By Jon Sarge
GCC/Staff
Dec. 3, 2009

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The day after Obama’s national address outlining his Afghanistan “strategy” to the American public (and world), pundits have been providing their take on the speech and how and why 30,000 troops may/may not be enough.  I believe they have all missed the greater point! 

Namely, that after this administration began changing the Rules of Engagement (RoE) on how this conflict would be fought, it doesn’t matter if he announced he was sending 30,000 or 300,000 troops….we are still going to fail.  Tragically, under the current Sympathizer-in-Chief many more of our military brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters will be needlessly sacrificed!

In the 60 Minutes piece that aired on September 27^th, 2009 U.S. Afghanistan commander, General Stanley McChrystal  outlined the “dramatic change” in which troops were being ordered to fight under the Obama administration. 

President Obama (who banned the use of the phrase “Global War on Terrorism” as soon as he entered the White House) has changed the main goal of the American forces fighting for their lives. 

As 60 Minutes stated, “Protecting the Afghan people – many of them living in impoverished villages – is now more important than killing the enemy, even if that means taking more risks.” 

Following the orders of his civilian leadership, General McChrystal “took drastic action, ordering a virtual ban on air strikes against residential areas, even if hostile fire is coming from the building.” 

It doesn’t take a military strategist to understand that, for the Taliban and al-Qaida forces, this means they know they are sheltered from America’s greatest weapon—its devastating firepower—if they hide and fight from civilian dwellings and mosques!

In another asinine RoE change, General McCrystal stated in the 60 Minutes piece that he had also ordered American convoys to stop their aggressive driving on Afghan streets and offered “It’s [driving fast] perceived by the people as arrogance.

It’s perceived by the people as not caring about; you know their right to use the road. And at the end of the day, it’s their roads,” he said.

When asked by 60 Minutes correspondent is he was trying to deprogram eight years of bad habits, McChrystal agreed saying, “Exactly, There’s an awful lot of bad habits we’ve got to deprogram.”

Newsflash to Obama’s top field general—US soldiers drive fast to keep from getting ambushed and blown up by roadside IED’s!  In their efforts to wage WAR in a kinder, gentler method (sparing Muslim brothers of their lives), this President and his genuflecting, political officers are going to get a whole bunch of our best and most patriotic defenders of freedom needlessly killed!  You have to wonder if that’s the intent. 

I mean, after all, according to his Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, these same returning veterans could turn out to be the domestic terrorists they would have to fight back home in the United States!    

So, most everyone is missing the great point.  It doesn’t matter how many troops you send into combat if you handcuff their capability to accomplish their mission!  Does no one remember Vietnam? 

The reason President Johnson could not succeed is because he tried to micromanage the war from the White House and restricted our forces from bombing North Vietnamese “safe havens.”  

In the end, I guess it’s not surprising coming from the Sympathizer-in-Chief who could not muster the courage to utter the word “win” in his first war strategy.