Subject: Re: Send me that article from Foreign Affairs
From: "Rob Norton" <[email-masked]>
To: "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2010 17:33:29 -0400

Interesting article. You should meet my friend/Princeton classmate John
Melkon.  John was Army special forces (a Ranger, but may have transitioned
to some other black ops group, maybe CIA) and was deployed to Afghanistan in
late Sept 2001 with a bag of cash to begin building relationships with
warlords before the U.S. invasion.  He's fluent in several languages,
including Farsi and Pashto, and knows as much about this situation as
anyone. John was in Tora Bora pursing Bin Ladin's during his escape in
'01/'02 until he was forced to retire when he fell out of a helicopter in a
firefight and was shot several times while hanging from a safety harness. In
any event, John would share your father's perspective on this war. He would
say that counterinsurgency is folly and that the only way to deal with the
ISI-supported "bad guys" is through targeted commando ops and drone strikes,
both in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I hope your dad can convince the president to reshape American expectations
of this situation so they can remove troops and step up a systematic
firestorm of targeted raids and drone attacks to kill real bad guys.

Also, it bothers me that the administration has not made meaningful progress
toward conveying the magnitude and ferocity of their campaign against real
terrorists.  This should be someone's full time job.

On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 10:46 AM, Hunter Biden <[email-masked]>wrote:

>
> http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/22/this_week_at_war_the_biden_plan_returns?page=0%2C0&sms_ss=email&at_xt=4ccbc30d9fbcf6ef,0
>
> R. Hunter Biden
> 202-333-1880
>
>
> On Oct 31, 2010, at 10:45 AM, Rob Norton <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> > Thanks for the ride last night.
>

-- 
Rob Norton  |  Relay Strategies  |  202.403.454