Scores of U.S. troops have been killed by supposed allies within the Afghan military and police forces. These green-on-blue murders prompted the Pentagon to suspend joint patrols. Retired U.S. Marine Bing West has been embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan on many occasions and just returned from going on a series of patrols.
He says there really isn’t more that can be done to screen the Afghans going on these patrols so our current strategy seems pretty pointless. “I just don’t know what we’re doing anymore,” said West. “If your degree of trust has gone away, I don’t know what you’re accomplishing when people tell me that we’re partnering. If you think your partner may kill you, there’s something wrong with this as a strategy.”
West says it’s time to close up shop and let the Afghans fend for themselves. “We have come to the end of what we can do with our conventional troops in the field, said West.
“We should quietly accelerate bringing them home. We should basically say to the Afghan leaders at every level, ‘Look, we’ve had it with you as a country. We do not trust you. We believe many of you continue to be corrupt. And if you end up swinging from telephone poles, it’s because you screwed up.'”
West says troops are confused about the strategy in Afghanistan and there is a very real dread that the U.S. is just running out the clock until the withdrawal takes place in 2014.
“President Obama should never, never have come out and said, ‘Well I’m gonna send some troops in there but we’re all leaving by 2014,'” said West. “Everyone knows the clock is ticking down and that changes what everybody does.”
West says Obama exited Iraq in a very bad way and we’re seeing a repeat in Afghanistan.
“I think President Obama did a great disservice to our country by leaving so abruptly from Iraq and causing chaos when he left that way and now saying he’s going to do the same thing in Afghanistan,” said West. “I do believe that we have to leave but we don’t need to trumpet it from the top of the roof.”
West suggests the morale of the troops is suffering as a result of the lack of direction from their leaders. He says he was asked to address the troops following his embed mission. He shared what he told our men and women in uniform.
“You have done your best for this country. You have volunteered and you have put your life on the line. And you can take enormous pride in what you did and for the rest of your life. When somebody says, ‘Did you fight in Afghanistan?’ you can say, ‘Yes, I did.’ And you’ve also had a heck of an adventure and you volunteered for it. That doesn’t mean politically everything is always going to work out well. But we’re used to life. We’re used to things not working out exactly right. That doesn’t mean that any of you cannot say, ‘I did my job,’ because you did do your job.”