All right Taliban baddies, come out and fight, wherever you are . . . . HELLO????

The BBQ Pit
21

I find it vastly amusing that some Taliban leaders are talking about turning in OBL now, when it is far too late to help them. If they had turned his worthless ass in the day we told them to, the Taliban would still have the country.

I also looked at pre-9/11 threads about the Taliban, and marvelled at how the “experts” said it would be impossible to dislodge them from control of Afghanistan.

I found this exchange eerie

Indeed, if only we had taken out the Taliban and bin Laden then, there would be a lot more people alive now. I hope that bin Laden gets sold out by his erstwhile-buddies, and we can have him publicly executed.

22

Because, as everyone knows, nothing makes you feel better and get over the death of loved ones like a public execution!!!

I want blood! Sing with me I WANT BLOOD!! Yippee! I want to kill and be covered with blood and guts and piss into the open mouths of my dead enemies!!!

murder solves everything,
JB

23

gobear: I’ll very humbly suggest that the campaign that is currently dislodging the Taliban, would have been next to impossible pre-9/11. For the following reasons:

1.) There was no political will to mount this kind of expensive endeavor in the United States. The U.S. was willing to lob some missles to try and pick off ObL, but not to spend over $1 billion a month in an agressive air/commando/intelligence war.

2.) We never would have gotten the cooperation of the Central Asian states.

3.) By the same token( and FAR more importantly ) we wopuld never have gotten the crucial support of Pakistan. Not only would they be unwilling, the U.S. lacked the will to twist their arm and threaten as we did.

4.) We wouldn’t have the political cover in the Middle-East necessary for such a defacto declaration of war on Afghanistan. We even wouldn’t have had it in Europe. The political hit would have been too heavy to risk the violation of “Afghan sovereignty”.

I 100% agree that in hindsight, we would have been better off seeking, somehow, to break the Taliban and al-Quaeda more directly, earlier. And I think the U.S. did make a very big ( and morally costly ) mistake in disengaging so abruptly from the Afghan conflict once the Sopviets rolled out in 1989. I think a moral humanitarian obligation and a golden propaganda opportunity were missed.

But cut the “experts” just a little break :slight_smile: . The world was a different place when those discussions were happening.

  • Tamerlane
24

Gobear:

All things happen context.

Without the 11 September events do you seriously think there would have been any commitment for this?

Tamerlane has aleady hit on the main points but let me expand.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. If you think that the Islamic world or Russia or even the Central Asian Republics or even the Afghans would have had the same reaction pre-9/11 then you don’t know jack about history or international relations. I am reminded of the academics who argue that England and the West should have gone to war against Hitler in 1937. All this abstracts away from reality. You will recall Pakistani support for the Taleban, among others.

For my part, I have no regrets about my pre 11 September comments and I stand by them, every motherfucking word. And I will add that if America tries social-engineering in those areas of Afghanistan where Taleban social rules have a real echo, it will get itself in a world of shit.

The real world pre-11 September was one in which the USA had little to no leverage in the region, where our actual on the ground intelligence was shit and where we did not understand or “care” about the problem in the region. Look at the god damn motherfucking pre 11 September threads. “Why should we care about the Mid East” Suspended motherfucking peanut particles and so forth…

Attack Taleban pre 11 September and what casus belli do you have? They don’t have the culture you want? Their women don’t dress how you think they should? Well that’s Well that ain’t no fucking casus belli, that’s called motherfucking imperialism and it already failed.

