They used the word surge. When they report it again, I'll see if there is any moe information.
__________________ S/V Scheherazade
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I had a dream, I was sailing, I was happy, I was even smiling. Then I looked down and saw that I was on a multi-hull and woke up suddenly in a cold sweat.
I would imagine any troop increase would be labeled a surge at this point.
__________________
John
Ontario 32 - Aria
Free, is the heart, that lives not, in fear.
Full, is the spirit, that thinks not, of falling.
True, is the soul, that hesitates not, to give.
Alive, is the one, that believes, in love. JCP
Maybe with the new president of Pakistan taking office today, it is all connected.
__________________ S/V Scheherazade
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I had a dream, I was sailing, I was happy, I was even smiling. Then I looked down and saw that I was on a multi-hull and woke up suddenly in a cold sweat.
Chuckles is correct. President Bush lost confidence in his generals (nothing new there-Lincoln had the same problem!) and promoted Casey up and out-in essence, Abizaid retired, and Petraeus, along with his theory of counterinsurgency warfare, which I like to call "asses in the grass", got promoted to running Iraq. It's hardly likely that Mr. Woodward would recognize the way changes in course are made at the highest levels of the military as he's spent the better part of his career despising them.
In short, President Bush sacked his generals and got new ones who could "git 'er done". Generally speaking, that's called leadership.
SO why does BUsh have to lie that he is listening to and following the advice of his commanders on the ground when he clearly wasn't????? he would have saved a lot of face if he had said he was cleaning house to get the right people in the right jobs. NOw THAT WOULD BE LEADERSHIP, not lying to the American people. AS usual, you have leadership upside down.
__________________
SailorMitch
Sailing winged keels since 1989. 1.20.09 Bush's last day the end of an error !! Hopefully we still have a constitution and economy left by then.
"Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength." The Dalai Lama
good planets are hard to find-- a song by steve forbert
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging the future but by the past.-- Patrick Henry.
Shift in forces to Afghanistan less than requested
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The modest shift in US forces to Afganistan announced Tuesday by President George W. Bush falls short of his commanders' requests despite signs the seven year-old US-NATO project there is at risk.
While conditions have improved in Iraq, Bush admitted that things have not gone so well in Afghanistan, shaken by an increasingly bloody insurgency fueled from safe havens in Pakistan.
"Afghanistan's success is critical to the security of America and our partners in the free world. And for all the good work we have done in that country, it is clear we must do even more," Bush said in a speech to the National Defense University.
His remedy: 4,500 more troops by early next year to bolster what Bush described as a "quiet surge" in US and NATO forces in Afghanistan over the past two years. Bush also called for doubling the size of the Afghan army in five years.
The US troops will include the deployment of a Marine battalion before year-end, which will replace another battalion that is due to come home, and an army combat brigade in January that originally was supposed to go to Iraq.
Currently there are 33,000 US troops in Afghanistan, about 14,000 of them in a 53,000-strong NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
US commanders, however, have said they need at least three more brigades, about 10,000 combat troops, to confront a better trained, increasingly sophisticated "syndicate" of Islamic militants able to move across a rugged, open border.
"To protect the 10 million Afghans, plus the three or so million that are in Kabul, given the numbers that we have here, they just don't work out totally," Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, the number two US commander in Afghanistan, told reporters on Friday.
"You know, it's very difficult for us to be able to do that, given the numbers we have, given the terrain we have," he said.
US forces are not losing the war, Schloesser said, but it was "a slow win."
US analysts and military officials have warned loudly that the situation has deteriorated over the past two years as the Pakistani military retreated from tribal areas, ceding them to militants under a series of peace deals.
Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, observed that the Taliban and other insurgent groups have dramatically expanded their presence in Afghanistan since 2004.
In January 2004, there were only about 13,000 US troops in Afghanistan and ISAF's role was limited to protecting Kabul. During the same period, the United States was facing an intensifying insurgency in Iraq.
Declassified US intelligence and UN maps show that the area of Taliban and insurgent influence or presence doubled between 2004 and 2005, quadrupled between 2005 and 2006, and rose sharply again between 2006 and 2007, Cordesman said.
"While much of this expansion involve presence, rather than fighting, insurgent movements win by expanding presence and outlasting their opponents, not by open warfighting," Cordesman wrote in a paper posted by CSIS.
"At this point in time, US-NATO/ISAF-Afghan forces are simply too weak to deal with a multi-faceted insurgency with a de facto sanctuary along the entire Afghan-Pakistan border," he said.
Schloesser said there were areas of his sector of eastern Afghanistan where he had "very low numbers of troops."
"I can come in and I can clobber the enemy, but then I can't hold it and stay with the people," he said.
Insurgent attacks, meanwhile, have risen sharply and tactics have expanded to include suicide bombings, roadside explosions, and more recently complex assaults involving larger forces.
With relatively few troops on the ground, US and NATO forces have had to rely on airpower and armed surveillance drones to protect small US and Afghan units operating in treacherous, sometimes unfamiliar terrain.
But an unintended consequence has been a series of high-profile incidents in which civilians have been killed in air strikes that has taken a toll on public support for the US and international military presence in Afghanistan.
General David McKiernan, ISAF's American commander, asked this week for a review of a military investigation into one such incident in western Afghanistan where Afghan officials said 90 civilians were killed.
The US military, which initially said no civilians were killed in the air strike, later insisted after investigating that no more than seven civilians were killed, along with 30 to 35 Taliban fighters.
