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As Taliban gain and U.S. weighs troop hike, a widow's plea to 'finish the job'

  

Category:  News & Politics

Via:  randy  •  7 years ago  •  6 comments

As Taliban gain and U.S. weighs troop hike, a widow's plea to 'finish the job'

widow.jpg

FILE PHOTO: Widow Alexandra McClintock holds her son Declan during a burial service for her husband, U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Matthew McClintock, who was killed in action in January at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia March 7, 2016. REUTERS/Gary Cameron/File Photo

 



By Idrees Ali | WASHINGTON


On a cold morning in January, Alexandra McClintock shoved her bare hands into the pockets of her black jacket and gazed at the endless rows of graves in Arlington National Cemetery, just across the Potomac River from Washington D.C.


Taking her hands out of her pockets and falling to her knees, she hugged a white marble tombstone as her sobs drowned out the bugle calls from a nearby funeral. Only the sound of her giggling one-and-a-half-year-old son, Declan, forced her to wipe away her tears and loosen her grip on the tombstone.

One year and a day earlier, a Green Beret soldier and chaplain had stood in her living room in Seattle to tell her that her husband, Sergeant First Class Matthew McClintock, 30, was killed in a firefight with Taliban militants in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province.

McClintock was one of more than 900 American and coalition troops killed in Helmand since 2001 -- about a quarter of the more than 3,000 deaths in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

Now U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is contemplating sending more troops to Afghanistan to boost 8,400 others there more than 15 years after the Islamist Taliban government was toppled. A decision is expected within weeks.

Current and former U.S. officials say that plans being discussed call for sending 3,000-5,000 more troops into what has become America's longest war.

Some relatives of the U.S. dead ask whether their loved ones have died in vain, particularly as U.S. administrations are reluctant to commit a large amount of resources to a conflict that is often forgotten.

"I feel like my husband's death is being dismissed and like my husband died for nothing," Alexandra told Reuters.

"We need to finish the job instead of just continuing to just barely get up to the line... we need to make my husband's death mean something," she said.

Some U.S. officials warn that the situation in Afghanistan is worse than they had expected and question the benefit of sending more troops there. Any politically palatable number of additional U.S. and allied forces -- like the size of the deployment being considered by the Trump administration -- would not be enough to turn the tide, much less create stability and security, the officials say.

Trump is likely to be sucked deeper into the war, which began when former President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Former President Barack Obama sought to pull out the remaining U.S. troops by the end of his tenure, but left thousands there to train and assist Afghan forces.

'BLEEDING ULCER'

Large stretches of Helmand province, source of much of the world's illegal opium supply, are again in the hands of the Taliban who have steadily pushed back Afghan forces which controlled less than 60 percent of territory earlier this year.

Last month, about 300 U.S. Marines were sent to Helmand, where McClintock was fatally shot in the head during an hours-long gun battle near the town of Marjah.

As far back as 2010, then Army General Stanley McChrystal, the top allied military commander in Afghanistan, referred to Marjah as a "bleeding ulcer".

McClintock's last trip home was in October 2015 for Declan's birth. He stayed a few extra days to help Alexandra deal with her postpartum depression.

"All he wanted to do was hold his son all the time or take pictures of me holding him and he was there for every single second," McClintock said.

The couple last spoke on Jan 1, 2016 on Skype. He promised he would be home in a month. His last words were: "I love you most."

Four days later, and just weeks before he was supposed to complete his deployment, McClintock was killed.

Alexandra had just returned from a therapy session when her doorbell rang.

"I remember the sound that came out of me when I collapsed, I remember crawling into my fireplace," she said.

Two weeks later, she received a package.

It wasn't addressed to anyone but sat outside her door. In the box was a late Christmas present from McClintock; two shirts that said "momma bear" and "baby bear."

Resting in a case on a mantle in her living room, Alexandra displays the American flag that was draped over her husband's casket during his funeral at Arlington Cemetery in March 2016.

What she does not put on display is a letter of condolence she received from Obama which now sits in a drawer. The generic letter, of a type traditionally sent to the relatives of deceased service members, made Alexandra feel "dismissed," she said.

"My husband died for their war, for this war," she said, adding that she nevertheless supported the war.

"It doesn't get easier," Alexandra said. "I still have dreams where I wake up thinking that Matt is in bed next to me, and I have to remember that he is gone."

For a graphic on U.S. troop fatalities in Afghanistan, click: tmsnrt.rs/2rCletQ

(Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by Yara Bayoumy and Alistair Bell)

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-afghanistan-military-idUSKBN18L0FX?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Reuters%2FworldNews+%28Reuters+World+News%29



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Randy
Sophomore Participates
link   seeder  Randy    7 years ago

3,000-5,000 more troops will do nothing except have more troops die for nothing. Send in 90,000 or 100,000 or 250,000 or more or pull every last one out right now! I am tired of all of the fucking around with this war ever since less then a year after we went in. We have been there too long and too many have died for not one fucking thing. MAYBE we could have justified it until we got bin Laden. Well he's dead. So we're done. So let's either destroy the hell out of the whole country and kill everyone in it or get out. Shit or get off the pot!

 
 
 
Randy
Sophomore Participates
link   seeder  Randy    7 years ago

I posted this the other day and then locked it when I went to bed and forgot about it. Still it is an issue that I am afraid my become lost in the fog of the Russian scandal.

I am also afraid that, if the Russian scandal gets too close to Kushner or to Trump himself, that Trump my do a sudden large increase in troops in Afghanistan or even launch an un-needed preemptive strike against North Korea, to distract from the issue of the scandal with a full scale war. I believe that he really is evil enough to start a war that would cost the lives of tens of thousands, or in the case of Korea, hundreds of thousands of innocent lives just to try to draw the pressure away from himself if the connection between him and Russia reaches he point where he may be facing impeachment and he wants a distraction.

 

 
 
 
Kavika
Professor Principal
link   Kavika     7 years ago

A quagmire that is never ending. A few thousand more troops are not going to make a different except to see more body bags coming back the U.S.

This weekend is Memorial Day, a day when we honor our fallen troops. It seems that since WWII almost every Memorial Day we are in a war somewhere in the world...Is it ever going to end, it doesn't seem that it will.

 
 
 
Randy
Sophomore Participates
link   seeder  Randy  replied to  Kavika   7 years ago

Send in a quarter million more troops for a few years to wipe out every Taliban fighter you can find and lose 8 or 10 thousand of ours. Or just take the troops we have in there out now. Those are the two real and stark choices we have. Just do one or the other. Just do something!

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
link   JohnRussell    7 years ago

You will never end terrorism as long as US troops are in that general region involved in prolonged war against Muslims. We "taught them a lesson" years ago. We may have gotten better results giving them the hundreds of billions of dollars we spent on making war on them. 

 
 
 
Randy
Sophomore Participates
link   seeder  Randy  replied to  JohnRussell   7 years ago

The only lesson we are teaching them now is that we didn't learn a damned thing about prolonged land wars from Vietnam and in fact are doing it worse because the North Vietnamese didn't launch terrorist attacks around the world.

 
 

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