Afghans-Let’s Leave them to it

The fortnightly free sheet “ The Voice of Freedom” magazine is packed full of pro-Nato stories about school openings and new wells, printed in full colour, in three languages, and distributed across the country. But it rarely reaches its key target audience.

Instead the locals use it in their restaurants to wrap kebabs, chips and glistening jalebi sweets, it is sold by the kilo, for 25p a restaurateur can buy 3kg. The Voice of Freedom is particularly favoured by restaurateurs because they claim  the premium white paper is more absorbent than ordinary Afghan newsprint.

Maybe its time to leave these heathens to their own devices and bring our troops home, I know I have advocated staying and finishing the job many times in the past and I still believe the mission needs to be finished, but as our troops are being killed now by so called friendly fire inside their own barracks as well as in conflict  its time to revaluate our position.

A possible  solution is this, later this month a further 40,000 troops will be announced by President Obama as part of a surge strategy, let us take this opportunity to bring our troops home letting the Americans take up the slack we leave, our 9000 troops can do our defending at home,  by becoming a Border  Army, we surround our selves with troops who are better trained and better equipped than customs officials to keep undesirables out , this also helps with our immigration problem.

After all if we can stop the bad guys getting in that’s part of the problem solved,  I know it sounds a bit simplistic but with  little tweaking I think we have a workable plan, David Cameron has talked about border guards before, here is a fully trained army ready for him to use.

DurdensView Tags: Afghans, Border Guard, David Cameron

The Afghan War

With President Karzai poised to claim outright victory in Afghanistan’s flawed elections, the Election committee is poised to delay the release of preliminary results and cancel hundreds of thousands of ballots.

Dr Abdullah Abdullah has accused Karzai of widespread fraud, and independent monitors look like they will back Abdullah’s claims. What a waste of lives and effort operation Panthers claw turned out to be in respect of providing security and persuading Afghans to come out and vote, The threat of the Taliban was to much for the majority of voters.

In military terms the operation was a success if you measure success by the amount of enemy they killed, however the numbers of Taliban combined with foreign fighters is still a problem.

I have said before this battle needs a greater focus on wiping out the Taliban, at the moment as they have been for the last 7 /8 years the military is fighting a war and trying to win “Hearts and minds” and this is hampering their effort.

I say lets forget “Hearts and minds”  for a sustained all out assault, with other Nato members stepping up to the plate and  providing troops, the US is planning a surge with up to another 100,000 troops to be deployed, and at the risk of repeating my self, if Europe can manage 100,000 to maybe this war can be ended.

DurdensView Tags: Karzai, Abdullah, Taliban, Nato

The End for the Taliban

The US has just launched the biggest ever offensive against the Taliban In Helmund province, by years end there will be almost 70,000 American troops there with another 33,000 Nato soldiers making up the numbers. I think this time they can be successful, in previous attempts at dislodging the Taliban from Helmund the attacks have been more surgical with much smaller numbers, and it was always  just a clearing exercise rather than a snatch and hold. This time it will be an all out assault with overwhelming fire power, so confident are commanders that they believe the first 36 hours will decimate the enemy, after that it will be a case of mopping up, nobody expects that it will be finished then because the Taliban will then take to the hills, and for the foreseeable future will fight a kind of guerrilla war. Critics point out that the Afghans have never been beaten on their own turf, but if my history is correct they have been beaten  before when the warrior Genghis Khan invaded,but this isn’t against the Afghan population this is against the terrorist population,   Khan’s tactics  was like the Americans are employing now huge numbers and overwhelming force. Gradually as the Americans start to rebuild their towns and villages and stay and protect them from the terrorists, the locals will see their lives returning to normal and start to accept the Troops for what they are, Nation builders not occupiers, I will be watching events there closely, and I am confident in 6 months we will see a return to normal for the locals with the Taliban in tatters.

Pakistani Intelligence

A U.S. drone strike this week killed a senior al Qaeda operator in a Pakistani tribal area near the Afghan border, U.S. and Pakistani officials said Friday.

U.S. officials said Saleh al-Somali, who was responsible for al Qaeda's operations outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan, was killed in the strike Tuesday. He was on the C.I.A.’S  list of the top 20 al Qaeda targets, according to an official familiar with the list.

For all the Pakistani Governments public berating of the Americans for using drones on Pakistan territory it was information provided by Pakistan’s SIS that led to the death of al-Somali.

The SIS (Pakistan intelligence service) has in the past been accused of having very close ties to Al Quaeda, so its about time they came on board.

With the 30.000 extra troops  “surge” in Afghanistan expected to be in full flow by the summer of 2010, and victory over the Taliban said to be accomplished in approx 18 months, the Pakistani’s know that the next major  battle in the war on terror  will be  fought in Pakistan’s border regions.

It will be interesting to see how accurate the time scale predicted for victory in Afghanistan is, with the new tactics of actively going after the Taliban and smashing them wherever they are found is.

Obama has said the troop pullout starts in July 2011.  and security handed over to the Afghans themselves to take responsibility for their own Country I believe its possible.

DurdensView Tags: Pakistan, al -Somali, Afghanistan