001-2012 we have lost thousands of America’s sons and daughters there, 1891 to be exact. They fell giving their lives for the security of our country and for the good of the Afghan people and the world. The cause of this war was just and appropriate. Regardless of what people feel about why we went to war with Iraq, the war in Afghanistan was warranted.

Photo Courtesy of Bigstockphoto.com

There has been a lot of discussion in the news, around the watercooler and in the homes of our military about what strategy we should take in Afghanistan. Should we draw a line in the sand at 2014 and pull out or should we plan to stay there until the country is ready to stand up for itself? In reality nobody has the perfect answer because none of us have the ability to see into the future.

However with SecDef Panetta’s slip of the tongue the other day stating that we are going to end the “combat’ role a year early in 2013, it really smells like our war strategy is now completely political. This screw up by the SecDef shocked many around the world, from the Afghans to Panetta’s own staff.

With an election year coming it is as clear as crystal that this new plan (that had yet to be announced to anyone) is geared towards propping up the President. He wants to be the guy who not only ended the Iraq War (except for the fact that President Bush signed the original agreement to have us out by the end of 2011), but also the Afghan war. As I said before when our last “combat troops” left Iraq, you can spin those lies all you want, but as long as they are still there kitted up, armed to the teeth and dying, they are in combat. So the administration is now planning a strategy to say that the last “combat” troops will be out of Afghanistan in 2013. Who knows how many and for how long American troops will stay there, but the political re-election machine wants the American people to believe the lies that by saying they are “non-combat” that we aren’t there getting wounded or dying anymore.

Now I personally agree that we need to hold Afghanistan accountable (like yesterday) for their own security. However I would like to think that our troops (many of which are friends of mine) whom are there, are there for the noble cause as for which this whole thing started, and not to just be fodder for political sound bites.

Please don’t think that votevets.org speak for any vets

Bouhammer — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:49:03 +0000

Votevets.org is about the most left leaning and ultra-liberal organization as IVAW and even a little more than IAVA. On their about page they state

While non-partisan, the group is the largest progressive organization of veterans in America

That is one of the biggest lies told on the site and goes along with many others. Jon Stoltz should be ashamed as a former NCO to put such lies on the web and portray him and his scrappy gang of left-pushing followers as anything close to non-partisan.

They are now generating their own news because they sent a letter to GEN Odierno asking him to block LTG (ret) Boykin from speaking at West Point. LTG Boykin has more than earned his opportunity to speak at West Point. Just pick any one timeframe of his career. You can start when he graduated form the very first Delta Force Selection course, his work on Operation Desert One, Just Cause, Gothic Serpent, Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom or any number of other “conflicts” he was involved with.

VoteVets (or as I call them, VoteforLiberalVets.org) is swallowing to the hilt, the lies spread by the MSM and the liberal left about LTG Boykin.

Had they read his book or did their research and not listen to the MSM and liberal, atheist-loving, religion-hating groups then they would know he was NOT comparing Christianity against Islam. He was comparing his God (The Lord Almighty) against the “God” of the guy he was interrogating (which was money and greed) when he said “My God is more powerful than your God”. Just because the not so skinny “skinny” was a skinny (i.e. somali) does not make him muslim or a practicing one at that.

Oh and in case you are wondering when this happened, watch Black Hawk Down. They portrayed BG Garrison as doing the interview of Osman Atto they got at the start of the movie, but that was actually Boykin.

Atto was stealing UN food and support from his people to make money for himself. He was not taking care of Somalis and instead was worshiping the false idol of greed.

GEN Odierno, I ask that you support LTG (ret) Boykin speaking at the US Military Academy and if possible even attend yourself. If Votevets.org was truly non-partisan then they would focus on getting vets elected and not attacking every Bush-era appointed leader that doesn’t see things their way.

Is NATO that stupid?

