I feel sad arguing with PAUL. When we were kids we all were taught that America did not instigate wars and would never attack a country that didn’t attack us first. We knew America cared about other countries and would never hurt anyone. To find an adult that still buys that stuff is kind of refreshing.
And your condescending attitude towards people who think ‘hey, maybe it’s a good idea to prevent a radical Islamist government which wants to revert these people to 7th century religious dogma, restrict the rights of women, free speech, any semblence of embryonic democracy and kite flying, whilst harbouring global Jihadi terrorist groups’ isn’t refreshing.
So I’m with Paul on this one, no ones saying the Warlords or any of those assholes in the Karzai administration are perfect, but at least you can reason and apply some strategies on them, where as with the Taliban, there is no room for any negotiation. They are not interested in rapproachment.
This really irks me sometimes, which is why I rarely contribute any more to these types of threads.
But maybe, just maybe Gonzo, we’re there to prevent another sort of situation which lead up to 9/11. This is not like Iraq, this is a multilateral UN approved mission with alot of international legitimacy. The only problem in this whole damn war is bunk strategy and useless tactics to fight the Taliban.
Actually we are recruiting more to Al Qeada and other organizations that hate us. When you kill people .their relatives seem to resent it. When you blow up a wedding party, it hits the news in Afghanistan. Everyday a bunch on Afghanies die and more people hate us. Then they look at our chosen and backed leader Karzai and they hate us more. They all know how corrupt he is and how much he is involved in the drug trade. How will any of that prevent a new 911. The sad truth is, it makes it more likely.
News flash for you, people die in war, civilians die in war, people get accidentally blown up, people get shot up by mistake, people get run over by accident, people get injured due to wrong intelligence, this type of scenario has been happening since man hurled wooden sticks at each other, it’s not going to change, and it shouldn’t mean we just pack up and leave.
As for Karzai, you miss the point, he’s part of a government you can reason and negotiate with, and irrespective of what you think, has at least some more legitimacy than the Taliban, who have never been elected democratically and whom most Afghans, despite the situation, do not want back.
A semi civilized government which is at least trying to bring its own country up to code is a hell of alot better than the Taliban.
At least with the Karzai government, there’s always the promise of being able to bring those disreputable to account sometime in the future, could you do that with the Taliban bringing their ilk to account? Not bloody likely.
Double news flash for you, these people who just happened to be getting killed are people with families and want us gone… Karzai’s government is in because of us. If we walk he has a tough time staying alive. He negotiates because we give him billions of American tax dollars. The people don’t want him in at all.
The people don’t want the Taliban either. But Karzai is corrupt and he will have a hard time when we leave. His governmental power is us.His election was a farce.
It may be that the people don’t want Karzai or the Taliban. But we created them both. We financed, trained and armed them to fight off the Russians. If we cared at all, we would have helped them rebuild their state then. or when we went in to get Al Qeada. But we did not. We abandoned them .We had no use for them then.
We’ll end up negotiating with the Taliban, although we’ll learn that we’re only negotiating with “moderate” Taliban and not the really bad guys. Most of the public part of this negotiation will be done through Karzai or somebody similar in the Afghan government.
The sort of situation which led up to 9/11 was America’s propping up and involvement with so many governments in the Islamic world, particularly the oily Arab part of it. This inspired a group of Muslims to try and take revenge over what they see as our hand in the corruption of their society. We responded to their attack by involving ourselves even more in that part of the world, using a lot of military force and directly killing large numbers of them. It’s difficult to see how we’re “preventing” further attacks by doing what we’re doing.
What useless tactics are we using to fight the Taliban? What tactics should we be using?
I thought we were supposed to be fighting Al Qeada. There are Taliban in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. I guess our children and grand children will get their chances . War forever, the neocons have won.
Richard Haass In Newsweek: Rethink Afghanistan Because Nation Building Is Not Working And We're Not Winning | HuffPost Latest News Nesweek is running a story tomorrow declaring the war not worth it and un-winnable. Past time to get out of there.
Since when do you take you cues from Republicans ?
This war is so stupid even the repubs are bailing on it. Our soldiers are again fighting aimlessly with no clear purpose. The people they are fighting are protecting their homeland and families. We own the skies and can send planes and rockets in at will. We can out gun them, but where are they going to go? They live there.
Audio message purportedly from al-Qaida’s No. 2 claims battlefield victories, blasts Arab leaders
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-al-qaida-audio-message,0,7598086.story
excerpt.
sns-al-qaida-audio-message
(CNN) – An audio message from a man identified as Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida’s No. 2, says Islamic militants are moving from one victory to another against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
article continues.
basically states we are lying face up in the grave we dug for ourselves.
they are laughing at us as the begin to cover us with sand. bury us, lock stock and smoking barrel.
Afghanistan, the Destroyer of Empires…
this time Ours.
Wonder why its such a big deal, it was a forgone conclusion even before it started,
thinking ppl said so, were scorned for seeing, saying the obvious.
thing is, now, it really is game over, we lose.
when will we accept it, how many more have to die ???
before we leave THEIR country…
its not for us, never was, up to us to DICTATE what should;d happen in Their land.
We are nothing better than invaders, deserve contempt, little else.
