Afghanistan: Obama’s Video Game War (Video)

Satire from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Afghanistan being the ‘Empire Killer’ like the last level in the video game to beat – 17 Sept 09 (3:47):

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In the coming days, 3,000 “combat enablers” will be deployed to pump the Obama Administration’s “civilian surge”, Jason Ditz at AntiWar.com reports U.S. officials say, adding: “The U.S. escalation on the ground comes amid growing evidence that the war is being lost, both in real terms and popular terms. But though the Obama Administration has made much of a promised ‘civilian surge‘ to bring stability to the war zone, it is now being conceded that little is going to result from it. The focus seems pretty much entirely on combat at this point, whether enabling it or engaging in it.”

The “civilian surge” is a setup for the top Afghanistan commander of the U.S.-led occupation, General Stanley McChrystal’s, ‘private’ request for 40,000 more troops. Mr. Ditz called the request a “doozy” in another summary describing the boost in “U.S. presence” to “well over 100,000 troops, and nearly triple the number in the nation with President Obama was elected last November.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates backs more U.S. troops on top of President Obama’s planned surge to double U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 68,000 by the end of 2009, despite rising opposition to the occupation by the American people and the hypocritical moral bankruptcy of the current Bush-Obama War on Terror.

Alison Smale’s analysis at The New York Times (h/t: Scott Horton) cites Carter Administration National Security Adviser Zbignew Brzezinski as the latest member of the U.S. poli-intellectual elite that-is-no-stranger-to-being-hawkish that is skeptical, at the least, of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan in stating the West runs the “risk of suffering the fate of the Soviet Union” due to the “Afghan perception that they are foreign invaders”:

For President Barack Obama, Afghanistan is the foreign policy issue that has “perhaps the greatest need for strategic review,” said Mr. Brzezinski, who met with Mr. Obama during the presidential campaign last year, and endorsed his candidacy but was not a formal adviser.

“We are running the risk of replicating—obviously unintentionally—the fate of the Soviets,” Mr. Brzezinski said in his speech Friday night.

The presence of so many foreign troops underpins an Afghan perception that the Americans and their allies are hostile invaders and “suggests transformation of the conflict is taking place,” he added.