Bouhammer — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:00:17 +0000

I have to wonder what elementary school drop-out is up at NATO running things and making decision? It does not take even a High-school diploma to figure out this is not a good idea or will turn out well.

Taliban militants, who have shunned violence, are being provided monthly cash incentive of £100, besides being given amnesty for all crimes such as murdering children, beheadings and hanging women.
“Members of the Taliban who give up their fight are being paid £100 a month and will be allowed to keep their guns in a new initiative to end the insurgency,” the Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported.

Paying the Taliban not to fight is like giving a rapist free hookers so he doesn’t rape innocent women. Sure it will accomplish what you want in the short term, but over time it will become too expensive and you make them dependent on you.

Once we cut off the payments then they will go back to doing what they have to in order to survive, which means attacking us or the Government of Afghanistan. You cannot buy your way out of a problem like this.

The move, which has the full support of NATO, is part of the “reintegration” programme and is intended to keep militants from attacking troops from the International Stabilisation and Assistance Force (ISAF).
“Those who have attacked and killed British forces are also effectively given an amnesty, which means they will never be put on trial,” the paper said.
Maj Gen David Hook, the director of the Joint Force Integration Cell in Kabul, told the paper the programme would be difficult for many British families to accept but insisted that reintegration was vital if peace was to be achieved.
The amnesty extends to all Taliban militants, including those who have taken part in atrocities, such as murdering children, beheadings and hanging women, it said.
The agreement is part of a policy signed by the British Government in which insurgents are being allowed to “walk off the battlefield” and enter a “reintegration” scheme, it said.
The paper said Taliban joining the programme are not interrogated but instead are asked to complete a questionnaire explaining their reasons for joining the insurgency.
More than 2,700 insurgents have been reintegrated into mainstream Afghan society since October 2010, with 800 now described as “showing interest in leaving the Taliban”.
Of those, about 90 are from Helmand, where nearly 400 British troops have been killed and more than 5,000 injured.

This will never work for the long haul. In fact I am sure many Taliban would simply collect the money each month and still attack troops. What is their motivation not to?

There is an old saying in Afghanistan that says “you can’t buy and Afghan, but you can rent one”. We can’t buy their loyalty or allegiance, it is impossible with the resources at hand. This is just the most stupid-ass thing I have ever heard of. It is bound to waste thousands or millions of dollars and end up achieving nothing except maybe a temporary reprieve.

Someone needs to find the idiots in ISAF and NATO who came up with this hair-brained idea and bounce them out of the building before they do any more damage.

Time to break out the stick

Bouhammer — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 13:22:39 +0000

The headline on this story says it all.

IED Attacks in Afghanistan Hit All-Time High

The number of IED attacks in Afghanistan has spiked to all-time high, U.S. military officials said, because of the free flow of critical bomb-making materials from neighboring Pakistan.

The summer fighting season continually gets worse year after year, and as each year progresses and as more and more foreign countries like Iran and Pakistan help with technology and assistance this is no surprise.

Senior military officials said there were more than 1,600 strikes involving so-called “improvised explosive devices” in June, setting a new record for the long Afghan war, and underscoring the dangers posed by militants operating inside both of the troubled countries. The number of IED strikes in June 2011 is nearly 25 percent higher than the monthly average for the conflict. In May, for instance, there were 1,250 IED attacks.

IEDs, crude bombs fashioned out of homemade explosives and simple triggering devices, are the primary cause of coalition fatalities in Afghanistan. So far this year, they have accounted for at least 158 of the U.S.-led coalition’s 283 battlefield fatalities in Afghanistan. And they are exacting a steadily climbing human toll: the bombs caused 1,248 coalition casualties between April and June, a 15 percent increase over the same period a year earlier.

Lt. Gen. Michael Barbero, the head of the military’s Joint IED Defeat Organization, said in an interview that the growing IED threat in Afghanistan is a direct result of Pakistan’s failure to prevent large quantities of fertilizer – the main ingredient of the bombs – from being smuggled into Afghanistan.

