Short Takes
Gen. Petraeus, proestors at Town Hall
Selling the war? Petraeus speaking at town hall.
George Bush’s departure from office hasn’t ended the counter-insurgencies he started in Iraq and Afghanistan — a fact driven home by the fast-moving technical presentation by Gen. David Petraeus on Wed., July 8 at Seattle’s Town Hall.
Petraeus, the chief of U.S. Central Command in the Middle East and former top commander in Iraq, says bin Laden is merely an “iconic” symbol that’s of little actual value for us.
One of the half-dozen or so protesters who showed up outside Town Hall prior to Petraeus’s appearance said she sees little difference now between Bush and Obama when it comes to ending the wars.
“I’m here because Gen. Petraeus is here to sell this war to the people, and I want to tell the people that we’re not in the market for any more wars. We need to end them,” said Helen Von Erichsen with Veterans for Peace. Because the president is escalating drone attacks on innocent people in Pakistan, she said, “it’s now become Obama’s war.”
And Petraeus, the architect of the counter-insurgency model the U.S. military now uses post-invasion, is the man in charge.
It’s a model, the amiable general told a packed house, that relies on “securing and serving” an occupied population to win their hearts and minds. Among the “big ideas” that he instituted after taking over command of Iraq in 2007, the troops had to “live our values” and live among the people — because “you can’t commute to the fight,” he said.
This is a year of transition in Iraq, Petraeus said. U.S. troops have already pulled out of Iraq’s cities, he said, and by this fall, U.S. forces will increase from 30,000 to 68,000 in Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s escalating guerrilla warfare is waged in the poppy-growing southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar on the Pakistan border.
Providing enough security in those Pashtun tribal areas to legitimize Afghanistan’s upcoming Aug. 20 elections will be tough, he said. And that’s just the start of the U.S.’ “to-do” list.
“Needless to say, there’s an enormous amount of work required to build the capacity of the Afghanistan government, for it to be seen as serving the people and not taking advantage of them, to clamp down the corruption that has hardened some of the elements,” Petraeus said. “And also then to get after this narcotic problem, the illegal narcotics industry that is such a plague on Afghanistan and indeed makes one of the major export crops, if not the major export crop, an illegal business and the obvious challenges to the rule-of-law efforts in that regard.”
The general at evening’s end responded to the audience question, “What happened to catching bin Laden?”
The mountains where he’s hiding are high and strangers stand out at vast distances, he said. But, “The fact is that while bin Laden remains a very iconic and a very important symbolic figure, he is certainly not issuing even strategic direction, much less day-to-day direction of any kind” to Al Qaeda.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Petraeus added. “We would still certainly like to find him, but, I mean, he is ... in an area in which we do not operate on the ground, and obviously that complicates things.”
Comments
Take a good look at these videos below and you will start to get a picture of how Americans really feel about President Obama’s healthcare reform (whatever the Democrats may say) 642-812 exam, particularly the Congressional Democrats’ bill, H.R. 3200, with its “public option 642-901 exam.”
Way to go, patriots! Seeing you crashing these town hall meetings is just one more argument for requiring our Congressmen to spend 75% of their time in their districts! Keep up the energy 646-003 exam, keep up the activism, and most importantly of all… roll all of this forward into electoral action in 2010 to unseat the tyrants in Congress!
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