Obama over his head on Afghanistan

General McChrystal warns against losing Afghanistan to Taliban. Obama delays decision on request for 40,000 more troops.

Prior to 9/11 and for several weeks afterward, the Taliban was providing safe haven to Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda. President Bush explicitly demanded for the Taliban leadership to hand him over to U.S. custody for prosecution. The Taliban declined to do so. We repeated the demand and again we were rebuffed.

Then the stakes changed. We notified the Taliban leadership that if they did not hand over Osama bin Laden within hours the Taliban would then be talking directly to the U.S. military.

The rest as they say is history.

Afghanistan is key. If it falls to the Taliban they will have control of the poppy trade which provides them with lots and lots of money with which they can buy guns, supplies and bribes for Al Qaeda’s needs. It is also used to help fund operations in America i.e. airfare for sleeper cell members stationed in Colorado who need to fly to New York who can’t normally afford to do so on the salary of an airport shuttle bus driver.

In addition the Taliban will have a stable station of operations from which they can continue to threaten Pakistan, already rife with Taliban and Al Qaeda supporters. Pakistan’s nuclear storage facility is not far from its northern borders.

When asked in 2008 about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen didn’t hesitate: “I’m very comfortable that the nuclear weapons in Pakistan are secure,” he said flatly.

Asked the same question in April 2009, his answer had changed. “I’m reasonably comfortable,” he said, “that the nuclear weapons are secure.”

As America’s top military officer, Mullen has traveled regularly to Pakistan — twice in just the past two weeks — for talks with his Pakistani counterpart, General Ashfaq Kayani, and others.

And like all those who have risen to four-star rank, Mullen chooses his words with extreme care. Replacing “very comfortable” with “reasonably comfortable” is a decidedly discomforting signal of Washington’s concern that no matter how well-guarded the nukes may be today, the chaos now enveloping Pakistan doesn’t bode well for their status tomorrow or the day after.

The prospect of turmoil in Pakistan sends shivers up the spines of those US officials charged with keeping tabs on foreign nuclear weapons. Pakistan is thought to possess about 100 — the US isn’t sure of the total, and may not know where all of them are. Still, if Pakistan collapses, the US military is primed to enter the country and secure as many of those weapons as it can, according to US officials.

The Taliban takeover of Haripur would put the Taliban on the doorstep of Islamabad and would also put two major nuclear facilities at risk. Haripur borders the Margala Hills, a region in the Islamabad Capital Territory. Haripur also borders the Punjab districts of Attock and Rawalpindi.

Attock hosts two major nuclear facilities in Pakistan: the Wah Cantonment Ordnance Complex and the Kamra (Minhas) Airbase. The Wah Cantonment Ordnance Complex host three sites where nuclear weapons and components are stored and assembled and aircraft and missiles are modified for use in nuclear attacks. The nearby Kamra Airbase is thought to host attack aircraft capable of delivering nuclear weapons.

If those facilities come into the hands of the Taliban it is game over for Pakistan and then India gets real, real nervous. She’s armed, too.

Now what?

Under this scenario we have an avowed enemy of the U.S. who likes to blow things up in the first place and who now have nuclear weapons. For them that IS the ultimate goal. If this happens, 9/11 will look like nothing compared to losing a city with millions.

Who do we attack then?

On September 23, 2009, Former Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice weighed in with a pretty sharp message for Democratic lawmakers who don’t want to send more U.S. troops to an unpopular war in Afghanistan that seems to be getting worse.

“If you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan,” she said.

She continued by saying, “The last time we left Afghanistan, and we abandoned Pakistan that territory became the very territory on which Al Qaeda trained and attacked us on September 11th. So our national security interests are very much tied up in not letting Afghanistan fail again and become a safe haven for terrorists.”

So you see, Afghanistan is key.

Newt Gingrich gives us a clue about what America will be like when that happens:
“I think those of you who care about civil liberties had better be thinking through how we win this war before the casualties (American civilians) get so great that the American people voluntarily give up a lot of those liberties. ”

Tom Tancredo, who ran for president on the Republican ticket in the last election has a very, very, good understanding about what America is facing. Still, few Americans can grasp what we are up against. He gets it:

The national intelligence estimates show what Islamic Fascist are planning.
From the televised Republican primary debate held August 5, 2007, in Iowa, this question was asked of Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo.

Last week you said that, in order to deter an attack by Islamic terrorists using nuclear weapons, you would threaten to bomb Mecca and Medina. The State Department called that “reprehensible” & “absolutely crazy.”

To which he replied…

“Yes, the State Department–boy, when they start complaining about things I say, I feel a lot better about the things I say, I’ll tell you right now. My task as president is primarily to do one thing–not to make sure everybody has health care or everybody’s child is educated–my task is to do one thing: to protect and defend this country. And that means to deter–and I want to underline “deter”–any kind of aggression, especially the type we are threatened with by Al Qaida, which is nuclear attack. I read the national intelligence estimate. I see what they are planning. And I’m telling you right now that anybody that would suggest that we should take anything like this off the table in order to deter that kind of event in the United States isn’t fit to be president.”

With the fact that Obama is dragging his feet on fulfilling a request for more troops to beat down and eliminate the Taliban forces, it would appear that Obama does not “get it.”

~ by Ben on September 22, 2009.