State Department in formal negotiations for U.S. troops to remain in AFGHN past 2014

This is not a shocker....Most who know anything about things in Afghanistan expected this development.  The info put out by Biden last week is also as expected as the POLS in charge are incapable of being honest with the American people about what is planned for Afghanistan.

The road ahead is hard and will be difficult....sorry to be a buzzkill but our enemies are not going to make things easy anytime soon.

State Department official: Negotiations to extend U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan starting soon

Posted By Josh Rogin Tuesday, October 16, 2012http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/10/16/state_department_official_negotiations_to_extend_us_troop_presence_in_afghanistan_s

Despite statements by Vice President Joe Biden, the State Department is about to begin formal negotiations over the extension of U.S. troops past 2014, a top State Department official said Tuesday.
 
Last week, U.S. and Afghan negotiators met in Kabul to talk about the Bilateral Security Agreement that will govern the extension of U.S. troops past 2014, when President Barack Obama said the combat mission in Afghanistan will end and the U.S. will complete the transition of the entire country to Afghan government control.

Also last week, Biden told Americans during his Oct. 11 debate with Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan that U.S. troops were leaving Afghanistan by 2014.

"We are leaving in 2014, period, and in the process, we're going to be saving over the next 10 years another $800 billion," Biden said. "We've been in this war for over a decade. The primary objective is almost completed. Now all we're doing is putting the Kabul government in a position to be able to maintain their own security. It's their responsibility, not America's."

Marc Grossman, the State Department's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, explained today that's not the whole story.

Grossman said Tuesday that the point of the upcoming negotiations is to agree on an extension of the U.S. troop presence well past 2014, for the purposes of conducting counterterrorism operations and training and advising the Afghan security forces

VP DEBATE - Biden yells, " Hey Kid, Get off my lawn ! "

I watched the VP Debate last night and it was exactly what was expected.  Biden was unable to defend his points so he resorted to acting like  " Rude Joe "

The Wall Street Journal writes it up well this morning:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443749204578051073494711456.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

If the DEMS strategy is to act rude and try to shout over your opponent, they will lose as people are sick of that version of politics.  I have already voted by absentee ballot....make sure you vote as this election matters.

The Taliban are our enemy, regardless what Vice President Biden may think or say

“The Taliban per se is not our enemy,” Vice President Joe Biden

Really Mr. Vice President ?? Really ?? Then let's send you over to Pakistan without a security contingent and let you have a face-to-face discussion with our "non-enemy" Tailban. Let me know how that works out for you.

I would say that anyone who encounters the Taliban in person would have a different point-of-view. Let's ask the British Doctor they kidnapped this week who was working for the International Red Cross or the 59 year old British Nurse they grabbed in December. Bet they hold a different point-of-view.

The Taliban are NARCO TERRORISTS, plain & simple. They like to wrap themselves in a jihadist cover and claim they are fighting for Islam, but in reality, it is all about the drug trade that comes from the Afghanistan/Pakistan region.

The Taliban and their allies the Haquanni, are all about terrorizing the populace, money, weapons and drugs. Their goal is to control all the aforementioned items in the AF/PAK region. The political posturing is folly as they don't care about Western issues like " Afghanistan " or " Pakistan ". Our Western concepts of countries and such are not relevant as they are tribal and don't really care about where the border line is drawn.

One certainty is that our present administration acts foolish when they play politics with the lives of our soldiers and emboldens our enemies when they speak foolishly about who we are fighting.

The Taliban are our enemy. They will wait us out, and when we leave Afghanistan, the bloodshed that they will inflict upon the people there will be horrific.

Mr. Vice President, with all due respect, you haven't got a clue. The enclosed news story is a prima facie example of the Taliban's true message to us and those who would be our allies over there.

A few thousand US Soldiers wounded or killed by the Taliban were unavailable for comment.

15 Kidnapped Pakistani Soldiers Executed by the Taliban in a Retaliatory Gesture
By SALMAN MASOOD and ISMAIL KHAN
NY TIMES: January 5, 2012

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Taliban insurgents executed 15 security soldiers who had been recently kidnapped and dumped their bodies on a hilltop in northwestern Pakistan on Thursday, in retaliation for the killing of a militant commander by government forces, government and military officials said.

The soldiers were kidnapped Dec. 23 after dozens of Taliban insurgents overran a fort in one of the restive tribal regions straddling the border with Afghanistan. Officials said they had tried but failed to secure the captives’ release.

