Murtha Says Afghanistan Is Lost - With Video
Democratic Rep. John Murtha — just back from a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan — said Monday that he never got a clear definition of what constitutes an “achievable victory” for the United States and fears that American commanders are assuming more time for the war effort than voters at home will allow.
“I am still very nervous about this whole thing,” Murtha told POLITICO. “If you had 10 years, it might work; if you had five, you could make a difference. But you don’t have that long.”
A top Democrat on military matters, the Pennsylvania lawmaker captures the skepticism facing the White House as President Barack Obama prepares to commit up to 35,000 more troops to the war effort. Obama has chosen a military forum, West Point, for his nationally televised speech Tuesday night, but Congress is the real test and a better reflection of the unease among everyday Americans.
Murtha, who chairs the defense appropriations panel in the House, is among the senior lawmakers slated to meet with the president at the White House on Tuesday. A Marine veteran of the Vietnam War and close ally of House SpeakerNancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the Pennsylvanian has worked closely with retired Marine Gen. James Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, who also served in Vietnam.
But it will be next to impossible for Obama to build broad support among Democrats in the House without bringing Murtha along.
“What’s the meaning of victory? I can’t remember a clear answer,” the chairman said of his briefings by military commanders and State Department officials in Afghanistan. And a later stop in Kuwait, where his delegation met with generals managing the withdrawal from Iraq, underscored the time pressures and costs facing Obama.
Delays in Iraq’s elections are already threatening to slow the pace of the withdrawal there, Murtha said, while in Afghanistan, the new U.S. commander charged with training the Afghan security forces — Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell — estimated he had arrived to find only about half the resources needed for his job.
Obama, as a central part of his strategy, will try to correct this by adding thousands of additional trainers.
The missed opportunities to begin more training in Afghanistan earlier are, in part, a legacy of the Bush administration’s almost single-minded focus on Iraq’s needs. Only $3.5 billion in funding was provided for Afghan security forces from fiscal 2004 through 2006 — about a quarter of what was provided for Iraqi security forces in the same period.
Critics warn that this administration must be more honest about its own training goals, and Obama is paying a price now for mistakes made last spring when he raised troop levels to 68,000 without a better assessment of the strategy he needed.
“He allowed himself to be rushed into announcing what he said was a strategy but was actually little more than a broad set of concepts,” writes Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The months of effort within the U.S. national security community that have followed have shown the president spoke before there was any meaningful reassessment of the threat.”
Cordesman has been a voice for “strategic patience,” predicting that, even in the best case, “it is unlikely that the insurgency and terrorist threat can be entirely defeated in Afghanistan and Pakistan within the next decade.”
“People always look for a punch line in any very complex situation, and inevitably they are wrong,” he told POLITICO. But he — like the more impatient Murtha — also says Obama must better define what victory means for his new strategy.
Others agree. “What is victory? It’s a good question,” said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-Calif.). “I’m not as prone to jumping into wars as I used to be. He spent two months deciding,” Berman said of Obama. “I think I can spend a few weeks.”
The same weeks coincide with the health care debate in the Senate and the growing pressure in the House for more action to counter unemployment. New jobless numbers are due Friday, and Obama himself will pivot from West Point to a meeting on the economy at the White House later this week.
A new Democracy Corps poll released Monday warns of eroding support for Obama’s economic message in 60 competitive House districts. “The country is not ready to listen to a narrative about how Democrats have brought the economy ‘back from the brink’ and averted an even worse disaster, as articulated by the president in his joint session address to Congress earlier this year,” reads the accompanying analysis.
Ironically enough, one of the commanders who impressed Murtha most was British Maj. Gen. Nick Carter in Helmand Province, who didn’t hesitate to say that real progress had to be shown by next May to keep political support alive at home.
“All these generals understand it can’t be won militarily. The more people you kill, the more enemies you make,” Murtha said. He credited the U.S. commander, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, with firmly changing the direction: “He’s trying to switch from killing people to winning their hearts and minds. It’s almost as simple as that.”
“He laid it out. He gave the best explanation he could of how it would work if you have the time, but I don’t think he has the time,” Murtha continued.
“I asked how much time he needed. He said he needs three years. I think he said at least three years. I said, ‘You don’t have three years.’”
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Could someone PLEASE feed this ex-Marine a huge bowl of STFU?