Cellphone imagery that surfaced later, and was broadly televised, put that into question.
__________________ S/V Scheherazade
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I had a dream, I was sailing, I was happy, I was even smiling. Then I looked down and saw that I was on a multi-hull and woke up suddenly in a cold sweat.
This is certainly something to look back in on in a week. I'll wait to see what steps the new Paki govt. takes, and see if there are any announcements out of NATO.
Afghanistan is certainly a very different field of battle than Iraq, made doubly so by the border issues with Pakistan. Plus the civilian factor makes it even harder. Not a place to be, when you're trying to "play by the rules".
__________________
John
Ontario 32 - Aria
Free, is the heart, that lives not, in fear.
Full, is the spirit, that thinks not, of falling.
True, is the soul, that hesitates not, to give.
Alive, is the one, that believes, in love. JCP
SO why does BUsh have to lie that he is listening to and following the advice of his commanders on the ground when he clearly wasn't????? he would have saved a lot of face if he had said he was cleaning house to get the right people in the right jobs. NOw THAT WOULD BE LEADERSHIP, not lying to the American people. AS usual, you have leadership upside down.
To the best of my recollection, George Bush was elected President of the United States and Commander in Chief of its armed forces. The Joint Chiefs weren't elected to that post. Nor were the US Generals elected to that post. I don't remember George Bush ever saying that he was turning over his duties as Commander in Chief to his Generals, to do as they wished. To the best of my knowledge, no President has ever abdicated his responsibility to command this nation's military, and told his military to do as they wished. In fact, most wartime Presidents have fired some General or another for his poor performance or poor judgment.
What President Bush has actually said is that he is giving his military commanders all the support that they request, and he's following their recommendations. Implicit in such a statement is that they provide him the kind of sound, creative and bold advice that the American people and their President have a right to expect of their Generals. If they fail to provide such service to their President and their countrymen, then the President not only has the Constitutional authority to usher them out their door, but he has a clear duty to do so.
When the President said he was following the advice of his Generals, it was a statement of fact, and true, right up until the moment that he decided that they weren't doing their job properly. That doesn't make his prior statement a lie. When the President did that, it didn't make him a liar. It made him a President who faced up to his Constitutional responsibilities and did his job.
Merriam-Websters defines the word "lie", in part, as follows: " to create a false or misleading impression." When liberals try to create a false or misleading impression that the President is lying about something when, in fact, he is simply reacting to history as it is evolving, that is an unabashed lie, and we should recognize it for what it is.
Last edited by Sailormon6 : 09-09-2008 at 06:37 PM.
So, the Dems are critical of Sarah and her Faith... The same Dems (obama) who quoated scripture! The same Obama who let it slip (HE IS A MUSLIM) on TV this week..
So Sarah prayed that GOD was on OUR side...
Let me think back.... Those who declared WAR on US who served in IRAQ called it a (HOLY WAR)... In a HOLY WAR it is appropriate to pray to GOD...
Hope those who wanted and declared a HOLY WAR are now saying (HOLY CRAP)... Just my thoughts.....
What President Bush has actually said is that he is giving his military commanders all the support that they request, and he's following their recommendations. Implicit in such a statement is that they provide him the kind of sound, creative and bold advice that the American people and their President have a right to expect of their Generals. If they fail to provide such service to their President and their countrymen, then the President not only has the Constitutional authority to usher them out their door, but he has a clear duty to do so.
When the President said he was following the advice of his Generals, it was a statement of fact, and true, right up until the moment that he decided that they weren't doing their job properly. That doesn't make his prior statement a lie. When the President did that, it didn't make him a liar. It made him a President who faced up to his Constitutional responsibilities and did his job.
Merriam-Websters defines the word "lie", in part, as follows: " to create a false or misleading impression." When liberals try to create a false or misleading impression that the President is lying about something when, in fact, he is simply reacting to history as it is evolving, that is an unabashed lie, and we should recognize it for what it is.
once again, have you read any of these articles???
BUsh announced the surge JAn. 10, 07 against the advice of most of his military brass, including the 2 main guys on the ground at the time (casey and Abizaid). The next morning, he went to Fort Benning, Ga., to address military personnel and their families. His decision had been opposed by Casey and Abizaid, his military commanders in Iraq. Pace and the Joint Chiefs, his top military advisers, had suggested a smaller increase, if any at all. Schoomaker, the Army chief, had made it clear that the five brigades didn't really exist under the Army's current policy of 12-month rotations. But on this morning, the president delivered his own version of history. "The commanders on the ground in Iraq, people who I listen to -- by the way, that's what you want your commander-in-chief to do. You don't want decisions being made based upon politics or focus groups or political polls. You want your military decisions being made by military experts. They analyzed the plan, and they said to me and to the Iraqi government: 'This won't work unless we help them. There needs to be a bigger presence.' (EMphasis added.)
SO YOU TELL ME WHAT BUSH DID....
Yes, bush is the CIC and has the right to fire the lot of them. He essentially did that to the ones responsible for the failures to that point, but he had to add his own weird twist to the story rather than tell it like it really was. for an example of true leadership in a similar situation, look up Harry Truman and Douglas McArthur.
__________________
SailorMitch
Sailing winged keels since 1989. 1.20.09 Bush's last day the end of an error !! Hopefully we still have a constitution and economy left by then.
"Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength." The Dalai Lama
good planets are hard to find-- a song by steve forbert
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging the future but by the past.-- Patrick Henry.
