Redefining Victory

We’re being told that the surge in Iraq is over and we have achieved victory. The president and the Pentagon are hedging their bets by saying “durability exists” but the “progress is reversible“.

We were told we won in Afghanistan when the Taliban were expelled and were replaced with former Unocal oil company consultant Harmid Karzai. Today the number of American deaths are the highest they’ve been since 2001, violence is up by forty percent, the Taliban are taking over villages without the use of military force and they control 90 percent of the poppy wealth.

Secretary of Defense Gates claims because of this “victory” in Iraq we won’t be seeing large scale operations like this again, instead we’ll be seeing smaller Special Forces Operations.

The steel desk warriors at the Pentagon sent Special Forces and Navy Seals on missions to the tops of mountain in Afghanistan where their helicopters were shot down in in an area they were told was devoid of the enemy. Our brave forces were then surrounded and attacked by Taliban and Chechen fighters. One Special Forces team leader said all modern technology failed them and he had to go back to fighting wars the old fashioned way; with thinking, pencil and paper.

The old fashioned definition of victory is when the dying of American troops stops and the enemy surrenders. Neither of these have happened in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The war in Vietnam (which both the president and vice president dodged) was televised. We’re not seeing any signs of victories now just like we’re not seeing any of the coffins coming home.