The executions followed the death of a high-ranking Taliban commander on Sunday and came just days after local news media reported that several factions of the Taliban had vowed not to attack the Pakistani military.

The bullet-ridden bodies of the soldiers, members of the Frontier Constabulary, were spotted by local tribesmen on Thursday morning after they were dumped in Mir Ali, a subdistrict in the North Waziristan tribal region. The Frontier Constabulary, run by the Pakistani police authorities, has about 70,000 paramilitary soldiers who operate checkpoints in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province and provide security at foreign embassies and consulates in major cities across Pakistan.

“From the look of it, it seems they had been shot dead early Thursday morning,” said a senior security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We have been trying to get them freed,” the official said, “and we have had contact with their captors. And until last night the indications that we had were very, very positive. God knows what happened afterwards.”

Farther south, armed men in the city of Quetta kidnapped a British doctor who worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross on Thursday, said Sitara Jabeen, a spokeswoman for the aid group. She said she knew of no motive for the abduction, which took place near his home.

The executions in northwestern Pakistan were claimed by a Taliban spokesman, Ihsanullah Ihsan, who described them as an “act of revenge” for the killing of militants in the Khyber tribal region on Sunday. He said the group would release a video of the killings “soon” and threatened more attacks.

A dozen militants, including Qari Kamran, a local Taliban commander, were killed in the Khyber tribal region on Sunday after security forces attacked a militant hide-out. Mr. Kamran was considered a high-ranking Taliban commander who oversaw terrorist attacks and activities in Khyber and his native Nowshera district in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

Security officials said they had expected retaliatory attacks because Mr. Kamran’s killing was considered a major success.

Last week, reports emerged that Afghan Taliban and leaders of Al Qaeda had urged Pakistani Taliban militants to put aside their internal differences and focus on attacking the American-led forces inside Afghanistan.

There have also been reports of negotiations on ending violence between Pakistan’s government and some Taliban factions, although military officials deny the existence of such talks.

The executions show that, despite a recent decrease in militant-related violence and suicide attacks, some Taliban militants are unwilling to end their attacks, analysts here said. A report released recently by an Islamabad-based research organization, the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, stated that militant-related violence had decreased by 24 percent in the last two years.

“The Taliban are not to be believed because past deals have shown that they end up violating their own peace deals with the government and use them to regroup and regain strength,” said Omar R. Quraishi, an editor of The Express Tribune, a Karachi-based English-language newspaper. He said the executions also highlighted differences among Taliban factions, because some groups seemed to support ending the fighting against Pakistani security forces, while others continued with attacks.

Salman Masood reported from Islamabad, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan

VP Biden - "We have done everything we could to make labor as strong as possible.." - That shows you where he stands....with the Greedy Hacks.

The regular reader will gain an appreciation that I have issues with the present Administration and their political allies...The UNIONS. The above picture illustrates just the "tip of the iceberg" of reasons why I have issues with Mr. Biden.

Now Mr. Biden speaks at the Teamsters Convention in Las Vegas Friday. Just for clarification, Union membership is at an all time low of 12% of all workers nationally. That pretty much means he is supporting only 1/8th of all the workers in the USA with his support. The other 7/8ths? Not so much...

Let's review some selected quotes to see where he stands on issues -

"We have done everything we could to make labor as strong as possible," Biden said. - No kidding which means you've enabled the people who set in place highly restrictive work rules, costing cities and towns Millions of dollars more for work that could be done in a more cost-effective manner. You also support the ability of the Unions to try & hold others hostage for their personal gains.

"They're blaming you," Biden said. "Not Wall Street's unregulated subprime mortgages, not multitrillion-dollar deficits run up by the last administration." - While common sense would allow all to see that Wall Street was at fault for the recession's damaging effects, the $14.3 Trillion Dollar level of the National Deficit was reached under the OBAMA administration, supported by the Nancy Pelosi/Harry Reid run Congress. The National Debt was large during the Bush Administration but doubled in the last 2 years due to OBAMA/Biden


A Magellan Research poll in June showed Obama's approval rating was just 41 percent, compared to a disapproval rate of 53 percent. The poll also showed just 45 percent of voters age 18 to 34, key voters for Obama, approve of his job as president. - The American Voters are smart enough to see that for the last 2 1/2 years, we have been heading into worse economic straits and that the White House has no clue as to how to resolve it other than trying to print up more money....a failed effort.