Of course Afghanistan is lost - just take a look at the Chicken in Charge (CIC) and you’ll understand. As for Murtha - this huge pile of pig shit needs to go home and write his memoirs (fat chance it will sell two copies).
Whenever the American Left wants to justify screwing over America and our military they just trot out Murtha.
Murtha has a chip on his shoulder the size of, ironically, a Jackass.
Why?
I guessing it’s because the U.S. Marine Corps passed him over for the career path to a General. For 28 years he was in the Corps moving in and out of active duty and the reserves a couple of times each. He eventually retired while in the reserves.
Really, I don’t know what happened to this guy so that he would so blatantly appear to have abandoned the Marine Corps principals of “Corps and Country”.
I cannot understand how anyone in elected office is immune from prosecution for sedition and subversion. This man is continually violating the sanctity of morale of the fighting man and woman and needs to be sent home to his little airport so he can write books and tell us all how railroaded he was.
You just watch how the upscope in the optempo rises because of this incredibly disloyal alleged marine.
I wonder if Eric Holder might be available to shed some light on cowardice once more.
These people are really breaking my heart after 34 years of service that I performed selflessly, with dignity, compassion and honor and at sacrfices few would want to emulate, but I cherish as heartfelt honor.
Who are these people who so arrogantly take for granted everything we are about???????
What’s worse is there is no one who cares.
I feel your pain, I gave up on this country on 11-04-08, they shit on my service by electing a fairy tale to the highest office in the land.
I’m appalled at this crap and feel betrayed after serving 28 years and 29 days in service of this country. It should be mandatory that all Congress and the President should be veterans - not that some shit bird like Murtha wouldn’t squeeze through the door, but at least the majority of them would know what service is instead of serving themselves.
Tellicorick: 34 years and counting, still serving and have always served to please God and General George Washington. I completely agree. What we take for granted is being TAKEN. I did not watch the saboteur last night, I saw one video clip of him specaking with those dagger eyes he has.
What’s been happening in this country is a script right out of the remake of The Three Musketeers with Kiefer Sutherland: the livid and deliebrate neglect by Clinton for eight years, the betrayal of Bush who tried to play catch up and was sabotaged repeatedly, but nothing in this country rivals the chaos and overt betrayal since January.
Quagmires are the invention of the pussyfooting Leftists.
If you insert an American military unit and tell them to WIN and instruct them to destroy our enemies there is not one single force, citizen army or terrorist group that can withstand the might of the US Military. Not a freaking one.
Now, you get Lefties, lame-ass politicians, lawyers and the MSM to manage a war and what do you get? FUBAR.
Drop these guys in and don’t talk to them again until they’re done doing their jobs. You’ll be surprised by the results.
By the way, to see Clinton up there and that marshmallow lapdog Gibbs is intolerable. I will not watch the video. These guys are causing the deaths of untold dozens and they have a gleam in their eye and talk so pompously, yet have no true love of country evident in anything they do. All true passion is borne of anguish and I have seen enough of both at their hands.
When does this end and when do consequences attach?
http://americangrandjury.org/forum/topic.php?id=1175
That’s what I’m talkin’ about!!
Oh hell yeah! That fired me up big time
Murtha is a puke. These are the kind of Mid-Value targets we should eliminate. The usurper’s early demise would turn his myth into legend but no one would miss that POS.
Murtha is a trash talking dirt bag from the past…deserving no hearing from Patriotic Americans who love their country.
Vote him out and rescue his state from tyranny.
Where’s a debilitating heart attack when you need one……
Yeah, the ass bag already speaks and acts like he had a stroke, maybe that is part of being a liberal POS, so yes, cardiac arrest, since the stroke didn’t stop him. Or Byrd, or too many others…
I can’t believe this old fart can appear in public without some old Marine kicking his ass. He’s an embarr(ass)ment to the Marine Corp. and to the country.
People in Western Penn have got to be just a Frickin stupid as the people in San Fran, they continue to vote for this ass clown.
bloated fuck has never found a fight he didnt want to lose
So in 2 years he’ll be eating his words like Harry Reid?
No, because the MSM won’t hold him accountable for the past, just like Reid isn’t, nor is Obama, nor any other liberal/socialist.
Until the conservatives really band together, and vote with their wallets as well as their ballot, the MSM will have all the income they need to stick it to us by support wind bags like Murtha and ManBearPig