New Afghan War: Frontline Correspondent Says Fight Has Morphed – But We Still Can’t Afford to Lose

6 September 2009

This story was published in the New York Daily News on 6 September 2009.

Photo: Jacobson/AP

Helmand, Afghanistan – The West is losing this war. This has been obvious for more than three years. Less obvious is that in 2009, we are down to the wire. Gen. Stanley McChrystal and others will soon recommend to President Obama the latest treatment for a dying patient.

Meanwhile, allies and Americans are asking themselves why we are here. Some are saying that Al Qaeda is still here or is waiting in the wings to return to its home. Yet Afghanistan was never Al Qaeda’s permanent home to begin with. Al Qaeda was just renting a little space here, just as it was renting space in places like Germany and Florida. (more…)

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Tags: Afghan war, Afghanistan, al qaeda, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Ghor Province
Posted Sep 6th 2009 at 2:56 pm in Michael Yon Dispatches, Military | 21884651 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/myon/2009/09/06/new-afghan-war-frontline-correspondent-says-fight-has-morphed-%e2%80%93-but-we-still-cant-afford-to-lose/New+Afghan+War%3A+Frontline+Correspondent+Says+Fight+Has+Morphed+%E2%80%93+But+We+Still+Can%27t+Afford+to+Lose2009-09-06+21%3A56%3A55Michael+Yon

Michael Yon Dispatch: The Kopp-Etchells Effect

17 August 2009
Sangin, Afghanistan

The roads are so littered with enemy bombs that nearly all transport and resupply to this base occurs by helicopter. The pilots roar through the darkness, swoop into small bases nestled in the saddle of enemy territory, and quickly rumble off into the night.

A witness must spend only a short time in the darkness to know we are at war. Flares arc into the night, or mortar illumination rounds drift and swing under parachutes, orange and eerily in the distance, casting long, flickering but sharply defined shadows. The worst that can happen is that you will be caught in an open field, covered by nothing and concealed only by darkness, when the illumination suddenly bathes you in light. Best is to stay low and freeze and prepare to fire, or in the case of a writer, to stay low and freeze and prepare to watch the firing. (more…)

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Tags: Afghanistan, Robert Gates, Sangin
Posted Aug 17th 2009 at 4:53 pm in Michael Yon Dispatches, Military | 20693423 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/myon/2009/08/17/michael-yon-dispatch-the-kopp-etchells-effect/Michael+Yon+Dispatch%3A+The+Kopp-Etchells+Effect2009-08-17+23%3A53%3A01Michael+Yon

Sangow Bar Village

16 July 2009
Ghor Province, Afghanistan

On a per capita basis, Afghanistan is becoming more dangerous for British and American troops than Iraq ever was. For those who fought in places like Anbar, Basra, Baghdad, Diyala and Nineveh, that’s saying a whole lot. On a per capita basis, there are strong indications that Afghanistan will prove more deadly than Iraq during 2006-2007. One can only imagine how many days and nights Secretary Robert Gates and his advisors must have agonized over troop levels here. On the one hand, we have a fraction of the troops we need, but on the other, increasing troop levels increases hostility toward us. Secretary Gates has made it clear to me that his biggest concern is that we will lose the goodwill of the people and they will turn against us. This happens to be my own biggest concern. The agony is in knowing we need more medicine and the medicine can be highly toxic here. Many people have complained that the new restrictions on air strikes will hurt us, but from my boots, General McChrystal (the new boss here) has fulfilled the intent of his boss, and that the decision, though tough, was wise; if we lose the widespread assent of the Afghan people, it’s all over but for the bleeding. (more…)

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Tags: Afghanistan, Anbar, Baghdad, Basra, Cesarean births
Posted Jul 16th 2009 at 3:43 pm in Michael Yon Dispatches, Military | 18503423 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/myon/2009/07/16/sangow-bar-village/Sangow+Bar+Village2009-07-16+22%3A43%3A38Michael+Yon

A Little Straight Talk

Those on the Left who have trashed George Bush for this entire decade claim they weren’t being rude or unpatriotic, but were simply talking truth to power.  That has a nice ring to it, so I think I’ll give it a shot.

Today, I’ll talk truth to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, potential justice of the Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor, Pope Benedict XVI and President Barack Obama.  That’s a more powerful lineup than the 1927 New York Yankees, if I do say so myself.

I have almost begun to feel sorry for Nancy Pelosi.  After all, when you get past the facelifts and the Botox injections, the designer suits and the large private jet, you have an aging grandmother who, in a perfect world, would be home playing with the grandkids and letting the wrinkles show.  Instead, she’s constantly on TV, telling lies and looking like a small animal staring at oncoming headlights.  I think that instead of babbling about what she didn’t know and when she didn’t know it, she should claim the Twinkie defense just like that other two-bit San Francisco politician, Dan White.  In case you don’t recall, when he went on trial for killing Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, White’s lawyers, in making their case for diminished capacity, claimed he had been suffering from depression, and that his depression had been made more severe by a junk food diet that included a lot of Twinkies.  I can see Rep. Pelosi taking that defense out of moth balls, dusting it off and blaming all of her recent insanity on cheap confections.  Heck, forget the pastries; she’d only need to mention having to sit through meetings with the likes of Harry Reid, Rahm Emanuel or Arlen Specter, and even I would lessen her sentence. (more…)

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Tags: bush, Charles Dickens, dan white, gitmo, Governor Carnahan
Posted May 28th 2009 at 8:04 am in Politics, Religion | 14437012 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/bprelutsky/2009/05/28/a-little-straight-talk/A+Little+Straight+Talk2009-05-28+15%3A04%3A26Burt+Prelutsky