Excellent ideas Sam! You’re correct-we need to stay in Afghanistan as long as we need it. We can use that time to slowly build up Afghanistan as you said. Plus as you also said Afghanistan will be a step in surrounding Iran-Iraq’s not a big friend of Iran (outside the Shias in the south) nor is Turkey or most of the Sunni nations.
Because the US military say there’s fewer than 100 there. Maybe there are some getting on-the-job training there but I’d guess most of those guys are looking to go to heaven.
There is no government in Somalia, parts of Yemen, Pakistan, Chad etc. to help us.
While we’re hand-in-hand with the corrupt regime in Afghanistan, Pakistan, almost every single Arab country then we’re only ever going to get hatred from their citizens. Look at the Arab countries for instance. We prop up all the big regimes, Egypt, Saudi etc. and the people enslaved under those dictators see them being backed by America. We’re the Great Satan. Why don’t Muslim terrorist groups want to bomb Sweden or Holland? They’re even freer than we are, they still have habeas corpus. But they’re not manipulating Muslim governments, propping up dictatorships that hundreds of millions of Muslims live under, so nobody wants to bomb them.
While we’re propping up governments over there, blindly supporting Israel etc. we should accept that we’re going to be the focus of quite a lot of anger and try and minimise that by as little military interference as we can in their countries to stop producing so many radicals. And deal with the existing/new ones by law enforcement, intelligence operations. Longer term we need to find an energy alternative to oil as then we can just forget all about the Arab world and leave them all to their own devices.
You seem to be implying the Talaban don’t already control most of Afghanistan?
The reason NATO is willing to talk to the Talaban now is because NATO is losing and losing badly i.e. his new ‘policy’ is not emerging from a position of strength.
Be happy to look at any current links that suggest the contrary.
Of course the problem now - for the Imperial mindset - is to withdraw is defeat and to buy them off is to appease: ‘Appeasement’ - not the favourite word of empire.
To read the Afghanistan occupation - or the U.S’s foreign policy as a whole - as empire building is ridiculous. No one in the U.S. wants to be in Afghanistan. No one wants to turn it into a colony and extract valuables from it.
The U.S.'s foreign policy is clumsy, it’s ham-fisted and often wrong. This is true in both Republican and Democratic administrations. But the U.S. is not an empire and has no desire to be one. What it is, is the wealthiest nation on the planet, and therefore winds up being the world’s policeman and emergency service. People love it when the U.S. does it on their behalf or on behalf of countries or interests they approve of. When it does it for reasons they don’t care about or like, it gets labeled as empire building.
You can see that in Haiti today, with the nutbars calling the U.S. military response an ‘occupation’ and empire building. As usual, the u.S. shoulders the bulk of the burden, and takes the bulk of the hostility.
Stopped reading.
I have a proposal: we tell the Karzai government that they have 6 months to make a deal (with the Taliban).
Then, we and NATO leave-and let the Taliban know, that any terorist attacks un us will be met by an immediate bombing attack.
There has been far too much blood and treasure wasted on a hopeless attempt.
I was asking why you think that Al Qaeda is going to places other than Afghanistan, not what source you rely on to make the determination that there are fewer than 100 in Afghanistan. So again, why are Al Qaeda not in Afghanistan?
I’ve been to a heck of a lot of countries where people hate us. It isn’t because we may be friendly with their government, it is primarily because of a perceived one-sided support of Israel and for invading Iraq for no good reason. Sweden, the Netherlands, and other countries don’t pursue those policies.
I would really encourage you to read the New York Times series of articles about the reporter who was kidnapped and held for months by a Taliban commander who was initially viewed as among the “moderates.” Link. One choice quote from the journalist: “Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of “Al Qaeda lite,” a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan. Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.”
The fact is that the world has changed dramatically since 2001, and I think it is unreasonable to assume that the Taliban has not changed as well.
They’re not in Afghanistan because there are quieter pplaces for them to operate in, like Pakistan, Yemen etc. And that’s down to the US military having a heavy presence in Afghanistan! But the only way you can make that heavy-military-presence policy work to eliminate all potential safe havens is to send heavy numbers of US military into all potential safe havens, something it’s impossible to do. So simply crossing one of their options off the list by being in Afghanistan (but also giving AQ the option of sending people there for on-the-job training, being a huge propaganda victory for AQ by us being there, promoting general radicalism etc.) does us no good whatsoever as far as the overarching problem of global jihadi terrorism goes, and actually makes the situation worse.
I read those articles in the NYT when they were published. And you’re right about the Taliban! The real hardline guys see it as a religious duty so they’re never going to change. However we’re never going to be in a position where we can do anything but negotiate with them. But luckily their ability to overthrow Muslim governments worldwide and form some kind of new Islamic empire is something that is only seriously entertained by the extreme paranoid bedwetting faction of the right. It’s never going to happen because the vast majority of Muslims don’t want them even in Pakistan, as can be seen with the victory of secular Pashtuni nationalists in the Swat valley by-election at the weekend. The only way the US military can keep empowering this radical jihadi fringe is to keep invading and bombing Muslim countries, supporting their corrupt regimes etc. The best thing to do is just negotiate a power-sharing peace deal with them like Hamid Karzai wants to do, and that’s what we’ll end up doing because we don’t have any choice.
The British empire never bothered with full-scale military occupations of almost all the countries that were part of their empire. India for instance was garrisoned by about 20 000 troops, the bulk of the imperial government being done by Indians working for the Brits. In a lot of countries, particularly the Middle East, the Brits just had a military base or two, as the biggest military power of the time that’s all they needed. And the British government didn’t run countries if they could help it, they used to leave that up to the natives whenever possible. All the Brits wanted was first dibs on whatever resources the country had. They weren’t interested in running the country or controlling the land mass, they just wanted their companies to get control of the goodies, whether it was rubber, spices, metals, minerals, oil, whatever. In a lot of cases the British military/government wasn’t even involved in the process when the private sector was able to handle it by themselves. For instance, a group of London investors set up the British East India Company, hired a bunch of ex-British army mercenaries (or “contractors” as they’re now known) and went off and conquered India. It was only when the French navy came sniffing round their expanding operations that the BEIC called the government in to help keep the Frenchies out.
