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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: SilentZ who wrote (190345)6/12/2004 10:57:16 AM
From: i-node  Read Replies (1) of 1586711
 
If we'd had enough troops to have kept Tora Bora completely surrounded in late '01, don't you think there's a good chance that bin Laden wouldn't have gotten out of there alive? Also, you don't think having sheer numbers working on and around the mountains where bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are believed to be hiding on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border would help?

Mistakes may have been made at Tora Bora, I don't know. But the mistakes didn't involve insufficient troops. The war in Afghanistan is being fought with special forces for a reason. It isn't about creaming a military as in Iraq. It is about acquiring and using intelligence. Once bin Laden is found, you don't need 130,000 troops to defeat him.

I would think this fact would be obvious to the Left.

And, most important of all, if we'd had boots on the ground in Afghanistan, would we be relying on warlords to ensure the security of that country? Afghanistan is deteriorating every day.

It is strange you're concerned about this given your stance on Iraq.

I, for one, would not have supported sending 100K troops to Afghanistan to capture bin Laden. It just doesn't make any sense to do so. Bin Laden is a tiny aspect of the problem, and they day he's gone you just have another guy to replace him.

I think the overriding point is that you don't send hundreds of thousands of troops out in search of Al Qaeda. We destroyed their training facilities. We forced them to move around and resort to archaic communications. They have no infrastructure. The beauty of Al Qaeda's celluar structure is that it HAS no real central authority subject to devastation.

We may not have figured out how to defeat Al Qaeda yet. What we DO KNOW is that traditional methods (sending 100K troops) won't work. If you think that should have been done you ARE confused. It isn't THAT kind of war.
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