The Sniper

KABUL – Eight American troops were killed in multiple bomb attacks Tuesday in southern Afghanistan, making October the deadliest month of the war for U.S. forces since it began in 2001.

The eight deaths occurred during “multiple, complex” bomb strikes that also killed one Afghan civilian, the U.S. military said in a statement.

Several troops were wounded and evacuated to a nearby medical facility, the military said. No other details were immediately available.

I’ve tried to be civil up to this point about the President’s reticence to send in the needed combat troops to quell the Taliban uprising in Afghanistan, but this has already gone too far. We’ve lost 55 troops in Afghanistan in October alone… how many more have to die before somebody mans up and sends in some reinforcements? Pakistan is begging for the back up to smash their Taliban threat and we can’t even secure our own AO because this administration is hemming and hawing. Waiting to see which way the political wind blows before sending in troops is the course that a politician would take, but we need a leader and we need one right friggn’ now. There is no viable “wait and see” plan. There is no viable “keep the status quo” plan. There is no “withdraw and let the Taliban take over”  option because if Afghanistan falls, so will Pakistan and then we’ll have the same guys that hosted Team 9-11 running the show in both countries. If you think they did some serious damage with some hijacked planes, imagine what they could do with the nukes that they would acquire from Pakistan’s failed nuclear state.

Some people have equated the question of escalation in Afghanistan to the escalation in Viet Nam but the two scenarios are as different as apples and oranges. South Vietnam didn’t have nukes to lose nor did they have a theocracy that was willing to use them indiscriminately if they did. The situation really is quite simple: substantially increase the troop numbers in Afghanistan and secure the country immediately or lose the region to religious zealots who will use that loss to gain nuclear weapons and create a second, much more powerful and dangerous, Taliban regime.

Statistically Afghanistan has always had a higher per capita casualty rate, but the current per capita death rate for October has surpassed our troop losses from the 2004 Battle of Faluja where we lost 137 troops in one month. We’re losing more people just doing small operations in Afghanistan than we did in the biggest, most heated battle of the entire Iraq war because we won’t send in enough troops to allow them to do their jobs right. How much longer are we going to let these guys hang in the breeze?

Tags: 8 dead, Afghanistan, bombs, casualties, indecision

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.