U.S. spy drones had no trouble spotting the Taliban fighters. There were more than 20 figures snaking through sparsely wooded hills, trying to outflank the Afghan government commandos in the village below.
In the starry darkness overhead, American helicopters loitered armed with precision-guided missiles, along with a flying gunship capable of drenching the area with cannon-fire. It would have been a hard shot to miss.
But before they could fire, the Americans knew they would have to get past the lawyers.
In the amorphous twilight of the Afghan war, it isn’t enough to draw a bead on the enemy. Before they shoot, U.S. troops have to navigate a tricky legal and political question: When is it OK for them to kill Taliban?
The operation late last month in Elbak, a flyspeck village in Kandahar province, exposed the complexity of implementing President Barack Obama’s Afghan strategy in the mud-brick villages, steep mountains and vast poppy fields where the combat takes place. With their Afghan allies walking into a possible ambush that night, U.S. commanders, monitoring video feeds and radio traffic miles from the front, had to judge whether enemy fighters who weren’t actually fighting constituted an imminent threat.
Mr. Obama, who campaigned on a promise to extract the U.S. from its long wars, has declared an end to the American combat mission in Afghanistan and set guidelines for when the remaining 9,800 U.S. troops, many of them in elite special-operations units, may use lethal force.
He’s on the other side.
If you can’t kill them when they are taking their morning dump, praying to their false god, or catching up with some slap and tickle with momma you’ve already lost. Actually the best time is a bullet in the back of the head in the middle of the night. The US military under Obama is the definition of stupid.
“On the other side” does seem to explain a lot.
Bureaucratic stupidity gets soldiers killed all the time. Our latest ignorant sliming was the attempt to reingnite the disgusting torture allegations against Canadian troops, whose war crimes allegedly included a wink and a nudge. There was an incident in Afghanistan when soldiers died because some bureaucrat changed the rules for civilian proximity to fire when they had a bunch of Taliban pigs pinned down, inside the previous kill zone, then were denied an artillery strike, I believe the first time in our NATO history that occurred. Everyone freeted, soldiers died. Cue up the Benghazi; same idea.
The classic story is Gen MacKenzie at Sarajevo Airport having to borrow a journalist’s satellite phone to call UN HQ in NY for authority to close the airport due to constant harassing fire. He was told it was Friday night, the office was closed and to call back Monday morning. I heard it from the man himself.
I’d agree progressives are a special kind of stupid on military affairs, and put Obama near the top of the class, though Hillary did some serious security damage with her limited influence. But the biggest terrorist enabler of all is Bubba Clinton, who let Islamism grow in strength and passed on obvious opportunities to take them out, using the same what about the civilians mantra, that ends up getting way more people killed, military and civilian.
Don’t expect Obama to grasp that. He has enough on his plate, finding enough suckers to buy his government bonds, and battling climate change.
Trump will change THAT in a hurry! I’m willing to bet odds that he’ll be the first President to actually WIN a war since WWII!!
What do you mean, first war since WWII. Despite all odds and expectations they beat Grenada in 1983. The U.S. awarded more than 5,000 medals for merit and valor out of an invasion force of 7,300. Mind you there were a lot of heroes sitting at their desk in the Pentagon.
@scar:
There is room to mock some aspects of the “invasion” as you have pointed out. On the other hand, it’s about the last time we’ve seen a President of the U.S. take decisive action against what was shaping up to be another Cuba. The whole communist take over was nipped in the bud and Grenada, and the rest of the Caribbean islands, are better off today for this.
I could easily envision Donald Trump following this type of policy.
@scar:
Oh, I forgot to mention that the “invasion” was condemned by the Canadian Government. Who was running the Canadian Government in 1983?
The US is still employing the same foolish strategy of ‘tying one hand behind their back’ as they did in Vietnam. That only gets troops killed and does not win wars.
That would be WW2 hero Pierre Elliot Trudeau.
I sure hope he never has kids.
Don’t forget, PM Selfie is on his way to Washinton and hearts are a flutter:
“The last time a Trudeau came calling as prime minister, it was Justin’s father, whose arms reductions efforts were derided by a Ronald Reagan official as “akin to pot-induced behaviour by an erratic leftist” and panned by an unnamed Pentagon official who said Canada had not pulled its weight in NATO.
Trudeau the elder told reporters outside the White House he was not going to worry about third-rate “Pentagon pipsqueaks”
To see what today’s military goes through to conduct operations watch “Eye In The Sky”. Scary depiction of military buck passing and political posturing.
America will lose in America and Canada will lose in Canada. that is the future of those who refuse to identify and kill their enemies.