There’s no government in Somalia. But do you have a cite?
A cite for what exactly?
Open, publicly known, government supported, terrorist training and recruitment centers.
They can stop any open training facilities with special forces and air power, they don’t need 100 000 troops on the ground to do that. And the “training camp” thing is nonsense anyway. After 9/11 we got footage of “terrorists” crawling on the ground and on monkey bars on a loop on TV, but these people were actually training for fighting wars in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir etc. The 9/11 attack was planned in an apartment in Hamburg, Germany. No monkey bars needed.
So the evidence shows that they don’t need training facilities to plan terrorist attacks.
As far as Hoh goes, lots of similarly knowledgeable people are saying exactly the same thing, he’s just the only one who got a lot of publicity.
And as far as the effectiveness of military force to bring democracy or even stability in Afghanistan, this from a former Soviet soldier who fought in Afghanistan is worth reading :
I identified with the Canadian soldiers at the funeral mourning the loss of their friend. Like them, I went to Afghanistan believing in "fighting terrorism" and "liberating Afghans." During my first mission, we were protecting refugees escaping an area that was under attack by the mujahedeen. I was deeply affected by their misery, and by the poverty and suffering of the Afghan people in general. In my mind, our presence was "helping Afghans," particularly with educating women and children. My combat unit participated in "humanitarian aid" - accompanying doctors and delivering food, fuel, clothing, school and other supplies to Afghan villages.
It was only later that I began to wonder: Did that aid justify our aggression ?
[…]
[INDENT] It is hard to kill people without demonizing them. In 1988, my unit accidentally hit an Afghan wedding party. My friend, whose mortar shells had killed innocent people, was shocked when he learned of it. Some soldiers, however, were indifferent. “That village supports the resistance, anyway,” they said. Like NATO now, we didn’t count “their” casualties. As another friend, Alexander, would later write : “We thought that all of them - old and young - were insurgents.” Alexander, to save his unit, had called in artillery that destroyed a village from which the mujahedeen were attacking. People of the villages hit by our air strikes became hostile and turned to the resistance. More attacks by insurgents led to more Soviet strikes.
After 10 years of such a tragic cycle, more than a million Afghans were dead and millions more had fled their devastated country. Also, ignored by many, a powerful religious force of militant Islamic movements grew under the pressure of foreign aggression. In 1989, during negotiations between my regiment and the most radical militants from the area, a mujahed told my friend : “We’ll take our revenge to your country.” And they did. The backlash spilled out and hit not only the former Soviet Union and Afghans themselves in the 1990s, but also America on 9/11. The vicious cycle I witnessed in the 1980s - violence causing violence - is still continuing.
At Andrew’s funeral, the shock and disbelief on the faces of his military friends were all too familiar. So were the official speeches. And the Canadian media coverage seemed like an echo of the Soviet press. “Positive changes are evident. However, it would be premature to say that Kandahar is not a ’hot spot’ any more,” the Soviets said in the 1980s. “Things have improved,” one Canadian newspaper said now, yet “significant problems” remain. “Development is occurring” in Kandahar, the paper added, just like a Soviet journalist had observed in 1988.
http://www.vigile.net/We-re-still-dying-in-Afghanistan
[/INDENT]
Afghan challenger plans to call for vote boycott
So no legitimate government til spring at the earliest. This is not the sort of protracted chaos we want to invest lots lives and treasure propping up.
Right, and these are the fucking heathens we’re supposed to be supporting.
Hoh describes Afghanistan politics as valleyism. They live in many separated valleys .He says they are extremely provincial and national politics is far removed from their lives. The local war lords or town leaders are running the areas. They don’t want the Taliban, Al Queada or Karzais government having anything to do with them. They sure as hell resent American intrusion.
If you “stop” “open training facilities with special forces and air power” you have gone into a sovereign nation, which is an act of war. That’s just what dudes want us to stop doing.
This singular analysis of the situation in Afghanistan could be dismissed as too subjective. General McChrystal has also had a few months to analyze the situation and his conclusion led him to make a formal request for an additional 40,000 troops and a change in strategy. The implied consensus of these separate analyses is that the war in Afghanistan has, thus far, been mis-managed. Whether this is a failing of stategic objective or resource planning, tactical execution, or some combination of all of these and more is for military experts and historians to decide.
The POTUS makes military decisions based on information and analyses from his military advisors. Some of these advisors, their staff, their mentors, and their proteges may still be in the critical path of data and analyses that the POTUS relies on to make crucial military decisions. Perhaps the most important considerations in mapping the way forward in regards to military planning in Afghanistan is to:
1 - acknowledge the mis-management of the war.
2 - identify the source (intelligence, stategic planning, etc.) of that mis-management of the war.
3 - decisively discard with mis-conceived stategic and tactical military objectives.
Our men and women in uniform and in harms way deserve a clear and achievable objective for their heroic efforts and sacrifices.
