In brief - the US military is granting low-level Taliban soldiers a sort of parole, releasing at least some of them in exchange for their promise not to return to the Taliban, and the assurance of tribal elders that they’ll keep these kids on the straight and narrow.
My question - how can this work? I mean, presumably these kids think that fighting for the Taliban is morally acceptable. Terrorizing women, intimidating anyone who cooperates with the government or the Americans, blowing up civilians - these young men think that behavior is fine and dandy. How can they be trusted to honor their parole, absent a genuine change of conviction?
It can work. I mean, there are Taliban and there are Taliban. A lot of these kids, the Taliban came into their village and said “Here’s a gun, your fighting for us now”, or got them all worked up about how how the foreigners were invading, and don’t they want to be heroes fighting for God and Afghanistan and kick the foreign invaders out. A lot of these people aren’t ideologues. They’re just cannon fodder. So, for most of them, you make them promise they’re not going to fight anymore, you send them home, and you let the village elders and chiefs keep an eye on them.
It’s not like paroling enemy troops is a new thing, anyway. It has a long, distinguished tradition.
Afghanistan has not been integratable into an Empire for a very long time, not the British empire, not the Soviets, and not you Americans.
The reporting on Afghanistan suggest maybe half the population is absolutely against you, mostly the Pashtuns. You can’t put half the population into camps, so eventually you’re going to have to start cutting deals to get out.
– and of course fighting for the Taleban is morally acceptable from their point of view, resistance against the foreign invaders. Noble old Pashtun tradition. The more the US tries to change the Pashtuns, the more they’re going to resist.
That is something that always confused me. Our culture thinks we will never give up, never surrender, fight to the last man but then fail to formulate our strategies to account for the fact that we are not unique in this sentiment.
I always found the disparate treatment of teh germans after WWII (compared to the treatment of the japanese) a bit odd.
We split their country in half and made them feel guilty for everything the Nazis did:
But in Japan we split Korea in half (hence the North Korea/South Korea) and let Japan virtually deify its war criminals.
Still things seemed to work out just as well in japan as it did in Germany and japan has not engaged in militaristic imperialism since then. Was this alrgely because of the guilt WE felt over nuking them?
Splitting the country in half was a bug, not a feature. Germany was divided into four occupation zones, one America, one French, one British, and one Soviet, with the goal of eventually ending the occupation and making Germany one independent state again. With the breakdown of relations between the Soviets and everybody else, the Soviets refused to let their zone unify with the other zones. Hence the splitting the country in half.
And during the occupation of Japan, there were also war crimes trials, and a purge of people involved in the old government (many of whom ended up back in the government after the occupation ended), and the government was reformed to make it more democratic and liberal as well.
So, I think the only reason for the disparate treatment was because all four Allies, including the Soviet Union were involved in the occupation of Germany and the occupation of Japan was strictly an American affair. The reason Korea was divided was because the same thing happened there as happened in Germany; the Soviet Union administered the north, and the US administered the south, and the Soviet Union refused to agree to reunification.
Winning is definitely possible. That’s the advantages of industrialization. It’s just that we lack the ruthlessness required to do so, and the proper incentive to use it.
You know, someone really needs to invent a sarcastic smiley.
I’m somewhat in agreement with both Marmite Lover and Ludovic.
Their society is nothing like ours, and we’re fighting to give Western-style democracy to a people who don’t even understand the concept. On top of that, we’re using Western-style rules of engagement against an enemy that follows no rules. We should have been totally ruthless from Day One, and the media should have been banned from covering anything that went on there until the situation was well in hand.
“Understanding the enemy” is key; one would have thought that the time spent in Vietnam would have taught the US military something, not to mention our observances of the Russian experience in Afghanistan.
If anything, Afghanistan should have been put under military administration, as Japan was after World War II, but it would have had to be more ruthless than that example due to the different circumstances.
Japan was still handled with kid gloves, and shouldn’t have been. Hirohito should have been tried as a war criminal, and there should have been some form of forcing the Japanese public to understand how their armed forces acted in such places as Nanking; it would have prevented the current situation where the Japanese public has become a nation of people in denial about the subject.
A better idea would be to recruit them. You were fighting for them, now you’re fighting for us, here’s your pay and your gun. Might help, given that our current Afghan allied army is made up almost entirely of old Northern alliance bods, a genocidal gang of minorities intent upon the subjugation of the pashtuns and company.
does the rounds in the internet cafes and coffee shops in Iraq and Afghanistan I’m sure plenty more locals will be running to sign up (not to fight along side you of course).
That is just sick on so many levels. Children!!!. Boy your military boys really are sick.
You are creating suicide bombers and radicals every minute of the day.
