Different war different era. Same battle plan

A popularize maxim of late, is to state that those who do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome are insane. Personally, I believe stupid is closer to the mark.

Intelligence Reports Offer Dim View

As President Obama prepares to release a review of American strategy in Afghanistan that will claim progress in the nine-year-old war there, two new classified intelligence reports offer a more negative assessment and say there is a limited chance of success unless Pakistan hunts down insurgents operating from havens on its Afghan border.

The reports, one on Afghanistan and one on Pakistan, say that although there have been gains for the United States and NATO in the war, the unwillingness of Pakistan to shut down militant sanctuaries in its lawless tribal region remains a serious obstacle. American military commanders say insurgents freely cross from Pakistan into Afghanistan to plant bombs and fight American troops and then return to Pakistan for rest and resupply.

So, here we are sixty odd years after our adventure in Korea and thirty five years past our ordeal in Vietnam. In both instances, our enemies fled across a border when pressed and when not pressed, they sat on the other side of those borders and prepared for attacks against our troops. Which they repeatedly launched.

Whether it was the 38th parallel in Korea, or the 17th parallel in Vietnam, the results were always the same. The enemy got to move south and attack US troops at will, then scurry hurriedly back into the undergrowth and back across the neighboring borders and the American military was powerless to pursue them.

Here we are again it seems. Our enemies the Taliban are daily attacking our troops with their cowardly IED's and their fleeting ambushes and yet they are allowed to literally sit on the Pakistani border and flip us off. And the Pakistani government? The same Pakistani government that America has paid billions to for their cooperation against terrorism? They allow the Taliban to operate in Pakistan and occupy these tribal mountain areas, unfettered, unabated and with absolutely no fear of the Pakistani army (or the US Army) ever coming to evict them.

General Douglas McArthur spoke out, as it concerned then president Truman's orders to him to not pursue the north Koreans and communist Chinese Migs beyond the Yalu river and not to cross the Yalu river in pursuit of the enemy. It cost MacArthur his career, but the man was proven right by history.

And now? Here we sit fifty seven years later and there is still no resolution on the Korean peninsula other than war again seems nearer by the day. Combine that with the fact that there were apparently no lessons learned in Vietnam either. Fifty eight thousand men died and hundreds of thousands were scarred physically and emotionally by that war, yet we learned nothing about prosecuting a war against an insurgency.

The bottom line, if we are not going to prosecute these wars as they should be prosecuted? Then we should get the hell out and bring our troops home and begin bunkering and sand bagging the entire border of America. From Canada to Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Just draw in our people and shut the entire thing down globally and let the forces of evil have the rest of the world. That is all that we have accomplished in the last sixty years since the end of WWII anyway.