I don’t think that’s necessarily what’s going on in Afghanistan. We bombed the shit out of Iraq, for better or worse, but not nearly so in Afghanistan.
My biggest concern aside from the deaths of innocents and the possibility that this effort may be unwinnable in the conventional sense is the immense stress we are putting on our military, both man and machines.
I can’t imagine how much money it’s going to cost to replace and refurbish everything that’s been lost or damaged, not to mention restoring a sense of well-being in the minds of our troops.
I am against some of our tactical options, but not against the basic premise. I believe in defending our nation. Especially since I live in their primary target city. Besides Afghanistan isn’t really a country. It’s a dreadful mistake that we treat it as such.
I agree (WRT Afghanistan, not Iraq). I find the general line of argument* “the US funded the Mujahideen, so it has no moral standing to attack the Taliban” most unpersuasive. Yes, we gave them the weapons, but then they turned on us. Kind of like how the US supplied Imperial Japan with most of its oil and metal in the run-up to December 7. And nobody can tell me that they didn’t deserve that open can of whoop-ass they subsequently received.
Also, it does need to be repeated: The USSR was evil.
*I’m not saying that’s your argument, Olentzero, but you do seem to me to be implying something along those lines. And I’ve certainly had some people explicitly state as much.
I see where you’re coming from, Fuji. That’s not my perspective, however. A few points:
There’s a whole mountain of hypocrisy behind playing up the Taliban and Saddam Hussein as the new threats to world peace and by God, something must be done when the US clearly had no problems with either of them doing what they did twenty to thirty years ago, e.g. Saddam gassing Kurds in Halabja in 1984 and Rumsfeld going to Baghdad to shake his hand.
The US is using the same approach this time around as they did last time - finding whoever is happy to receive funding and training against the enemy du jour regardless of political or religious stance. I’m not saying Maliki or Karzai are the next Osama bin Laden but that person is already most assuredly in the mix of fighters on the US side. In other words, even if the US decisively defeats the Taliban, it will have done nothing to stop the cycle of terrorism and violence.
That cycle of terror and violence is not going to end as long as there is at least one global superpower seeking to exert its political and economic dominance over other regions of the world and seeking to prevent either the rise of competing superpowers or to prevent other superpowers from exerting their political and economic dominance over other regions of the world.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have US dominance over the Middle East and Central Asia as their fundamental operating logic. Freedom and democracy, should they ever arrive in those countries via US military occupation, will only be tolerated so long as they do not threaten US interests.
Successful opposition to these wars needs to involve three forms of resistance: resistance from the occupied countries themselves, resistance from the US civilian population, and - most importantly, I feel - resistance from soldiers in the US military itself. Matthis Chiroux, Ehren Watada, and Camilo Mejia are, I hope, merely the tip of the iceberg. They’re opposing the wars for roughly the same reasons I’ve listed above, plus they’ve born witness to the actual human toll, both physical and psychological, of these wars on US soldiers and Iraqi/Afghani civilians alike.
As stated upthread, sometimes the right thing is done for the wrong reasons. Stefan Cook’s resistance to the war in Afghanistan is based on arch-conservative jackassery of the worst kind. Frankly, if they’ve just dumped his ass from every job he’s held so far and left him to stew in his own juices, that’s enough time and effort wasted on him.
He got a General Discharge, because doing anything else would have given an organized group of nutjobs a greater platform for their bogus protests. Letting him go makes him insignificant, as he should be.
I’m ambivalent about the Afghan war, but I believe Maj. Cook’s phony plea for publicity puts a stain on legitimate opposition to the war.
A question so simple, in fact, it was answered in the OP, which you quoted in your post.
In any event, it’s immaterial. Nobody actually believes that birther stuff, and frankly I don’t want anyone that does handling weapons or representing the country anyway.
Hypocrisy, perhaps. The thing is, if the Taliban didn’t want to be on the receiving end of a US invasion, perhaps they shouldn’t have sheltered and supported OBL after US demands to turn him over? 'Twas hardly an unforeseeable consequence.
You may be right about the US creating the next OBL in Afghanistan. However, I’m cautiously optimistic that things will turn out better than in the 80s, as instead of using proxies, the US is putting its own blood and prestige on the line this time.
Strongly disagree with you here. Even if the US abandoned Israel and followed a strict policy of non-interference in the affairs of predominantly Muslim countries, there would still be groups of bitter, angry losers there who would rather foment hatred against outsiders instead of improving their own societies.
I largely agree with your other points. However, I would add that, while I think that the Chriouxs, Watdas, et al. may be acting out of a sense of personal integrity that on an individual level is commendable, I think it would be extremely dangerous for US security if such internal opposition within the armed forces ever became widespread.
No one portrayed the Taliban up as a new threat to world peace. They played them up as the force in between us and our objective, Al Qaeda. As for your comments on Saddam, I doubt you’ll find any argument here, we pretty much universally agree that invading Iraq was a boneheaded move.
You seem to have this idea that history somehow ends at some point. It doesn’t bear out. History is a succession of stories that build upon one another. The idea that we will eliminate all threats once and for all is pie in the sky and unrealistic. In Iraq we have laid the groundwork for having to fight a unified Shia Islam sometime in the future and that’s unfortunate. In Afghanistan Karzai is from the Afghani secular royalist faction of the Pushtun tribe and not comparable to an Islamist Muj. We didn’t favor the secular royalists in the past because people like Bearden respected the Muj who were actually on the front-lines fighting, not the ones who comfortably lived in exile in western states.
You could have stopped at, “That cycle of terror and violence is not going to end.”, you don’t need to qualify it. Humanity will be at war for the foreseeable future, there is nothing coming down the pike that should lead us to believe a peaceful world order will spontaneously break out during our lifetimes, unless of course we develop life-extension during our lifetimes, then maybe when we are three-hundred years old we might see a shift in human consciousness.
And? So what’s your point? We should let someone threaten us as long as they are a free democracy?
Except it doesn’t appear that a ground swell of people in the US actually agree with you.
Right, they might not be attacking us, but they’d be attacking whoever else they saw as an impediment to their goals. Global Jihadists want one thing and that’s an ascedent Islam. They want to see Darul Harb cleansed and a world united under Darul Islam, their strict interpretation of political Islam no less. As it is they spend far more capital killing other Muslims over theological minutiae than they do killing westerners.
Well, in the real world, we both know the world’s most powerful nation would never hand over any of its high leadership for external prosecution. Realpolitik aside, I also find the implied moral equivalence between a military invasion whose planning was publicly debated on the world stage for months prior to its initiation and a sneak attack which deliberately targeted thousands of civilians to be repulsive.
The point is not whether or not the two are equivalent. Obviously they’re not. However, if Bush was called up, we wouldn’t refuse on the grounds that he didn’t do anything wrong, but that as a sovereign state we’re not handing over one of our nationals to be tried in a foreign court.
