Gottfried, I agree that it is hard to judge accuracy when someone claims local knowledge. Who knows what point of view or what veracity the reporter has. It was from the Guardian, a conservative British newspaper so that may indicate some degree of reliability. I don't think that the current plan to use hit and run troops rules out the possibility that we would some day have firebases there or, if not, that we could have a large scale ground operation whether we wanted it or not.
The use of ground troops greatly increases the odds of an incident that could lead to substantial escalation of the action in Afghanistan. The Afghanis are reportedly notoriously vicious with prisoners. If our GI's are captured, tortured and killed, the outrage and the pressure on our leadership to expand the scope and intensity of the action would be substantial. There is evidently a strong hawkish lobby in the administration and, of course, among the military. That lobby would be strengthened by such an uproar.
Even without an escalation like that, it's possible and maybe likely that there will some day be a large scale ground operation there. It's sometimes a lot easier for special operations to get in than it is for them to get out. If the unit suffers casualties that limit their mobility or the extraction point is compromised because of opposition forces or because of armaments that can take out the extraction choppers, the extraction can be delayed or even aborted. Lots of things can go wrong on the ground and if the Taliban are primed and ready to take casualties in order to kill or capture U.S. troops, things could get really ugly, really fast.
In my experience, in actual firefights things change so quickly and move so fast that there is no way to plan for all the contingencies in advance. It involves a series of decisions that are made as a result of the interaction of you and the bad guys. You could, for instance, take heavy fire from a position that was thought to be clear or have an rpg drop right in the middle of a squad and get tied down with wounded and dead that require treatment and men to pack them out. You end up somewhere you didn't want to go and can't get to the place you need to be to get out. There you sit relying on air power to keep the bad guys off but pretty soon they are inside the safe zone and the only way to get to them is to call in firepower that may well take you out as well. They bring in armaments that will take choppers out of the sky and now you're stuck with your dead and wounded and it's night and you still can't get out cause they're out there and anyway you've got the wounded to deal with. The dead and wounded keep increasing and your ability to move keeps decreasing.
Guess what, you just bought into a ground war, at least for a while. They are sending more troops in to get you out but they don't know about the underground tunnels and the cave system and there are a lot of bad guys getting into position to set a bigger mousetrap.
The point I'm making is that it's not the black and white picture that we would sometimes like to think it is. In the course of fighting against skilled and determined foes, nothing goes quite the way you think it will and sometimes it goes just the way you thought it wouldn't. Don't go there unless you're willing to take the losses. In the case of troops on the ground and in the case of Taliban fighters, losses can mean some very nasty things. I've heard a lot of talk about being resolved and tough enough to see this thing through. One of the tough things we will likely have to do is to leave our soldiers to their fate if they are captured and beyond our reach. I'm prepared to do that. I wonder how many others are? Ed |