This blog along with many military leaders and other regional experts have been saying for a while that the path to success in Afghanistan is through Pakistan. We have little to no influence in Iran, so there is no reason in even considering them. But Pakistan is a “friend” and I use that term loosely. Fertilizer in Pakistan is one huge threat to our troops in Afghanistan along with several other threats. But fertilizer is exceptionally dangerous because it has a normal benign use for crops. So to posses it is not a major red flag. Having six tons of it is, but if nobody in Pakistan is watching (like the officials in Norway weren’t watching a couple of months ago) then people can acquire it and stockpile it for uses that are beyond farming.

The fertilizer issue poses a particularly complex set of challenges for American and Pakistani policymakers. It is legal to produce fertilizer in Pakistan, an agrarian nation whose farmers are heavily reliant on the crop stimulant. As a result, U.S. military officials acknowledge that any American effort to block the production or export of the fertilizer would spark fierce public fury within Pakistan. More practically, U.S. officials say there is virtually no chance that Islamabad would agree to such curbs.

The U.S. also has a paucity of useful intelligence about the militant networks inside Pakistan that purchase the fertilizer and then smuggle it into Afghanistan. In a late-June speech, Barbero said the nation’s intelligence community needed to place more emphasis on the IED “supply chain” leading from Pakistan to its volatile neighbor.

Our country’s leadership needs to get much more aggressive on the Pakistan government to deal with this issue. By aggressive I do not mean giving them even millions or billions of more dollars in aid. The “carrot” method has failed to work. Now it is time to break out the “stick”.

To read the entire story, go to:

www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/ied-attacks-in-afghanistan-hit-all-time-high-20110803/

Attack on the Inter-Con Hotel

Bouhammer — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 04:35:32 +0000

There are still a lot of reports coming out about the attack on the Inter-Continental hotel today. Depending on what news media you read, the actual number of attackers and dead may vary. Bottom line is that the Taliban just showed that even the most secure and largest city in Afghanistan is not safe. Heck the biggest and most prominent hotel sitting on a hill in the middle of the city is not even safe.

So, exactly why are we planning to pull out 30,000 soldiers by the end of next year?

A follow up to the President’s Plan

Bouhammer — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:43:55 +0000

Yesterday I posted a blog entry about the President’s withdrawal plan from Afghanistan. Around the time I was posting that, apparently GEN Petraeus was testifying in front of the Senate committee which was confirming him as the head of the CIA. ‘

It appears that GEN Petraeus has the same reservations and concerns that ADM Mullen had.

Hours later in a Senate confirmation hearing on his nomination to be the next director of the CIA, GEN. David Petraeus, the current commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, nearly echoed ADM. Mullen word for word. “The ultimate decision was a more aggressive formulation than what we had recommended,” Petraeus said.

Gen. Petraeus said that over the past month he had a series of meetings with the president during which he recommended a number of different options for reducing the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, each with its own risk assessments.
Petraeus conceded that no general ever has all the troops and resources he wants, but when the president makes a decision “it is the responsibility of the military to salute smartly.”

Read more: www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/06/23/military-leaders-would-have-handled-afghan-war-drawdown-differently/#ixzz1QCjXCDnt

So it is not just the SecDef, and Admiral Mullen warning that the President’s plan was too aggressive, but also the top combat commander in Afghanistan (the same guy that turned around and won Iraq and will soon be the CIA Director), GEN Petraeus. Yes it is ultimately the President’s choice, but that also means he can NEVER blame anything on anyone else, not on President Bush, not on GEN McChrystal, not on GEN Petraeus, not on ANYONE. This is HIS war to lose so I hope he realizes that and takes that to heart.

The President’s plan

Bouhammer — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 20:21:32 +0000

I have been thinking about this posting all day since I saw the initial news last night that the President is going to call for 10,000 troops to withdraw by the end of the year. Of course last night the reports were that it would be 5,000 at the end of the summer and then another 5,000 in the spring.