And the BEIC actually used to have a seat in the British cabinet to make sure their Indian and various other global divisions got what was needed from the government and also provide private sector contracting services for the Brits in countries in Africa where the government was more involved in the process. And once the prime minister and other senior politicians left office, they got a seat on the board at BEIC or/and one or more of its private sector competitors. Of course nowadays any kind of systemic corruption like that would be impossible in our vibrant, free democracy. That kind of thing only happened in the dark days in other, corrupt countries.
For the record America has military bases or basing arrangements in 130 of the world’s 190 countries.
KABUL (AFP) – Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries, is sitting on mineral and petroleum reserves worth an estimated one trillion dollars, President Hamid Karzai said Sunday.
The war-ravaged nation could become one of the richest in the world if helped to tap its geological deposits, Karzai told reporters.
“I have very good news for Afghans,” Karzai said.
“The initial figures we have obtained show that our mineral deposits are worth a thousand billion dollars – not a thousand million dollars but a thousand billion,” he said.
He based his assertion, he said, on a survey being carried out by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), due to be completed in “a couple of months”.
The USGS, the US government’s scientific agency, has been working on the 17-million dollar survey for a number of years, Karzai said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100131/wl_sthasia_afp/afghanistaneconomyenergyminerals
Posted without comment.
The Washington Post is reporting that the Taliban militia in Pakistan is crumbling, from military defeat and loss of public support.
First of all, the point that AQ isn’t in Afghanistan because the US and NATO are there is my point.
Second, you are wrong that the “only way” to prevent AQ from setting up training camps in some country is to have the US military be in every country. AFAIK, there’s no AQ training camps in countries where the government is effective and capable of policing/defending itself, so an entirely valid option is to help get other governments on the ball enough to police/defend themselves. This is the second time you’ve pushed this egregious fallacy of the excluded middle, and I wish you’d acknowledge that you’ve been called on this point.
I completely agree on both points. War is resolved not through wholesale elimination of one side, but upon the reaching of an agreement that hostilities are no longer needed. There’s nothing wrong at all with negotiation, as Churchill said, “Jaw-jaw is better that war-war.”
On the second point, there is no way that Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or any Salafist extremist movement can ever achieve their goals. They are destined to lose, the only question is how much killing they can do before they are rendered ineffective. For all this junk that pops up now and then about how “the terrorists are winning and America is losing,” there is no way for the extremists to ever achieve their goals, meaning there is no way they can ever win. We would do better to keep that in mind.
OK, so how do you get the Pakistani government to go after the AQ people in their country and stop supporting the Afghan Taliban? How do you empower the Yemeni government to be able to control the various secession/rebellion movements in Yemen? Set up a new system of government in Somalia? And in the forthcoming decades while you’re doing these things, do the same in other emerging Muslim failed states? Will we be as successful in getting rid of the problem group in these countries as we have been in getting rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan?
That’s a great article 
Not one named person knows anything. This passes for ‘news’ in the national media?
The Taliban were soundly rejected in the closely-watched Swat valley by-election at the weekend. The more Pakistanis get to know the Pakistani Taliban, the more they dislike them. The Afghan Taliban are a different animal altogether though.
Do me a favour, it’s a propaganda piece in support of the (largely) privatised drone policy.
It’s got not a single meaningful quote.
I quoted the wrong post in my last post, I meant to quote just the Washington Post article. 
We’re not losing badly as the tired defeatist far leftists are saying. It’s merely a question of will and how long we stay here. Every year the US stays here we can rebuild more and educate for Afghans.
Ha ha ha; the centre-left media not liberal enough? Do you get your news from Mother Jones and Huffington Post?
54 40 or fight.
There is a substantial portion of the US that would not mind being an empire and would like to start with your beloved Canada. annex canada - Google Search
That much empire wouldn’t particularly piss me off. Especially since it would wind up as provinces being states. That said, I don’t see a need for it from the US point of view. The only serious difference we’ve had in 150 years is that Canadians love harboring draft dodgers. The Canadian government responds by letting the FBI run around Canada in a way they couldn’t in the US. Yes, they delayed Charles Ng’s extradition a while, but not as long as California has delayed his execution.
But what the hell is the point of 700 plus military bases around the world? Holy Budda on a pogo stick? Why can’t the other developed nations pick up their fair share of the slack? Haven’t enough people read Thucydides to know the dangers of letting the leading democracy do the actual policing work? Again, I’m not talking about humanitarian aid to Haiti (which I approve of) but long term troops all over the world. NATO is getting to improve in that the US has a far smaller percentage of the heavy lifting defending Europe, but the European allies simply did not pick up their share of the slack until the end of the cold war. And Japan and China. I can understand nobody wants the Japanese to return to their as bad as the Nazi’s imperialism, but that isn’t really likely. China can also clarify exactly what they expect Taiwan to do. But both these nations need to step up and defend the high seas against piracy.
As far as extending human rights to women all over the world, especially Arab style Islamic countries, that simply is not the job of the military. Treating women like slaves and chattels is despicable, but it isn’t the job of the US government to change it in other countries by force. Diplomacy would be a good start.
The United States as a global superpower has the moral duty to ensue human rights throughout the globe and be the protector of humanity not just itself. The British ended the slave trade during their time-we can accomplish far more-perhaps establish a democratic world state to prepare for extraterrestrial invasion.