WASHINGTON – The U.S. plan to send an additional 3,200 Marines to troubled southern Afghanistan this spring reflects the Pentagon’s belief that if it can’t bully its recalcitrant NATO allies into sending more troops to the Afghan front, perhaps it can shame them into doing so, U.S. officials said.

But the immediate reaction to the proposed deployment from NATO partners fighting alongside U.S. forces was that it was about time the United States stepped up its own effort.

After more than six years of coalition warfare in Afghanistan, NATO is a bundle of frayed nerves and tension over nearly every aspect of the conflict, including troop levels and missions, reconstruction, anti-narcotics efforts, and even counterinsurgency strategy. Stress has grown along with casualties, domestic pressures and a sense that the war is not improving, according to a wide range of senior U.S. and NATO-member officials who agreed to discuss sensitive alliance issues on the condition of anonymity.

While Washington has long called for allies to send more forces, NATO countries involved in some of the fiercest fighting have complained that they are suffering the heaviest losses. The United States supplies about half of the 54,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, they say, but the British, Canadians and Dutch are engaged in regular combat in the volatile south.

“We have one-tenth of the troops and we do more fighting than you do,” a Canadian official said of his country’s 2,500 troops in Kandahar province. “So do the Dutch.” The Canadian death rate, proportional to the overall size of its force, is higher than that of U.S. troops in Afghanistan or Iraq, a Canadian government analysis concluded last year.

British officials note that the eastern region, where most U.S. forces are based, is far quieter than the Taliban-saturated center of British operations in Helmand, the country’s top opium-producing province. The American rejoinder, spoken only in private with references to British operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, is that superior U.S. skills have made it so.

Full Story Here:
Allies feel strain of Afghan war

I am going to keep this short and to the point lest I drift off on another tirade concerning the dumbest SOB to ever inhabit the White House…

If ‘Mr. Stay the Course’ had actually done that, stayed the course where the course actually was, we could have very likely avoid almost 4,000 combat deaths in Iraq, saved BILLIONS of U.S. taxpayer dollars and been done with Afghanistan, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Pakistan and any other REAL threat to America by now, that is, if this GWoT were actually about terror and not so much about arming those that caused the attacks of 9-11 in an effort to secure oil and the revenues that go with it…

And to our allies, if the Taliban is more active in your area than they are in the U.S. areas, KILL THE TALIBAN, I mean, there’s just something about KILLING your enemies, in LARGE numbers, it has been MY observation that this practice tends to take the fight, or the desire to be active, right out of them…

When did the armies of the free world decide it was OK to prosecute a PC war?? What part of that idea is just not right?? Do ANY of you think the Taliban and al-Qaeda are going to fight a PC war??

I think not…

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