We’re currently bombing Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. We bomb Pakistan regularly but the government hasn’t declared war on us. We took some Islamic terrorist chief out in an airstrike in Somalia recently without it leading to war although admittedly they don’t really have a government to declare war on us. But we manage just fine to keep AQ from setting up any facilities in Pakistan, take out various members without it leading to war with Pakistan. The Pakistani government are our allies in the war on terror, on paper anyway, and are doing their own radical/terrorist killing stuff currently in Waziristan. They’re technically happy that we’re killing Islamic terrorists in their country. Any kind of Afghan government is going to be the same.
We have the permissions of the governments in Afghanistan, Pakistan , and we have the permission because neither openly supports AQ. If nations (such as the Taliban run Afghanistan) openly supported terrorism and openly ran camps and recruiting centers, we wouldn’t have permission. Thus, it’d be an act of war. In the case of Afghanistan, the nation was in civil war, almost no nation recognized the Taliban, and we had the support and permission of one of the “governments”.
If the Taliban took back over, after a while they’d become the recognized government. Thus they could go back to openly supporting AQ, terrorism, etc.
So the Taliban could declare war on us? Exactly what difference would that make? If the Taliban did take over and did support AQ again, how would that be substantially worse for us than the current situation?
You can’t be serious here. I think you need to read a little bit about McC. He didn’t just move from a desk into being a SOF General. You have my personal guarantee that McC has far more ground experience in these environments than Hoh got in his tour or 2 in Iraq.
Does he need to run-and-gun in every conflict in order to maintain his credibility with you?
I’m on the ground in Afghanistan right now. I’m a well educated officer with more time in than Hoh had, as well as more deployments. Does that make me more credible than McC?
The thing myself and other officers here in Afghanistan don’t understand about this thing with Hoh is what makes him so special? Who gives a shit about some Captain infantry goon that got out and somehow caught peoples attention by saying that he disagrees with an already unpopular war? Wow. I can go to any base and grab 50-100 active, seperated and retired officers, with more experience than Hoh, who say the same thing, and have for quite some time. He’s not saying anything new. So who gives a shit when he comes over here and quits to go home? Why is the Obama administration pandering to him and trying to cajole him into staying? They certainly aren’t doing that to the rest of the people punching out.
Just because a challenger calls for a vote boycott, it does not follow that the winner is not legit.:dubious:
No, if the Taliban became the recognized government, then I don;t think we would go in there in the first place. The USA does not have a policy (GWB aside) of attacking sovereign nations without active aggressive provocation. We do have a policy of backing the “Democratic” side in a civil war, which is different.
As a minor note, less than eight hours ago I was on an honour guard detail to greet, among others, the Afghan ambassador to the U.S., who was in Montreal for some reason. During the many idle minutes leading up to this, I attempted to calculate for purely academic reasons just how much of an international incident I could cause if I bayoneted him.
I decided against it.
At last, someone “on the ground” who I assume knows wtf he is doing over there, apart from providing insurgents with targets to shoot at, and walking/driving into crude roadside bombs on a daily basis.(Or is that just our UK troops?)
What exactly are your day to day objectives, beside policing a country that doesn’t seem to want you there? What specific long term objectives have the troops been given? Are they clearer to you than they are to those of us watching on ‘back home’? Perhaps you can explain it free of all the political spin we get when we hear it on the news?
Tactically my day to day objectives don’t fall into a neat box that I can describe on a public message board. OPSEC first right?
Operationally I can say that I’m part of the on going air campaign, though not flying or dropping bombs.
Strategically everyone is kind of in limbo. We are waiting to see what the boss (O) decides to do here. When you are on the ground here your main concern is going home in one piece, and serving your time honorably and effectivly executing your part of the mission.
There’s not alot of room for questioning the mission and bitching about the locals and their contempt for us. All that does is breed bad thoughts and can’t help you in any way. If you want to question you do that before you join the team or after you go home when chatting with your buds on the porch. This is not the place to do it. Believe me, I walk by plenty of locals on a daily basis who CLEARLY would cut my eyes out in a heartbeat if they had the chance to do so. You can see it in their eyes.
I still haven’t gotten used to seeing the LNs doing construction in flip flops and bathrobes.
Nobody is going to recognise the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan, they may get partial recognition in some kind of negotiated settlement. America has invaded, organised coups, interfered to help overthrow governments in over 80 different nations since WW2, it’s difficult to argue we don’t have a policy to do it. And whoever we support in these things we label the democrat, even if he’s an authoritarian dictator. History shows us that we don’t care how bad any regime is so long as they cooperate with us. We even were prepared to deal with the Taliban and we will in future when all this stuff about how bad the Taliban are will be conveniently forgotten.
Would it really take so much for the agenda of Al Qaeda to disappear?
Are the demands that wild and crazy that they can’t be met?