Pentagon's Bob Gates: A Big Surge Into Afghanistan As Well As Iraq

[Ed. note: The picture below, from AP, was taken of Gates in Afghanistan with American soldiers at a center called Camp Tillman - likely named for Pat Tillman, the football player whose death from friendly fire in Afghanistan became one of the better known HUGE LIES of the military and the Bush Administration. Unfortunately, with the Bushies and the Pentagon, telling the truth is simply never an option.]

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said today he will probably ask the president to significantly boost the troop level of U.S. forces in Afghanistan (always pitifully low considering circumstances) to fight "the resurgent Taliban."

From Associated Press:

"I think it is important that we not let this success here in Afghanistan slip away from us and that we keep the initiative," he told reporters traveling aboard his aircraft as it refueled here for a flight to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he was to meet with King Abdullah. "There's no reason to sit back and let the Taliban regroup," Gates said.

There are approximately 24,000 U.S. troops here, of which about 11,000 serve under NATO command. Another increase would raise questions about the future course of a war which the United States is increasingly handing off to NATO forces.

Success? That's a fairy tale. And the Taliban regrouped five years ago.

Let's look at facts.

The Taliban resurged almost immediately after we went in there and bombed lots of caves. We allowed them not only to reconnoiter, but to do so in numbers and initiatives that made them (rather quickly) stronger than they were before we landed there "to get Osama bin Laden, dead or alive" on October 8th, 2001, less than one full month after the attacks on America that took down the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Just months later, as Salt Lake City, Utah, hosted the winter Olympics, Bush openly boasted that we had far more soldiers protecting Olympic athletes and watchers than we had in the country we were blaming for fostering terrorism that led to 9-11. I seemed to be the only one scratching her head, completely mystified and disgusted by that claim.

For now years, the Bushies stood by and watched opium production, once checked by the drug-unhappy Taliban, skyrocket, soar along with Taliban forces who swiftly reinserted their own bizarre brand of Islamic law. While the Bushies boasted that girls were now going to school in Kabul and elsewhere, reports already told us that girls had long since been pulled out of schools because it was too dangerous for them; the Taliban would punish and sometimes kill girls who tried to attend, who left their homes without a birka and proper male escort.

So why surge troops into Afghanistan now, so long AFTER we failed all our objectives there, and now half a year since NATO took over basic operations (which was a real fight since other countries did NOT want their soldiers sent into a country where the U.S., while ignoring security, still called the shots)?

We certainly aren't surging to wipe out the Taliban, to catch Osama or to pursue the happy horseshit of "freedom and democracy and little girls goin' to school" for this country.

I suspect the troops, if they go, will be sent to sit and wait for an attack on Iran and Syria, from which they could be moved readily from Afghanistan as well as Iraq. That is, those troops not killed will be deployed from Afghanistan and Iraq into Tehran or elsewhere in Iran-Syria.