I don’t even agree with Tamerlane that the US made a mistake disengaging from Afghanistan in 1990/1. Actions happen within their motherfucking context. There is no way that I see that anyone could have ensured a good outcome to Afghanistan circa 1990. (a) American involvement in Afghanistan doesn’t happen in a goddamn motherfucking vacuum. It happens in the context of the Soviet Union falling apart. Does agitating the Soviets circa 1990-1991 payoff in terms of 1990-1991? Do we have either the home political or abroad political cover for it? Nothing happens in a vacuum. Maybe our ignorant fucking isolationists will learn a lesson. (b) It ignores that we worked almost 100% through the Pakis. They, with close connections couldn’t keep things together. Why the fuck does anyone think that the magical involvement of the USA solves fucking problems? Good fucking lord. I know fucking personally I would say most the fucking US folks who know the fucking situation. I don’t know one motherfucker who could have made the right call. Face it. One can’t predict things. The world is one fucked up place. © al-Qaeda. Here is a genuine fuck up. We should have and perhaps could have taken better measures. However better measures requires real intelligence. The cock-up with Clinton reflected not some motherfucking stupid fucking dumbshit wag-the-dog incident (a dumb fucking movie if you ask me) but bad motherfucking intelligence. I know some of our folks on the ground there (there’s only so many embassy “commercial officers” or whatever whose knowledge of business (or subject X) and econ is slim but can talk about security like there’s no fucking tomorrow one can meet before one starts to get a sense of things) and I say straight up our assets are slim. I don’t want to bust on good people working with little support or attention from their home base. But I am convinced we need to invest massively (and well) in people who know the languages and terrain. And the fucking culture. Was that possible circa 1999?

No it absolutely was not.

Look at me. Who was better to me, who thought, man this dude’s language skills are actually useful? The Europeans Americans? Nobody was offering me, several years back, the $$. It is no accident I have Euro employment experience cause frankly the US has been fucking fooling itself.

25

Probably not. But possibly a very slightly better one. I’m not talking about political interference. But after waging a succesful proxy war against a then enemy, in which what assets Afghanistan had were devastated, I think a larger, very serious charitable ( not really ) commitment of money and materials to help rebuild infrastructure was a moral obligation.

Granted I’m a bit of “bleeding-heart” in that respect. I acknowledge that in the world of real-politik that sort of attitude is a liability. And hell, it may, probably would, have just all got blown to hell anyway. But maybe not. And maybe it would softened attitudes towards Americans in that region just a little.

shrug Probably not. But if I were dictator, I would have tried harder than we did.

  • Tamerlane
26

Tamerlane,

I did not mean to say we should not have done something, I mean to say that it just was not going to happen.

For geopolitical reasons.

For domestic reasons. For every person who understood the connections and the risk in the future, there’s 1000 who would start a thread (were the internet around in 1990) asking “Why should I care…” "Why are my tax dollars going to … "
Penny wise, pound foolishness is the bloody hallmark of American popular thinking about foreign affairs. I’d love if it were different, but I don’t think the poor bastards who have to work with thin funds, little support and less understanding should be pissed on by people who wouldn’t have given a fuck 6 months ago. (no not gobear at all who I know better than that, this is more a general statement)

27

Ah, true enough. The will was no more there to attempt a “Marshall Plan” for a no-longer-strategic country in the middle of nowhere than it was to launch a war. I think it was a mistake, but you’re quite correct that given the circumstances it was almost certainly an inevitable one.

I fully agree.

  • Tamerlane
28

There’s a Will Rogers quote that’s appropriate here, but unfortunately I can’t find it. The gist of it is that if you want to know when the next war will start, all you have to do is to watch the US government cut the military spending, and the next war is sure to follow.

29

My other rant were I not to go to bed now, would be about Americans who believe military spending = foreign policy.

Military spending cuts did not have fuck all to do with this. Our military is huge, it’s not the size, it’s the orientation. Intelligence cuts might have, but then the intellgence was aimed at a threat which doesn’t exist anymore.

The problem was lack of understanding. Money doesn’t but that per se.

30

No, I didn’t miss your point, you missed mine. We cut the crap out of both the military and intelligence budgets (which can almost be considered the same thing because of how they overlap) because we figured that the world was now “safe” since there was no big bad Soviet Union to worry about. And we got bit on the ass at least twice by doing that! (Once when the Iraqi’s went after Kuwait, and then 9/11.)

And military spending may not equal foreign policy, but the US is like the fastest gunfighter in those old westerns. It doesn’t matter how nice we are, and how many people we tell that we’ve hung up our guns for the last time, there’s always going to be some punk kid showing up in town who thinks he can out-draw us.

31

Hold on there… SOmeone said that Iraq’s army was untrained. No way in heck. First of all, they had fought in fiercely contested battles with Iran. This is not some big, but useless army. Agianst any other military they might have done well. But we had surprise, morale, and the best equipment and training money could buy.

AMERICA ROCKS!!!