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On Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:51:05 -0700, "nom=de=plume"
wrote:
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. ..
On Sun, 11 Jul 2010 18:13:50 -0700, "nom=de=plume"
wrote:
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m...
On Sun, 11 Jul 2010 18:16:48 -0400, bpuharic wrote:
On Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:41:59 -0400, wrote:
I don't believe the Kabul government really has much influence in the
area where the AQ guys are hiding. That is why we failed at Tora
Bora.
we failed in TB because scum bag bush refused to send in US troops
when we had osama cornered. the 'new republic' had an excellent
article earlier this year on this exact event
I don't think BL was going to stay put for the month or two it would
take to safely deploy a division. We saw what happens when you don't
do the groundwork in Somalia.
This started as a quiet hit on Bin Laden but by the time he got to
Tora Bora that was not going to work. Bush didn't want another war.
Come on. We had him in a corner. We just needed to finish the job, but
instead we handed off the responsibility to paid thugs who let him go.
Bush didn't want another war? Are you sure? After all, he was
"listening"
to
his generals (until they contradicted Rumsfeld anyway).
You were going to have a mission shift if we went into Afghanistan in
force. The original plan was a covert hit squad.
Who is "you"? Bush let Rumsfeld dictate a tiny army with no ability to
have
boots on the ground, despite the recommendations from the military.
The rhetorical you.
We are proving a huge army is not much more effective in the mountains
than a little hit team.
You simply can not move a mass army as fast as they had to if they
were going to get Osama by brute force. It has been almost 10 years
and we still don't have that much power in that area.
When we started chasing OBL we had local support but he was moving
into an area that would rather shoot us than help us. It is still true
today and we still do not really have any operational control there
with 140,000 people on the ground.
There are still 100 al queda there that we can't catch.
We have about 95K in Afg. and about the same number in Iraq.
That is the number after we finish the surge, that has taken months to
get going and we were already there in force . How long do you think
it would have taken to deploy the army you think Bush should have used
at a moment's notice? Do you think OBL would have waited patiently for
them?
We had the opportunity to finish him at Tora Bora. Rumsfeld decided to
outsource it. It failed.
I think we'd both be surprised by how quickly the military can deploy in
great numbers.
You act like we can instantly drop a division into an area nobody
actually knows much about, with no real way to support them and expect
more than half of them to survive.
We could have if we had prepared properly. Rumsfeld/Bush prevented that by
firing any general who even talked about it.
If you want to say we wasted a lot of our "covert" resources in Iraq,
no argument but from where we were, we did about all we could do.
Sure. With the forces that we had. Which were inadequate.
I do believe a small covert force, working with the locals was the
only way we would get OBL.
Now perhaps.
We had a hard enough time finding Saddam and it was in a totally
conqured country.