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Playing Nice With The Taliban?
by Dale Brown, 2009

ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT TheBigFiveOh.com Blog @ Yahoo.Com, 06/06/09

This article was posted in the daily Air Force Times online blog: New Directive on Air Strikes: Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new top commander of US forces in Afghanistan, was poised to issue a directive late last week instructing US troops to avoid air attacks against Taliban insurgents in scenarios in which civilians could be placed at grave risk. McClatchy news service reported July 1 that the directive was to take effect on July 2. It calls on US troops to assume that Afghan civilians are present in a town or village where the Taliban has taken refuge and to refrain from calling in air strikes or commencing a firefight if there is any doubt about the presence of civilians. "We cannot keep going down the path of putting civilians at risk," Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, US Forces-Afghanistan spokesman, told the news service. He added, "People want to see changes in behavior." Afghan civilian casualties caused by US and coalition aircraft have been a sore spot in US-Afghan relations.

So if US forces are to ASSUME that civilians are present in a town or village, and Taliban fighters escape to that town or village, we can't engage them? What kind of policy is that? What do you think the Taliban will do? We are TELLING them what their safe escape route is! What if the Taliban ATTACKS from a town or village instead of retreats to it? This directive mans we can't fight back AT ALL! This is Pres. Obama's idea of warfare: letting a hundred bad guys go is better than killing one civilian, even if it is completely unintentional or accidental. Over the weekend I saw the movie "Flight of the Intruder," based on the novel by my friend Stephen Coonts, in which US forces fighting in Vietnam were being killed while bombing "suspected truck marshalling areas" which turned out to be empty jungle, instead of bombing known high-value targets because of the fear of killing civilians. Can you spell MORASS? BOGGED DOWN?

ANOTHER VIETNAM? Because that's what will happen in Afghanistan if we let progressives in Washington dictate the rules of engagement on a battlefield half a world away. What's next? Barack Obama huddled over a map of Afghanistan with Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, and David Axelrod, deciding which targets should or should not be attacked next?

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