ITS ABOUT BIN LADEN YOU DUMBASSES! Thats the Mofo I want dead, through any means necessary. I could care less about Saddam in his damn bunker.
Shifting resources, losing focus, get mired in a poorly-planned mess. Whatever, fix the mess you are in, but DON'T LOSE SITE OF THE REAL BAD GUY:
And guess what, THE CIA IS SHUTTING DOWN ITS BIN LADEN GROUP!! WTF.
The man who led America's hunt for Osama bin Laden has said the CIA was wrong to disband the only unit devoted entirely to the terrorist leader's pursuit - just at a time when al-Qaida is reasserting its influence over global jihad.
Shutting down the Bin Laden unit squandered 10 years of expertise in the war on terror, said Michael Scheuer, who founded the unit in 1995 and arguably knows more about Bin Laden than any other western intelligence official. He believes the unit was dismantled because of bureaucratic jealousies within the CIA, and that the closure delivers a further setback to a pursuit that has been squeezed for resources for the past two years.
"What it robs you of is a critical mass of officers who have been working on this together for a decade," he told the Guardian. "We had a breed of specialists rare in an intelligence community that prides itself on generalists. It provided a base from which to build a cadre of people specialising in attacking Sunni extremist operations, who sacrificed promotions and other emoluments in their employment in the clandestine service, where specialists were looked on as nerds."
4 comments:
Wow, two posts in a row I can sink my teeth into! Iraq had EVERYTHING to do with 9/11. Up until then, the US held a policy of absorbing a first hit, then going after the BAD GUY that did it. After 9/11, the US could no longer sit back and absorb a hit. The US had to be proactive. Accepted that we found very little in the way WMD when we finally went in after ten years. Guess what, that didn't make Saddam any less of a bad guy. As I've stated before, I think our timing was wrong. Either we should have gone in much sooner, or waited him out. One way or another though, we would end up going in. I'm not trying to be sarcastic, but must we always let the terrorist strike first before we respond? Bin Laden killed a few thousand on 9/11. How many did Saddam kill?
Norman I don't doubt that Saddam had terror camps of some sort, and he deliberately misled even his top military brass to think he had WMD's. But Saddam was containable, since the US could fly over his territory with inpunity, and he was after all subject to economic sanctions. I worried then- and still worry much more about Iran.
If you want to be proactive about stuff, I would rather have seen US troops doing it right in Afghanistan...and if necessary occupying half of Pakistan, where the real bad guys were.
No argument about Saddam being containable at the time... but at a hefty cost with a high level of risk; perhaps acceptable risk. With the information I had, I would have held off. My point, however, is that there was a strong link between actions in Iraq and 9-11.
Exactly what did the US troops do wrong in Afghanistan? That was pretty much text book taking down of a country in a matter of days / weeks that the Soviet Union couldn't handle over the course of several years? As far as the real bad guys, the real bad guys are all over. There was a large concentration in Afghanistan at that time and we got a lot of them in. We got some in Pakistan as we ll. We didn't get the ones in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc. I'd like to wordsmith this to sound less argumentative and expand a bit more, but I've got to get some work done.
Re Afghanistan, Norman, given the time and resources available I think they did a hell of a job, nothing wrong there the first couple of months, actually outstanding.
Where there was one big mistake, was relying too much on Afghan warlords to lead the chase into Tora Bora after Bin Laden.
After 2002 the leadership failure was draining resources and commitment needed to chase after Bin Laden and his crew in neighboring Pakistan and the border area.
The "enemy" is spread wide over and decentralized, and part of the real fight is going on in all sorts of strange and murky places. But part of their leadership -and the "spiritual" center of many of the militants is in Pakistan.
The U.S. IMO should have maintained a bigger presence in Afghanistan, as a staging area to fight Al-Qaeda and the Talibans both inside and across the border. And it also helps to keep an eye on Iran too.
And the areas of operation are largely rural and relatively underpopulated, not the densely populated, urban, Sunni triangle.
The US needed to "go medieval" on Afghanistan, and it was the right place to do so, if it pissed off many Muslims and stirred up Pakistan. They still could have pressed further, gone directly into Pakistan if needed, and still would have had a clear purpose and support of many people in the West.
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