You know, I’m getting pretty tired of that ‘Graveyard of Empires’ Cliche, because what some people don’t understand is that even if NATO leaves Afghanistan, it doesn’t mean that we’ll stop supplying Karzais government with aid or technical advice or even money. Just like that other power, the USSR, which, if it didn’t break up, would of still supplied the PDPA indefinately even after it withdrew Soviet troops. In fact, Najibullahs government survived up until 1993 when the newly formed Russian Federation cut off aid.
This is a defeat because? Insurgencies tend to have a political paradigm to them, as long as they have a role in government, and aren’t helping to plan any other 9/11’s as well as being flanked by a Western supported government, it’s understandable, but I don’t hold out this scenario, purely based on the fact the Taliban will try a power grab for the whole country, again.
So their attacks were a failure, if as you say, that was their intended goal.
We did pull soldiers out of Saudi Arabia, which Osama wanted. We got rid of Saddam and destroyed secularism in Iraq, which he wanted. We unleashed a persecution against women and homosexuals in Iraq, which I expect he wanted. We’ve badly damaged America on multiple levels, which I’m sure he wanted. It was anything but a failure.
Yet I don’t see any fall of any Arab governments, in fact, I see a retrenchment and strengthening of each regime because of 9/11.
Secularism by force is no secularism at all, it’s just gonna drive any contentions underground. Hence Saddams Islamist social campaign in the mid to late 90’s.
You talk about persecution in Iraq as if it never existed before. America is a resillient nation, capable of bouncing back, something of which you seem incapable of understanding.
Another aspect of our failure; we did serious damage to the democracy movement in the region by promoting the idea that “democracy” is just code for slaughter and chaos.
Secularism by force is the only kind of secularism there is, since only force stops everyone with a One True Faith from trying to ram it down everyone else’s throat. Somehow I’m not surprised that you find religious tyranny and mass murder a plus, though.
By comparison it didn’t. Women could hold jobs and get an education, homosexuals could live in peace, and so on. Now women are afraid to leave their homes much less hold jobs, and homosexuals have been systematically tortured and slaughtered. Admittedly the Republicans probably consider both of those a victory.
That won’t retroactively make the damage never have happened; not that I expect America to ever fully recover.
Homosexuality was a crime in Saddams time as well, not to mention women can still get jobs in Iraq now, the only difference is that the security vacuum which the US blundered itself with allowed reactionary forces to limit the progress made. But your comparison to then and now is ridiculous, you’d think that Iraq just turned its clock back to 12th Century Afghansitan, which it hasn’t.
Again rubbish, secularism can be attained by gradual inclusion into culture, whether political or social, over a matter of years or generations, Iraq’s was forced down just like Titos in Yugoslavia, only problem is, once you remove the man from the machine they helped create, it breaks down, which is why the thin veneer of secularism vanished as soon as Saddams regime was toppled.
Not to mention that secular parties were the main victors of Iraqs most recent election, I guess the best thing about the Iraq war is that it has de legitimized most of religious dogma some political parties have.
They did have the ‘One true faith’ rammed down their throats for 30 years, it was called ‘Saddam’
Maybe, but it doesn’t mean that democracy is a dead or spent force in the ME, which is what you’re implying.
No, but it can help shape future American policy towards being a surgical knife rather than a butchers one.
They are regardless of your fantasies much worse off in all ways than they were under Saddam. The dead remain dead. People who were not being killed under Saddam are being killed under American occupation.
The same thing happened as would happen in any society when the government was removed and nothing put in its place. You are also ignoring the fact that a “thin veneer” is much better than the slaughter and oppression that commenced.
No, its become a negative force. Everyone “knows” it’s a code word for “American toady” and mass death.
As if. It simply demonstrated what collective sociopaths we are.
Before we went into Iraq, over half the students in university education were women. They could and did wear western clothes if they chose. Women worked outside the home and had many freedoms that they lost, thanks to us.
Just another unintended consequence that others have to bear for our aggressive foreign policy.
- It’s a defeat because our stated aim was to defeat them. We don’t negotiate with evil, remember? You’re either with us or against us, or, uh, our negotiating partner. Only a few years ago our leaders were saying things like this :
September 2004: “And as a result of the United States military, Taliban no longer is in existence. And the people of Afghanistan are now free.”
December 2004: “In Afghanistan, America and our allies, with a historically small force and a brilliant strategy, defeated the Taliban in just a few short weeks.”
October 2005: “Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence — the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago.”
And the Taliban didn’t control the whole country before either, they were fighting the Northern Alliance up till we invaded. They’ll go back to fighting them after we leave. We’ll supply our guys with enough materiel to hold Kabul and nominal power, what we should have done back in 2001 instead of escalating a war we could never win.
- They knocked a couple of our office buildings down and killed a bunch of people so I’m guessing that gave them some measure of revenge. From a strategic point of view it was an outstanding success for bin Laden, drawing us into foreign wars where we radicalise more Muslims and bleed our Treasury, destabilise the Middle East even more etc.
And in Iraq the secular parties were not the biggest winner, the Shiite religious blocs together won more seats. They also wrote the constitution where nothing can contradict the laws of Islam, leaving the Iranian Ayatollah whose political group won the election that he demanded with an effective veto over any political legislation.
I thought our stated aim was to get Osama Bin Laden and bring him to face justice for 9/11.
Of course, that failed anyway.