The new rules of fighting a war….Obama style, via George F. Will: (h/t The Captain’s Journal)
… occasionally there are riveting communications, such as a recent e-mail from a noncommissioned officer (NCO) serving in Afghanistan. He explains why the rules of engagement for U.S. troops are “too prohibitive for coalition forces to achieve sustained tactical successes.”
Receiving mortar fire during an overnight mission, his unit called for a 155mm howitzer illumination round to be fired to reveal the enemy’s location. The request was rejected “on the grounds that it may cause collateral damage.” The NCO says that the only thing that comes down from an illumination round is a canister, and the likelihood of it hitting someone or something was akin to that of being struck by lightning.
Returning from a mission, his unit took casualties from an improvised explosive device that the unit knew had been placed no more than an hour earlier. “There were villagers laughing at the U.S. casualties” and “two suspicious individuals were seen fleeing the scene and entering a home.” U.S. forces “are no longer allowed to search homes without Afghan National Security Forces personnel present.” But when his unit asked Afghan police to search the house, the police refused on the grounds that the people in the house “are good people.”
On another mission, some Afghan adults ran off with their children immediately before the NCO’s unit came under heavy small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and the unit asked for artillery fire on the enemy position. The response was a question: Where is the nearest civilian structure? “Judging distances,” the NCO writes dryly, “can be difficult when bullets and RPGs are flying over your head.” When the artillery support was denied because of fear of collateral damage, the unit asked for a “smoke mission” — like an illumination round; only the canister falls to earth — “to conceal our movement as we planned to flank and destroy the enemy.” This request was granted — but because of fear of collateral damage, the round was deliberately fired one kilometer off the requested site, making “the smoke mission useless and leaving us to fend for ourselves.”
The NCO is the backbone of our nations military. They don’t deal with the politics of the upper ranks, they operate to achieve the mission and keep their men save. They are on the ground, on the front lines with their troops. They see it all….and when they are seeing what the NCO wrote about above you just have to know we have already lost Afghanistan.
Obama came into office telling us that we were fighting the wrong war in Iraq…Afghanistan is the real threat. But here we are on the verge of it becoming such a quagmire of no progress and body bags that we will be forced to leave in failure
Because of our troops, one great General, and one great President…we won the war in Iraq. A new President now sits in power and he is ensuring our failure in the one place he said we needed to win at.
Unbelievable.
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