I have no love for the GOP either as they have not shown an alternative presidential candidate to date who I believe can do better. This election cycle will not give power back to the Unions as they are seen as grabbing more money for their own members and continuing to keep the cost of living high for all. I feel the Unions served a purpose in their inception but that ideal and manner of assistance for the average worker went away when the Unions became famous for corruption, greed and thuggery.

Time will tell and as the 2012 Election cycle comes to bear, people will vote with their pockets, regardless of what the fools (plural) in the White House believe....A day of reckoning is coming for the Dems and it will not be pretty. They lost control of the House, and this time, it is likely to be the Senate and the White House too.


Biden praises unions, attacks GOP policies in Las Vegas speech
By Benjamin Spillman
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Posted: Jul. 1, 2011

In a fiery, partisan speech Friday in Las Vegas, Vice President Joe Biden hailed labor unions as guardians of the shrinking middle class and assailed Republicans for fighting for tax breaks for big companies and the wealthy at the expense of regular Americans.

Biden's speech was the closing act for a national convention of thousands of members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union at Paris Las Vegas.

In addition to attacking Republican policies, Biden defended the administration of President Barack Obama, who is gearing up for his 2012 re-election campaign.

"We have done everything we could to make labor as strong as possible," Biden said. "We can't have a strong middle class with a declining labor movement."

Biden spoke for 33 minutes to an audience of more than 1,500 raucous Teamsters who interrupted his speech several times with applause.

"I just liked what he was saying about how the rich are trying to kill the rest of the world," said Rudy Gardner, 55, a Teamster from Washington, D.C., of the speech. "People are tired of what is going on."

Biden accused Republicans of using the recession as an excuse to erode worker rights.

"They're blaming you," Biden said. "Not Wall Street's unregulated subprime mortgages, not multitrillion-dollar deficits run up by the last administration."

The speech comes as Obama and his surrogates are traveling the country to shore up support for re-election, no small task given the state of the economy nationally and in Nevada, which Obama won by 12 points in 2010.

Several times Biden sought to contrast the wages and lifestyles of middle class Teamsters with wealthy Americans he said would benefit from tax breaks if Republicans got their way.

"(Republicans) really believe that a strong U.S. economy rests upon an ever increasing accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few enlightened guys they think are smarter than you are," Biden said. "You are the only thing that stands between the barbarians at the gate and them taking it all over."

Ryan Erwin, a Republican consultant working for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, said Nevada voters won't buy the working class hero message Obama and Biden are selling with their campaign.

Erwin said Obama and Biden will pay an electoral price for not delivering on campaign promises to revive the economy, especially in states like Nevada, which is suffering from the highest unemployment in the nation.

"This is nothing more than a distraction from reality," Erwin said of Biden's harsh rhetoric. "When you have nothing to run on that is positive, all you can do is pick apart things your opposition does."

Although Obama won Nevada handily in 2008, his support has weakened along with the economy.

A Magellan Research poll in June showed Obama's approval rating was just 41 percent, compared to a disapproval rate of 53 percent.

The poll also showed just 45 percent of voters age 18 to 34, key voters for Obama, approve of his job as president.

Even some at the speech Friday acknowledged re-election could be difficult for Obama and Biden.

"I want them to win but the mood in this country is so far right wing I am afraid they might not," said Mike McGaha, 57, a Teamster from Greensboro, N.C.

In addition to the Biden speech, Teamsters nominated three candidates to the ballot for international general president.

Incumbent James Hoffa won most votes.

Also nominated was Sandy Pope, who would be the first woman to hold the job, and Fred Gegare who accused Hoffa of being out of touch with workers on front-line jobs and for making too many concessions to big Teamster employers such as UPS.

Contact reporter Benjamin Spillman at bspillman@reviewjournal.com or

Sebastian Junger - "Everyone's against war, any sane person's against war, and yet everyone goes to see war movies..."

An acquaintence of mine from Middleboro, MA recently inquired about the "tone" of my comments here, especially regarding my rather spirited bashing of POTUS & his administration, The Governor of Massachusetts and many of those held dear by the Left. He stated that I was regurgitating Fox News.

In my defense, I rarely, if ever have cited FOX News on this blog....I read many different sources and try to gain a multi-faceted view. Hate to say it, our Nobel Prize Winner in the White House and his lefty ilk were the ones spouting " Protest is Patriotic" for years....seems a little hypocritical for any Lefty Leaning person to now say it is uncalled for as the shoe is on the other foot... Can't take the "heat", stay out of the kitchen.

