Saturday, September 1, 2012

Green-on-blue attacks: U.S. officials acknowledge American lives were sacrificed in the rush to implement Obama's Afghan strategy

U.S. and NATO officials have acknowledged that, in the rush to implement the President's politically calculated troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, Afghan troops were not properly vetted, which resulted in the deaths of 45 coalition members since the beginning of the year - most of them Americans - at the hands of their supposed Afghan allies.

Hence, in an extremely belated response, the senior commander of U.S. special forces in Afghanistan has finally decided to suspend training for all new Afghan recruits until they can be re-vetted, the Washington Post reported on Saturday.

The spike in green-on-blue attacks has forced NATO officials to concede the 'painful truth': Many of the attacks might have been prevented "if existing security measures had been applied correctly," the Post reported.

Numerous military guidelines were not adhered to by either Afghans or Americans because of concerns that they might impede the growth of the Afghan army and police.

“What we learned is that you just can’t take [the vetting process] for granted," a senior special operations official was quoted as saying. "We probably should have had a mechanism to follow up with recruits from the beginning.”

NATO officials also acknowledged that, in certain instances, the vetting process was never properly implemented because of concerns that comprehensive and thorough background checks could slow the recruitment process. Requirements that Afghan soldiers produce proper credentials while on base were also ignored.

One U.S. official said that there was a lot of pressure to increase the size of the Afghan forces. Consequently, the vetting process was "was cast aside" because it was viewed as an impediment to accomplishing this goal.

But why was there was a lot of pressure to increase the size of the Afghan forces?

Because President Obama is exerting this pressure.

Mr. Obama [the Politician-in-Chief] insists on handing over primary responsibility for Afghanistan’s security to Afghan forces by the middle of 2013 and to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. That requires developing a sizable Afghan force in a short period of time, which is why stringent security measures and a thorough vetting process have not been properly implemented. And sadly, this has led to a huge spike in green-on-blue attacks, which has resulted in the deaths of U.S. and coalition troops.

And while insider attacks in Afghanistan have increased dramatically under President Obama's watch, he only recently [within the last week or two] acknowledged the problem. But, in truth, this is typical of Obama, who always seems to have an extremely belated and delayed response to problems: It takes him months [if not longer] before he is willing to acknowledge that a particular problem exists, no doubt because he would rather pretend as if these problems, which reflect poorly on his policy-making decisions, do not exist.

Frustrating, indeed.

In a related development, two American soldiers were killed in an insurgent attack in Afghanistan on Saturday. In a separate attack on Saturday, two suicide attackers blew themselves up near a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan killing at least 12 people. No American or coalition troops were killed in the attack, but a number of troops were wounded.

In May of this year, I noted that, contrary to President Obama's assertion that the Taliban's momentum in Afghanistan had been broken as a result of his [failed] policies, both Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Mike Rogers, the leaders of the Senate and House intelligence committees, upon returning from from a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan, asserted that the Taliban has grown stronger over the last three years.

But of course, it's easy for Obama to lie when he's got the mainstream media on his side.