WSJ:
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan—U.S. spy drones had no trouble spotting the Taliban fighters. There were more than 20 figures snaking through sparsely wooded hills, trying to outflank the Afghan government commandos in the village below.
In the starry darkness overhead, American helicopters loitered armed with precision-guided missiles, along with a flying gunship capable of drenching the area with cannon-fire. It would have been a hard shot to miss.
But before they could fire, the Americans knew they would have to get past the lawyers.
In the amorphous twilight of the Afghan war, it isn’t enough to draw a bead on the enemy. Before they shoot, U.S. troops have to navigate a tricky legal and political question: When is it OK for them to kill Taliban?
The operation late last month in Elbak, a flyspeck village in Kandahar province, exposed the complexity of implementing President Barack Obama’s Afghan strategy in the mud-brick villages, steep mountains and vast poppy fields where the combat takes place. With their Afghan allies walking into a possible ambush that night, U.S. commanders, monitoring video feeds and radio traffic miles from the front, had to judge whether enemy fighters who weren’t actually fighting constituted an imminent threat.
THESE SO CALLED Rules of Engagment are made by someone who has been behind a desk too long
Spur wing why don’t you go over and show us how it should be done !!
How inspiring would that be if a bunch of old men joined up and flew over to fight those jihadists
Make a great (non)reality show
@John: Actually John, Spur is right. I have been there and you can not win without supporting your allies. You have all this experience based upon your continuous idiotic posts, why don’t you tell us what you would do?
Wen the decision making is removed from the commander on the ground, the war is lost.
@Randy: Checking, rechecking and overthinking is what kept bin Laden alive long enough to give us 9/11. This is not a law enforcement action, it is war with amoral terrorists.
The Taliban and AQ have been enjoying a resurgence in Afghanistan as of late. Do you think there is a connection between that and hogtying the troops? But on another thread we were told how Obama is personally responsible for taking out the bad guys.
I think that we should never have occupied Afghanistan
Some of that is based on history and some of that is based on my living there in 76-77
Our “allies” are the ones who tell us what we can and can not do in their sovereign country
The Russians had a rather relaxed set of REOs didn’t seem to help them much
Afghans have never liked being occupied
I think we should give notice and get the hell out
Our occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq were colossal failures they created far larger problems than they solved
We were safer when the Russians were in Afghanistan and Saddam was in Iraq
ISIS???? ISIS was funded by those Sunni Arab countries you jokingly call our allies
We have spent over 1,500,000,000,000 in Afghanistan and are no closer now to what you might call “victory”
That is about $60,000 per Afghan for each man woman and child
For a 1/4 million a family I think it looks like a failure
Let Afghanistan solve their own problems
@another vet:
Afghans have never been very tolerant of people occupying their country
@another vet: John hasn’t figured out that we are not occupying Afghanistan. We are and have been from the beginning assisting the Afghanistan government fight the Taliban and AQ. Was there agent orange in 19 I was just looking for some excuse for the lack of understanding.
@Randy:
Ra@Randy:
Randy apparently at least some Afghans believe that the USA. US occupying their country
How long do you think the puppet government in Kabil would last without the USA there?
Afghans aren’t much different than we are, we can tolerate 15000 Ameticans killing each other
BUT get really upset whenever any foreigner ( or American acting in support of a foreign entity) kills any of us
@Randy: He never served so he wouldn’t have been exposed to it.
@another vet:
Only a bit exposure to it in Cambodia in 1970. Did do some work in ground crew with CASI Having the cartlidge taken out if one knee right after high school put me 1-y immediately after college then 4f after the second knee was done
Less than 2% of people who served in Vietnam volunteered for a second tour I remember how unpopular that war was. Anyone with any firefight Coukd have seen that our real fie was going to be China and that we should have been supporting nationalism in Vietnam, which of course is what we are doing now selling them arms
Randy, the Orlando killer also claimed to belong/support Hezbollah.
Hezbollah (Shia) is the sworn enemy of ISIS ((Sunni) could you explain to us, how to square that circle ?
His statements seem to indicate to me that he wanted to belong somewhere but being a drinker, drug user and gay was finding that difficult to be accepted anywhere
@John: I would still get checked out. Just about everyone I know who was exposed to that shit came down with cancer, mostly pancreatic.
@another vet:
Thanks I have
There is a huge correlation with tobacco use
Fortunately I was born allergic to tobacco