If wishes were horses beggars would ride as my mother says.
The reality is that Afghanistan is NATO's quagmire with no end in sight. No plausible victory except in the teeny tiny minds of right wing warmongers.
Many Nato countries have been directly involved in the US-led war on terror for the past five years. Fatigue is setting in. Forces are overstretched. The conflict shows no signs of ending any time soon. There is a growing perception among the public in Europe that the Bush Administration has mishandled the conduct of the conflict and that Iraq, and now possibly Afghanistan, may defeat the cream of the Western military. Those fears are reflected in the conduct of the war in southern Afghanistan, which was meant to be a Nato peacekeeping mission but instead has turned into a deadly counter-insurgency war. But the crisis does not bode well for future operations. By most accounts the war in Afghanistan is likely to continue for years to come.
NATO is now uping the amount of troops it needs...from 1000 to 2000 now to 2500...this despite the increased Canadian forces that have been sent there.
A NATO military chief asked yesterday for another 2,500 troops to be sent to southern Afghanistan to reinforce the Canadian and British battlegroups that have been under fierce attack by the Taleban for the past two months.
NATO officials -- and Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor -- are calling for more troops and equipment to bolster the forces already in Afghanistan. Canada is now sending as many as 20 Leopard tanks and 300 additional personnel to Kandahar to provide additional protection for its troops.
The NATO meeting today got no new committments for troops.
NATO failed Wednesday to win new troop commitments urgently needed for its Afghanistan campaign, but the alliance said a 10-day offensive to dislodge Taliban fighters from their southern strongholds was achieving its goals despite the shortage of troops."No formal offers were made at the table," NATO spokesman James Appathurai said after an emergency gathering aimed at finding contributions for an expanded force.
The reluctance of Nato members to meet their commitments is partly due to the demands made on major nations for international operations elsewhere and wariness about getting sucked in to an open-ended conflict.
And the humanitarian situation in the failed state of Afghanistan only gets worse....
While international focus concentrates on the south of Afghanistan, a report released today indicates that millions of Afghans in the north and west of the country face starvation after drought destroyed much of the harvest. Christian Aid, which issued the report, will call today on the British government and international donors to give money to the country’s emergency drought appeal, which requires £41 million.
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