VPILF!

[G.Irish]

Special Forces are still in Afganistan. Human intelegance is going to be limited in that area since the other side uses the threat of death to you and your family.

That is a significant challenge but the way you get around that is by taking out those Taliban fighters and gaining the trust of the community. If they can reasonably believe that you can eliminate the threat, they'll help you. Some of the Army people in Iraq have noted that they've been able to achieve this.

But again, that's why the focus should have been on Afghanistan.

"Undermine support for their cause in the communities they live in. The common people don't want to be blown up either so you make sure the common people are on your side by attacking terrorists/insurgents but keeping collateral damage low. Help their communities and they're more likely to help you. Use locals to help you take out terrorists."

that is basically impossible to due in that part of the world... especially by the US. The common people wanted to be free, but they want to take no risk... just incase the freedom doesnt last long. Its historical... the same shit happened in that area for hundreds of years.

Well what the military leadership is starting to do on the ground is work with the leaders of tribes to help them oust foreign fighters from the region. Again, common Iraqis don't want to get blown up either so if you approach from a standpoint of increasing their stability and security you will have a lot more success than viewing everyone as an enemy and dropping bombs on non-hostiles.

You're correct that there's no way we are going to solve any of the long standing tribal or religious on our own, but that really isn't the point or the goal. The goal is to get rid of the radicals by helping the majority of people in those countries who simply want to live in peace.

The issue with Israel started in WW1. When the allies broke up the young turkish republic and created the hostile region. welcome to shit we shouldnt have done decades ago. we are kind of stuck with it now. and we cant really go back on it or we lose ALL footholds in the region.

We don't have to abandon Israel or anything but we need to show even-handedness and fairness with regards to their actions in the region.

Unfortunately, even our special forces have their hands tied due to "morality." We wanted to be straight forward and upright and took a stance of not assasinating people. we still dont do that today... or Sadam would have had his hole filled with concrete or something.

We're not fighting heads of state, we're fighting terrorists. We have assassinated terrorist leaders and we should continue to kill them when possible. Assassinating heads of state is a totally different ball game and causes a lot more problems than it solves.

"6. Use our human intelligence to infiltrate and disrupt terrorist cells. That is what the CIA is for. Human intelligence also means we need more linguists on the ground so that deployed units can gather and act on intel better. "

you can thank the Clintons for destroying the funding our intelligence community needed to keep this up. its not cheap and not easy. there are suggestions that if they didnt cut the budgets in the places they did, we could have known exact dates, times, and flight numbers for 9-11.

Maybe so, we need to fix that from here on out.

"7. Clean up the criminal intelligence failures in our stateside organizations. There were whistleblowers about several red flags we had before 9/11 in the FBI that might have averted the attack had the agency done their job. "

the biggest issue was they didnt know specifics. thats not going to magically be created by communication between offices... it happens by putting more agents in the field and not having to pull agents from their current duties because working covertly costs too much!

There was a translators who were not giving the FBI the correct information and when someone in the FBI blew the whistle she got fired. Then there's the fact that the FBI had arrested Moussaoui before 9/11, knew he had flight training, knew he was affiliated with radical terrorism, and had confirmation from other intelligence agencies. But they didn't search his laptop because the FBI leadership didn't think there was probable cause to get a warrant.

There was plenty of warning and plenty of it got ignored. There's no getting around that.