Pentagon Papers II

And we had troops on the ground at that point as well.

 

bin Laden gets caught.

Wow. We've got the No. 1 guy in a shitload string of shitheads.


You don't kill cockroaches one at a time, or one room at a time. You bomb your house.

Killing bin Laden doesn't accomplish anything. They've got a rodent just waiting to take his place.

 

How would that operation work?

How many men involved?

How do we establish in-country contact in order to gain the intelligence necessary to locate and extract him?

Let's hear the fucking plan genius.

 

Azrael must think Obama is the candy man. If we'd been able to take him out with special forces, Clinton would be the hero. He's got all kinds of goat-effers surrounding and protecting his ass, and all hate America and given the chance would eradicate the west. These are dumb fucks with lots of money.
Treat 'em like cockroaches, we're done with them in six months.

 

The initial plan of fighting a covert war using Special Forces was very effective.

The problem I have is the decision to move forward with "the surge" and commit more troops to Afghanistan. This was also something that Biden was against.

Still think staying with covert operations would be effective in keeping Taliban/ Al queda at bay . We don't need the mass of troops.

 

If we had the capability to snatch Bin Laden in a small scale special forces operation I'm sure we would've tried. In fact, I'd bet the farm we HAVE tried it and failed. It's nice to think there was a quick and painless option, but there wasn't.

 

Spare me your hardguy internet bullshit please.

Our intention in Afghanistan was never to remake the country, so why invade? Why tell ourselves the nation-building lie? Our goal was to get bin Laden. We certainly had enough leverage on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan even in those days to buy the sort of information we'd need to grab him. How much of the half trillion dollars we've spent there in the decade since would have bought bin Laden himself - not just his location, but bin Laden himself trussed up on the back of a mule - from a local tribal leader? Ten million? Twenty? A billion?

A ground war in Afghanistan, a full-scale invasion - as was said at the time by everyone who'd ever read any history - was the worst possible choice we could make.

 

We did not start with a "Ground War" . That is starting now with "the surge".

 

From The Washington Post, Wednesday, April 17, 2002; Page A01

The Bush administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge.

Intelligence officials have assembled what they believe to be decisive evidence, from contemporary and subsequent interrogations and intercepted communications, that bin Laden began the battle of Tora Bora inside the cave complex along Afghanistan's mountainous eastern border. Though there remains a remote chance that he died there, the intelligence community is persuaded that bin Laden slipped away in the first 10 days of December. ...

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Have American forces been as close to him since?

 

Umm, I think we DID make that offer. We didn't go invading immediately after 9/11. Instead, we first gave the Taliban an ultimatum to turn over Bin Laden and cooperate with us in dismantling his network in the country if they wanted to avoid war. It was only after they refused to turn him over that we invaded. Wasn't that essentially a refusal of the same sort of offer you describe?

The people claiming we never should've invaded Aghanistan are seriously Monday Morning Quarterbacking. Nobody was saying that in the months after 9/11. Iraq we never should've invaded, that war was thoroughly illegal. But I don't think we had much choice but to go into Afghanistan.

 

We started with the cruise missiles and B-52s. But we were approaching 20,000 troops on the ground 7 years ago. That's certainly a "ground war."

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/10/01/world/middleeast/afghanistan-policy.html

 

No - we started with Special Forces on the ground to direct the B52's and Cruise missiles which proved to be very effective.