I am not sure if those reports were wrong or if he had a change of heart, but now the “official” story is 10,000 by the end of this year.

So at the cusp of the worse fighting season we will see in Afghanistan since the start of the Global War on Terror, the President is going to announce a pull-out of troops, thereby telling the Taliban, AQI and our other enemies that their waiting game is paying off.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love for this war to be over. LOVE IT. But I also don’t want the last 10 years to be in vain. I don’t want my brothers and sisters who have fallen on the field of battle or are living lives forever scarred and changed to be all for nothing. I struggle all the time with the right answer for Afghanistan. I literally commit have a dual-minded struggle going on.

Sometimes I think we should commit everything we have and go in there and kick ass, to all be damned. By kicking ass I don’t mean just killing everything in sight, but instead going in with the appropriate amount of forces to secure the place, clear the areas of interest, hold them and then build and transition. We may have 100,000 troops there right now but that is still not enough. We need to lock down that country on all sides and eradicate the cancer. This means holding the government accountable for dealing with corruption and for prosecuting its own citizens and officials who are corrupt.

The other part of me wants to go back to the strategy I had when I first came back in 2007. Put the country on notice that they have 18 months to clean their act up, pull themselves up by their bootstraps and secure their own country. Big boy rules apply and they need to start acting like it. At 18 months we pull out everything, and I mean everything and come back home. However we leave them with the caveat, which is that if we suspect they are allowing terrorists to train and plan and attack from their country, then we reserve the right to come in there with whatever we have and eradicate the threat.

…..BREAK, BREAK, BREAK…..

What you read above was what I had written so far before the President’s speech last night. I had written that in the late afternoon and was meaning to get back to it and finish it up to post before the President spoke, but got distracted with family matters.

So now the speech has happened and we all know that the President is planning to pull out 10,000 this year and another 20,000 next year so that all 30,000 “surge” troops are pulled back out.

By the definition of “surge” that makes perfect sense. You surge them in for a specific reason and as soon as that objective is achieved then you pull them out. My problem with it is that it shouldn’t have still been considered a “surge” but a regular increase of forces. Those forces were and are still needed. Yes by them being classified as a “surge only” force then they should be pulled out…once he objective is complete.

So what was the objective? According to the President on Dec 1st, 2009….

After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.

So as per his words the objective was to “seize the initiative” and “build Afghan capacity“. I am wondering, does he or more importantly do the combatant commanders feel we have now successfully “seized the initiative“?

Maidan Shar, Afghanistan • It took the U.S.-led coalition $106 million to build Afghanistan’s largest police training center, while insurgents needed only a single mortar shell to show the challenges facing the Afghan security forces.

The round crashed down and exploded within the grounds of the facility during its inauguration Wednesday, sending panicked police recruits crawling across the floor of a meeting hall and prompting bodyguards to bundle one of Afghanistan’s vice presidents and the government minister in charge of police forces into helicopters and flee.

I would say we are a long way from quite seizing anything of substance. How much Afghan capacity has been built if they cannot even secure a police training center?

So we are going to pull out these surge troops before they accomplished their objective, because the timeline is up?

We have a common saying the Army. We train to standard, not to time. The same holds true here, we fight a war based on mission and objectives not based on a deadline.

Heck even the top military commanders are not happy about this plan by the President.

Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee that he supports the plan, although he had recommended a less aggressive drawdown schedule.

Obama’s approach adds risk to the military mission, Mullen said. But he added, “It’s manageable risk.”

I know Admiral Mullen is trying to walk a thin fence, but I think he needs to be a little more of a NO man in this case.

I will close out this blog for now as I have covered a variety of topics and I could go on for quite a while about this topic. I will close it with this old Afghan saying.

“You Americans may have the watches, but we Afghans have the time”

Time is on their side and now they know all they have to do is wait us out….