For the record, I am "unenrolled" and follow neither party as I vote the Man/Woman and NOT the party.

Actually, I digress. Enclosed is a copy of an article written about a person whom I have much respect and admiration for, Massachusetts native and War Correspondant Sebastian Junger.

He admits to being a Lefty politics wise but supports the Afghanistan War. He has felt the heat of battle and understands what most of the Lefties back stateside have no clue on....Do He & I agree on all things ?? NOPE. Then again, I disagree with one of my Heroes in life, US Senator John McCain but that doesn't stop me from supporting him either. The difference is Sebastian Junger & John McCain both make intelligent arguements and have HONOR. They are thinking and caring passionately about what they are espousing.

OBAMA, Pelosi, Deval Patrick, Geitner, Napolitano, Biden ??? NOPE....None of them are worthy to stand next to Sebastian Junger or Senator McCain as the only thing they care about is controlling your life and your money. They are devoid of honor and integrity as a group. My opinion, and solely based on my observations. Many agree with me and many disagree. If I had to go somewhere "hot", I'd trust John McCain & Seabstian Junger long before I would consider trusting any of the aforementioned bunch.


OK - I digressed a 2nd time. Now the words from Sebastian Junger. Read on as it is worth your time to hear what he says. I hope one day to meet Sebastian just as I have met John McCain. I would really like to get to know him better.

Sebastian Junger reflects on friendship, war and peace

After the death of photojournalist and friend Tim Hetherington in Libya, Junger resolves to cease front-line reporting. But war, he says, remains one of humanity's master narratives.

By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times
June 9, 2011


Last Oscar season, author Sebastian Junger and photojournalist Tim Hetherington walked the red carpet together.

Their documentary "Restrepo," recorded while they were embedded with a U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan's remote and dangerous Korengal Valley, was nominated for an Academy Award. For months the two men had lived with the troops, sharing the same food, the same stifling quarters, and the same long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of adrenaline-fueled terror.

Barely two months after the Oscars, on April 20, Hetherington was killed in a mortar attack in Misurata, Libya, where he was covering the rebel uprising against Moammar Kadafi's regime. In the months since, Junger has resolved to pull back from combat journalism.

"I'm not going to do any more front-line reporting, because I don't want to put my wife through what I went through with Tim," he said during a recent stopover in Los Angeles to promote the new paperback edition of his 2010 book "War," which Junger was compiling while he and Hetherington were filming "Restrepo."

"It was a very obvious thought to come to in the wake of all this. Tim's death made war reporting feel like a selfish endeavor."

It's a startling concession from an author whose eyewitness accounts from Liberia, Afghanistan and other global hot spots can make readers imagine they're inches away from the mortar blasts and AK-47 rounds.

Written in sinewy, stripped-to-the-waist prose, "War" not only paints vivid profiles of the U.S. soldiers Junger met, and the harrowing conditions they endured, it also penetrates deeply into the strange, terrifying allure of combat and the motivations of the young men who mostly wage it. The book has drawn critical comparisons with such canonical literature as Michael Herr's Vietnam-era "Dispatches" and the World War I and Spanish Civil War reflections of Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell.

In this month's Vanity Fair magazine, Junger eulogizes Hetherington's valor and vision in conveying the world's suffering to others. Another photojournalist, Chris Hondros, was fatally wounded in the same Libyan attack that killed Hetherington, and two other photojournalists were injured.

Before Hetherington's death, Junger said, the perils of war reporting had always felt abstract. He's not judging other journalists' decisions to place themselves in harm's way, but he's had enough.

"I thought it couldn't happen to me, and I'd never known anyone who had got killed — couple guys that got shot. You know, there's a lot of denial. I mean, denial works."

A trim 49-year-old with intense storm-gray eyes, Junger has the demeanor of a youthful college English professor who moonlights as the track coach — an Ivy League mind outfitted in solid blue-collar principles. He projects a restless curiosity, a touch of rah-rah adventurism, a dash of low-key machismo.

The author and his wife of six years, Daniela, a Bulgarian native to whom "War" is dedicated, have no children but are discussing starting a family.

Junger said that his father, a theoretical physicist, opened his mind to science and the idea that the physical and human worlds "can be understood and should be understood." His mother, a painter, gave to her son a more aesthetic and spiritual mode of understanding. Journalism merged his left- and right-brain tendencies "in kind of a nice way."

Despite his own vow to pull back from the trenches, Junger still not only considers war to be a great journalistic subject, he regards it as one of the three or four master narratives of human life — or, at least, guys' lives.

