As history has shown time and time again brutality on its own is counterproductive. You do what you are suggesting
i) you will have the entire Afghan nation against you
ii) a war with a nuclear power.
iii) And your army superfucked as it now has to operate in a country with the worst terrain on earth, with a near 100 percent hostile population and oh your supply line is cut as you are surrounded by hostile countries.
iv) So General ralph124c. Your strategy has resulted in ISAF forces being trapped, unable to obtain supplies through Pakistan (and possibly at war with it) or Iran while the Central Asian republic route is much less reliable and many there have sympathy with kin in Afghanistan who you have massacred while Iran is hostile, the entire Afghan nation having turned against you, you have resistance in every little village town and hamlet, you have little to no intelligence on the enemy because no one is supporting you and you cannot like all good occupiers divide and play the faction against each other since the faction have come to the conclusion “anyone or anything is better then these batshit insane people staying here”.
That’s the eternal running in circles you got with the “We didnt lose in Vietnam!” crowd. Not realizing that not going for mass massacre of civilians ( though more than one million Vietnamese soldiers dead, and more than 2 million civilians killed would qualify as massacre) is part of the equation, I’m sure if you decide to cross out every parameter in an equation, you’re bound to find the solution.
Sadly this solution will not apply to the problem you were tasked with resolving.
I’m not even sure if Ralph is making an argument here, but if so the fallacy is obviously a simple false dichotomy: All out general war, or peace. There are in-between options where military action proves to be a quite useful tool for limited objectives or objectives short of totally annihilating an entire nation. That points back out of the hijack in terms of advancing mlitary technologies.
Take stealth, for example. We have the ability to hold virtually any target on the face of the earth at risk with a very low probability of losing the shooter.
Then there’s precision-guided munitions. Despite being expensive, they are many orders of magnitude less costly than the ordinance they reaplaced in a cost-to-kill analysis. Cluster bombs, deep penetrators, IR seekers, radar-guided missiles, etc, etc. all getting better all the time. Enemy combatants simply have nowhere to run and no place to hide anymore.
I won’t even go into the ISR and communications topics, since they get complicated real fast. Suffice to say if it moves or can be seen from space it can be tageted and destroyed at will in a very short kill chain.
Tin pot dictators at cross-purposes with the owners of these weapons tend to behave better nowadays and are much less likely to even invoke their use at all than they were a couple of decades ago. Peer level foes now have an extremely high conventional deterrent factor.
Maybe, but it depends on who’s fighting who. In any case, it’s made them more or less decisively fightable.
Although I do not agree with Ralph’s methods, I agree with his analysis of our present policy in Afghanistan. We do not seem to have a coherent, achievable set of goals. All I figure we are doing is keeping our guys there so the Taliban can’t wrest control of Afghanistan from the weak, corrupt government we are propping up. I see no end in sight. If I were the President, I would be asking very, very, VERY pointed questions of the Secretary of Defense, such as, "give me a good reason why pulling our troops out now is not a good idea.
Also, Nadir, just because our armed forces are all volunteers, is no reason to treat their lives as disposable for no good reason.
The truth about our soldiers’ in terms of what they are asked to do, their perceived status both in the American public’s eyes and their own and the realities they as a group are faced with on a daily basis lies somewhere apart from being treated as “disposable” and “asked to die for nothing.” I said neither.
He doesn’t need to ask those questions because he is fully aware that doing so would simply invite our enemies back to the pre-war status quo of basically owning a state-sponsored terrorist training ground.
Correct answer: The United States Army in joint operations supported by our Navy, Marines and Air Force and armed forces and coalition partners from 42 countries totaling 64,500 troops presently under NATO command.
Just to clarify.
Shed a little different light on the subject? Maybe?
You responded to a post saying that we should not ask our young people to die in Afghanistan by saying that since we had an all-volunteer Army no one was being asked to die. Sure sounded like you were saying that anyone who volunteers is disposable. If that is not what you meant, what did you mean, and how does what you meant refute the point you were responding to?
So what portion of forever should we be staying in Afghanistan? What is a reasonable pull-out point? You’ll forgive me if “no possibility of a Taliban takeover” is not a sufficiently specific objective.
Since you and ralph seem to be the ones tugging the collective heart strings with your cliche thinking, please feel free to go ahead and infer whatever you like. Like I said to rephrase, your words - not mine.
You might also consider reading for comprehension prior to responding for spin.
