| By Mike Collins - Oct 11th, 2009 at 10:27 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Adams County | Broom Brigade | Veterans for Progress |
Categories: Peace & Social Justice, Foreign Policy & Security, Effective & Ethical Government, Media Accountability, Budget Priorities
"— Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s reported recommendation of 40,000 additional troops — is itself counterinsurgency light. In his definitive recent field manual on the subject, Gen. David Petraeus stipulates that real counterinsurgency requires 20 to 25 troops for each thousand residents. That comes out, conservatively, to 640,000 troops for Afghanistan (population, 32 million). Some 535,000 American troops couldn’t achieve a successful counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, which had half Afghanistan’s population and just over a quarter of its land area."
Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco
By FRANK RICH
THOSE of us who love F. Scott Fitzgerald must acknowledge that he did get one big thing wrong. There are second acts in American lives. (Just ask Marion Barry, or William Shatner.) The real question is whether everyone deserves a second act. Perhaps the most surreal aspect of our great Afghanistan debate is the Beltway credence given to the ravings of the unrepentant blunderers who dug us into this hole in the first place.
Continued at the New York Times:
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