Administration's plan for endgame of war

It will very interesting to see if Obama can perform a troop boost then withdraw as promised during his campaign. The major concern no one will say is that the US wants badly to define some klind of "victory" in the end. My question is what the victory will consist of...Less troop deaths, a more stable region or what? In addition the possibility of things just not going as planned given the region's history along with the likely scenario that towards the end of the withdraw it is likely enemy forces will attempt some catastrophic attack as a "last ditch" effort to inflict as much damage in a parting shot.


From the article on MSNBC - The additions will bring U.S. forces above 100,000 by next summer. If the timeline holds, it will require a costly logistical scramble to bring in so many people and so much equipment almost entirely by air. It will also probably require breaking at least an implicit promise to some soldiers who had thought they would have more than 12 months at home before their next deployment.

With U.S. casualties in Afghanistan sharply increasing and little sign of progress from the war's beginning in 2001, the war Obama has called one "of necessity," not choice, has grown less popular with the public and within his own Democratic Party. In recent days, leading Democrats have talked of setting tough conditions on deeper U.S. involvement, or even staging outright opposition.

Obama is acknowledging the divided public opinion with his emphasis on an exit, as well as on stepped-up training to help Afghan forces take over and a series of specific demands for other governments, including Afghanistan, Pakistan and NATO allies, to contribute more.

MSNBC link to story

reply to post by mikelee


Lets hope that he and the troops get all of this sorted! I mean 30,000 troops is alot of people, and if something should go wrong... I shudder at the thought of all those casualties and deaths!

Originally posted by Wolf 
reply to post by mikelee

 

Lets hope that he and the troops get all of this sorted! I mean 30,000 troops is alot of people, and if something should go wrong... I shudder at the thought of all those casualties and deaths!

Hey Wolf,

I would rather not think about it either because the response required if that scenario actually happened would be a massive one indeed.

The picture of the announcement speech on Huffington Post this morning really scared me. Reminded me of Nazi Germany...



The speech itself is just more of the same fear mongering "We are not safe in the world" bla bla etc. I am a European resident and didn't get to vote for Obama, but I fell for his clever NLP speeches, just like many others. I filled in words like "change" and "hope" with my own meaning, thinking that Obama meant what I thought those words meant. Well... he obviously had a very different agenda.

Originally posted by Mythtified
The picture of the announcement speech on Huffington Post this morning really scared me. Reminded me of Nazi Germany...

The speech itself is just more of the same fear mongering "We are not safe in the world" bla bla etc. I am a European resident and didn't get to vote for Obama, but I fell for his clever NLP speeches, just like many others. I filled in words like "change" and "hope" with my own meaning, thinking that Obama meant what I thought those words meant. Well... he obviously had a very different agenda.

Toss in Donald Rumsfeld dressed in a black uniform and there 'ya go!!

[edit on 2-12-2009 by mikelee]

reply to post by Mythtified


WOW that really does look like a scene right out of Star ship Troopers...

Now if we were fighting for a good reason like giant bugs this whole war and troop surge would actually make sense to me.