Who to believe, the President or the SecDef?

Bouhammer — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:36:18 +0000

So the story below made me wonder, is the “withdrawal” of troops just eye-wash to appease to the those who the President promised he would start to pull troops out this year? Or is it truly the start of a real withdrawal of troops?

Then you have SecDef Gates (who I have been critical of over the last 12+ months for being a ride the fence yes man) doing his last hoorah tour of the troops and starting to speak more frankly of his soon to be ex-boss.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates says U.S. forces are doing a great job in Afghanistan, and people need to be patient and “consider the consequences of failure” if the U.S. were to pull out prematurely.

Gates returned last week from an overseas trip in which he bade farewell to troops ahead of his departure from his post at the end of the month. CIA Director Leon Panetta is expected to be confirmed this week as Gates’ replacement.

As I read Gates’s comments and see the story below I wonder isn’t this an exact opposite of each other? To me it seems we have the administration talking out of both sides of its mouth at the same exact time. As long as Gates is the SecDef, he still represents the Government.

Granted he may be just speaking his mind and his opinion from his standpoint, but then if that is the case who is right? The President who is telling America what he wants them to hear or the Secretary of Defense who is giving his honest opinion? I don’t know about you, but I would always want to hear the truth and not what someone thinks I want to hear.

Around 800 US troops would reportedly be withdrawn from Afghanistan next month and won’t be replaced, raising suspicion that President Barack Obama’s plans to bring back the troops by July 2011 have already been set in motion.

Defence Secretary Robert Gates has admitted that Washington has made a decision not to send replacement units over fears that the troops would have to be redeployed when Obama makes his drawdown decision at the end of the month, Fox News reports.

He said that Afghan commander General David Petraeus had recommended the move that suggests that these two units would be the first ones to leave the country.

“As General Petraeus was looking across Afghanistan and beginning to identify different options, it was pretty clear that these two units were units that would probably be on that list. And so we took the decision here as the chairman has just said to divert them so that we didn’t end up putting them someplace and then pulling them right back out again,” Gates said.

The plan came to light when senator Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, started receiving complaints from members of the Oklahoma National Guard’s 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team about their sudden change in mission.

Inhofe’s office said that members of the 45th, who had been preparing for months for an Afghan army-training mission, were disappointed to learn they have been reassigned to Kuwait to provide security for U.S. forces leaving Iraq.

“The last minute nature of the re-missioning of two battalions to Kuwait has impacted their training and deployment,” Inhofe said in a statement, adding that the members of the 45th strongly believe that “their re-missioning is part of a drawdown in Afghanistan, even though an assessment from General Petraeus is still outstanding.”

Lack of Leadership

Bouhammer — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 03:17:12 +0000

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he has stayed out of the contentious budget negotiations in Washington, even as he expressed disappointment at the potential government shutdown and the possibility that troops would miss paychecks.

“I have not been at all involved in the budget negotiations, and I obviously defer to the president,” he said Friday.

Oh, ok…wait, WHAT?
Isn’t the SecDef the primary and top leader representing the military and all of its members? Shouldn’t he be the primary advocate and spokesperson for the troops under his command? Shouldn’t he be the one lobbying and pressuring Congress to pass a bill that would keep troops getting paid?

In the book “Obama’s Wars” the SecDef was painted as a “yes” man and a guy that likes to avoid conflict and would not choose sides until the very end when it was clear who would win. He would side with them.

I think his recent statements validate that image of him in the book by Bob Woodruff.

Read www.stripes.com/news/2011-budget-battle/gates-says-he-s-steered-clear-of-budget-talks-1.140486 to get the whole story.

Libya vs Iraq

Bouhammer — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 02:15:16 +0000

There has been a lot of talk, comparison and similarities identified between the un-war in Libya and the war in Iraq. Watch this video to help clear up some of the facts vs. the myths.