"Look at the cave paintings in France. What do they show? They show the game animals that they've hunted — a form of warfare, in a way, violence. They show warfare, they show men fighting each other. They show fertile females. I mean, what topics preoccupy men? You want to look into the male brain? It's like, OK, I need to kill game, I need to sustain myself — basically, career. Conflict and combat, manliness and proving yourself. Hot chicks. And the final one is shamanism, connection to the divine. That comprises the entirety of what's on the walls of the caves in France. That's the male brain, that's human society in a lot of ways."

Stories of violent conflict and men acting gracefully (or otherwise) under duress have been the alpha and omega of Junger's writing career, in books such as "The Perfect Storm" (1997), about a fishing boat disaster, and "Fire," about men who earn their living, and sometimes their deaths, by doing perilous jobs in places like Sierra Leone and Kosovo.

As a writer, Junger credits Hetherington with "opening my eyes up" to the rich complexity of visual experience. When he was trying to organize "War" around a unifying principle, Junger asked himself, "What would Tim do and how would Tim think about this material?"

Junger concluded that his friend "wouldn't be organizing it in an event-driven, linear way, he'd be looking for some deeper structure that reflects the human experience." That helped Junger eventually build "War" around three thematic blocks. "Fear" elucidates the primal emotions and human frailties that combat unleashes. "Killing" illuminates military tactics, political gamesmanship and the grotesque seductiveness of high-tech weaponry.

The book's final section, "Love," explores the ties of loyalty and affection that bind soldiers to one another far above any mere ideology.

"Everyone's against war, any sane person's against war, and yet everyone goes to see war movies," Junger said. "All my lefty friends — and in case you hadn't picked up on it I'm pretty left-wing — went to see 'Saving Private Ryan.' They're going to see 'Saving Private Ryan' because war is dramatic and compelling and important and reveals tremendous things about the human soul. And you get it on oil rigs, you get it in logging camps, you get it on fishing boats, you get it in platoons."

If all war is insane, and yet horribly compelling, in Junger's view there are good wars and bad wars. Afghanistan, which he has reported on since the 1990s, is among the former, he believes. Even before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, drew the U.S. deeper into the country, he said, it was clear that only the international community could end Afghanistan's endless civil wars.

Junger believes that if the U.S. and its allies can ever pressure Hamid Karzai's corrupt government to reform so that the people will support it, U.S. forces can withdraw and Afghanistan can achieve peace, security and at least a form of "middle-ground" democracy between the failed state it was in the 1990s and "democracy like we see it in Iowa."

By contrast, invading Iraq was an error, he thinks, and he refused to cover it because "I don't want to risk my life covering a mistake."

There's one other dangerous assignment that Junger shuns: writing fiction. In his early 20s, inspired by the brainy tough-guy holy trinity of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, Junger tried his hand at a few short stories, but they rightfully ended up buried in a closet, he said.

"I mean, a bad novel is hard to write," he said. "A brilliant novel, like I don't even know how that happens. So that's why I don't do it. Writing fiction feels like it would be like going off the diving board into a swimming pool that has no water in it.

"Maybe one day I will, and the pool will be filled with water and it'll be nice, but right now it doesn't feel that way."

It's all the fault of the American Voters, because you're stupid, uneducated, bigoted, greedy racists....

THIS is the message that the Democrats are sending the voters, if not directly, through their proxies in the media.....columnists and Op-ed writers who support the agenda of the DEMS have been sending this message to us for months....." You just don't get it - you're not sophisticated enough - you're bigoted, etc., etc.

WELL let me clue them in - WE, the American Voters GET IT alright - and from what I have seen of the polls for the upcoming November Elections, the DEMS are really going to get it - In Spades.

I for one, am tired for being lectured by POTUS, FLOTUS, BIDEN, PELOSI, REED, GEITNER, POLITANO, HOLDER and the whole group of pin-heads who think they are the smartest people in the world when I wouldn't put them in charge of a bake sale. They are not only NOT the smartest, they have underestimated the intelligence of the voters along with not being in tune with American Voters values.

Get over yourself Mr. President & Madam Speaker - You aren't doing what the American people want and all the name-calling in the world will not change our opinion of your lame agendas...you'll get the message when the voters make the President a "lame-duck" for the last two years of his term and send Ms. Pelosi out of her lofty perch.....and none too soon.

The Picture Speaks for itself

No other commentary required.....