Keep on thinking and keep on questioning. Our success in this "war" is not what it's made out to be.
The following comments on the cost and effect of our bombing mission is the slow and painful truth. However, I am sure it will anger a few of the people on this board, who would consider it darn near treason to even POST this stuff, let alone cut n paste it from the author, an ex intel-military person.
I am doing this for the irony, so humor me please.

Quote (go get yourself some coffee):

"I'm sitting here waving the American flag, secure in the knowledge that, by the end of the day, the armed forces of my country will have squandered another $150 million of the American people's money. So far the cost of the campaign in Afghanistan to the American people has been $1.5 billion. The score currently stands -- US Department of Defense: $1.5 billion vs. The Taliban: $38,000. And that is very typical of the wars we fight.

For that $38,000 worth of ammunition, they have been able to shoot down two of these ultra-modern, sophisticated surveillance drones, which cost the US taxpayers $10 million a piece. Or else they just came down because of mechanical failure.

The chief accountant of the Taliban, the head bean-counter, has said, "We like this war. Thus far, we are very satisfied with the progress of the war."

It's really bad. I was talking to some former military people, and they were telling me how laughable it is. As they point out, the principal problem is that you have assault helicopters, only a third of which work at any time

Then they're firing Cruise missiles and Tomahawk missiles with only a 37% accuracy rate. Then we're doing what we did in Iraq, which is using old conventional iron bombs, just to clear out the inventory, by carpet-bombing Afghanistan. But, as they point out, these old iron bombs are taken directly out of inventory. Most of them are from Fort Greeley, Colorado, the old US storage facility there. They don't check any of these old munitions. They're just loaded and shipped out.

What they're telling me is what the American people aren't being told - fully 25% of these old iron bombs don't work any more. They drop them by the B-52 load and 25% of them don't explode. Although they don't explode because the fuse connections have worn out, the fuses are still live. And this is where the humor comes in.

We're carpet-bombing the Taliban forward positions to try and give the Northern Alliance a chance to attack. They said they wouldn't risk an attack, unless we carpet-bombed the Taliban positions. The problem is that not only do we bomb the Taliban defensive positions, but, at the same time, we are creating a minefield (the unexploded bombs) against the very same army that we're trying to get to attack those lines.

In other words, there are a lot of unexploded munitions on the field that still have live fuses, so if you step on them or drive over them the wrong way, they're going to explode. So, not only do we bomb the Taliban, but at the same time we establish a minefield, which prevents the Northern Alliance from attacking them. In other words, we bomb the Taliban and at the same time we protect them with this minefield.

And why is it done? Because nobody cares.

They want to get rid of these old conventional munitions and they look for small wars to use them up. The total inventory of these weapon systems isn't even known anymore because they don't even bother. They've had some of them since the 1950s. Like the guy said, they could turn Afghanistan into a parking lot if they wanted, just by using these old conventional bombs to get rid of them.

The Afghani campaign is no different than the Iraqi campaign, which is no different than any other campaign that we fight. Nobody is ever told to look at how much it costs. Nobody is ever told in the military structure to try to fight a war economically. The problem is that with unlimited monies (nobody cares how much of the taxpayers' money is spent) any campaign we fight automatically costs three times as much to fight, since we're fighting with weapons systems that are only one third effective.

Then they'll have "elite American commandos" on the ground in Afghanistan, but the problem is that a lot of the guidance systems, the GPS's on a lot of the helicopters don't work. So they're dropping these special-forces guys and they don't even know where they are.

An inside military source says that several platoons of these commandos were dropped off and they don't know where they are because the GPS system on the helicopter doesn't work. Their hand-held GPS sets don't work. It's the middle of the night. They have no idea where they are. Half of their night-vision ware doesn't work. They don't know where they are. Finally they wandered into an old BP (British Petroleum) gas station in Afghanistan and got a road map and finally figured out where they were.

So imagine here are these "elite special commandos" wandering around with all these wires and special antennas coming out of their helmets - none of which work. They have all this mickey-mouse gadgetry that doesn't work. But finally they stumble into a gas station and get a road map. And that's the kind of war this is.

We're fighting a war in which one third of the weapons don't work, which means it costs three times as much to fight. We put in land troops and the communications devices don't work and the night vision doesn't work. Then they lay down infra-red sensors for targeting aperture for the aircraft because the "smart" weapons only have about a 40% hit ratio, despite what the government says they have. They put down the sensors, then regroup, and then they're pulled out. But thirty minutes later, the Taliban removes the sensors out of the ground. We still have no structure developed where they stay behind and try to protect the sensors.

You have to remember the Afghans have history on their side. As one old Afghan said, "We beat the British. We beat the Russians. And now we're ready to beat the Americans." In fact, Alexander the Great was the last guy to actually overcome the Afghans.

Then there's this joke I keep hearing about the Northern Alliance and how the Department of Defense is trying to clean them up for the media to make them look like an "effective fighting force," when they're actually "15,000 illiterate, lice-ridden, flea bags." That's how Rumsfeld actually described them, according to an inside source.

On CNN, the Department of Defense is making a special show to clean up the Northern Alliance, to make them look like they're united. The Northern Alliance leader says, "We're going to attack the Taliban."

The Department of Defense gave them all clean uniforms from US inventories and brand new boots and taught them how to march in a straight line for the cameras. Then they said, "This is our new effective fighting ally."

What they didn't say, of course, is that they offered to give the Northern Alliance some old M-60 Mark III American tanks, which would be the equivalent of the Taliban's T-72 Russian tanks. They didn't want them. The general said, "No, we don't want any American weapons. We want Russian weapons. At least they work"

The Russians are making a big propaganda deal out of this. They say, "Oh, we're helping the Northern Alliance. We're doing our share in the alliance against terrorism because we're providing them with a bunch of tanks." What the Russians aren't saying is that they're not giving them away for nothing. The United States is quietly compensating the Russians for them.

The Taliban, after all, aren't dummies. Many of them are well-educated. They know all they have to do is stay entrenched. They don't have to fight. All they have to do is defend themselves and have some of their forces left intact. Every day this alliance is continuing to fray at the edges. The Saudis are ready to back out. Even the British are wavering under pressure from their public.

Everyday we are hearing more and more reports of US weapons systems that don't work and revelations that helicopters are crashing due to faulty spare parts
Then we see the amount of money this war is costing the American taxpayers for no gain. We don't know where the al Qaeda organization is within the Taliban. We have an intensive bombing campaign of so-called al Qaeda caves - then discover that the al Qaeda hasn't been there in six months.

The problem is that the United States isn't used to fighting this type of war. Then there is the logistical problems - a very remote region where there are no solid lines of supplies, where communications are poor, and where road systems are almost non-existent. Everything that has to do with logistics is difficult. And we are coming into the winter season where the weather will get worse. Then you combine that with the fact that we have absolutely no intelligence about these people.

The Pakistanis reassured us that they know so much they even know the location of every one of the Taliban's pea-shooters. The Pakistanis gave all this lovely intelligence to the Department of Defense. They were just licking their chops, so they went and bombed all these sites -only to find out that this "intelligence" was about a year old.

The Taliban had long since moved the weapons. The Pakis just failed to tell them that this "intelligence" was old.

The US had no human intelligence resources on the ground. The Department of the Defense didn't even have accurate maps of the country.

But they're getting good support from CNN, which is their chief propaganda outlet. For anybody with a brain, you watch CNN and it's all so much nonsense - how the White House and the Department of Defense are trying to manipulate this thing."

Courtesy Al Martin