World-News

More than twice as many U.S. troops died in Afghanistan in 2009 than in Iraq, U.S. casualty records show, and Afghanistan is likely to become an even deadlier place for American forces as reinforcements are rushed there to battle insurgents.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2009-12-30-troop-deaths_N.htm


From Information Clearing House

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Success of Afghanistan Troop Surge Doubted Widely

Sherwood Ross, The Public Record: "'There isn’t the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his Dec. 1 speech (at West Point) will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan,' writes Thomas Johnson in a report published Dec. 10 in Foreign Policy magazine. And for emphasis, he adds the word 'None.' 'The US president and his advisors labored for three months and brought forth old wine in bigger bottles,' Johnson wrote, noting, 'The speech contained not one single new idea or approach, nor offered any hint of new thinking about a conflict that everyone now agrees the United States is losing.'"

http://www.truthout.org/01021002

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Fighting the wrong wars

The American Conservative
by Patrick J. Buchanan

Obama just ordered 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan. Yet, even if Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal pull it off and pacify Kandahar, how does that protect the American homeland from suicide bombers hell-bent on blowing up airliners? How does turning the tide in Afghanistan stop radical Muslim youth in Africa or Arabia from being trained to board planes with bombs and blow them up over the Atlantic? How do 130,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq make us more safe from an al-Qaida that has moved into Waziristan, Baluchistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa? The Sept. 11 massacre may have been decided upon in Afghanistan. But the perpetrators were Saudis and Egyptians who plotted, planned and trained in Germany, Boston, Delray Beach and Northern Virginia...

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2010/01/01/fighting-the-wrong-wars/



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Petraeus
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=McChrystal
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Afghanistan
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Afghanistan+surge
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Waziristan
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Baluchistan
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Yemen
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Somalia
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=casualties
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=insurgent
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=al-Qaeda
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=9/11
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Sherwood+Ross
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Patrick+J.+Buchanan