1,300+ coalition troops dead, nearly 4,500 injured, c. 11,000 and 30,000 Afghan civilians dead and innumerable resources spent, so we could liberate the people from tyranny… and replace it with a politically desirable ‘democratic’ government, which funnily enough turns out to be tyrannical.
Hamid Karzai’s recent political manoeuvrings, to ensure his re-election, have just involved passing a law which allows husbands to deny food to wives who do not meet their sexual demands, and allows rapists to avoid prosecution by paying compensation to the assaulted woman.
“Tamkeen is the readiness of the wife to submit to her husband’s reasonable sexual enjoyment, and her prohibition from going out of the house, except in extreme circumstances, without her husband’s permission. If any of the above provisions are not followed by the wife she is considered disobedient.”
We are pouring soldiers’ and Afghani citizens’ blood into a moral black hole. It’s sick and tragic and indefensible. My grasp of English isn’t sufficient to communicate how heinous this is.
I feel like people are not getting the full extent of the damage when they hear or read that word “wounded.” Most people probably think, “oh, 9 people dead, that’s too bad, but at least the rest of them survived.” OK, yeah, they survived, but think about it: 91 people wounded means that there are bound to be some really serious injuries there. Some of them are probably going to die of their wounds later, which will drive up the actual death toll. Some of them will probably be crippled and unable to work, which will throw their families into complete poverty; people will be malnourished and die as an indirect result of it, and others will probably turn to crime. That word “wounded” really conceals a lot, I think; people really shrug it off, forgetting that each of those wounded people is an individual person and not a statistic.
If mainstream news media actually showed the uncensored effects of car bombs and air strikes on actual human bodies, and the injured survivors, instead of sanitising broadcast material and pushing it to the back of the news agenda, I’d like to think that those still tacitly supporting this action would evaporate pretty fast.
I agree with Argent Towers about the injured- especially in a country where there must be questions about the capacity to provide long ranging support for those with loss of limbs etc.
I have always thought one possible answer to such regimes is to educate the women and give them greter self esteem. I just can’t see it happening.
I am really, really surprised the UK and Australia got involved in Afghanistan.
The British Empire said “You know what? This is entirely too much hassle” and cut their losses there in the early 1840s, and we know how fond they were of meddling in countries full of Non-Europeans.
So deciding that things would be different the next time around- after the Russians had proven that wasn’t going to be the case- just baffles the imagination, it really does.
I’ve been wondering lately what our objectives are in Afghanistan. It doesn’t seem that anybody has laid them out in the last eight years or so.
Are we fighting to wrest Afghanistan from…for the sake of…and we’re backing…? And we’ll know we’re done when…?
Initially British authorities intended to stay out of internal Afghan affairs having taken revenge for the losses of the First Anglo-Afghan war (which involved the massacre of all of the c. 16,500 working personnel and troops, bar a sole survivor who managed to retreat and stay alive). Unfortunately this was forgotten by 1878, and again in 1919, and again in 2001. A master-class in not learning from history.
We are fighting to wrest bits of Afghanistan from local warlords and Taliban militias. We are doing this for the sake of the Afghan people, and since we incited a civil war (and participated in it) in order to capture the Al-Quaeda operatives seeking refuge there, we kind of have a responsibility to do so. We are backing the civilian government we installed, which is marginally less odious than the one we deposed. We’ll know we’re done when the international community forgets the matter and we can withdraw without too much of a fuss.
It’s worth saying that Afghanistan would likely be a far better place if evil murdering baby killer cunt George W. Bush hadn’t diverted so many resources away to fight the hopeless mesopotamian clusterfuck in Iraq.
I hate to say it, but we’ve gotten ourselves into another unwinnable war. Afghanistan is more than ever resembling Vietnam…we have a determined enemy, who has unlimited resources (afghan heroin financing weapons from Pakistan), plus an unlimited supply of superfluous young males who actively seek death/martyrdom.
Plus, we are propping up a corrupt, unpopular ruler who grows more out of touch every day. We need an American DeGaule, who can cut this burden loose!
Everytime I read of another poor kid’s funeral, I get madder!
Afghanistan is NOT worth the bones of a single American soldier; let them kill eachother all they want.
We don’t seem to learn much from history.:mad:
Afghanistan is nothing more than a bunch of backwards barbarians, great empires of the ages have crushed such rabble in the past, so can we (and great empires have also been pillaged by such rabble as well–and so have we.)
Afghanistan is a lot different than Iraq or even Iran. There’s little hope for Afghanistan becoming a prosperous, 21st (or even mid-20th) century western-style country. It’s too backwards, the people too ignorant, and there are too many tribal divisions.
My solution? Pull out? No, not really. Do what we should have done years ago: hit the Taliban with everything we have, kill as many of them as possible. If you kill 200,000 or so members of the Taliban and destroy any towns that continue to support them they will be more or less crushed. Not forever, though–because we’ll have a lot of angry Afghans on us after such a violent contest, and they’ll gravitate towards a lingering Taliban. The solution at that point is to basically parcel up warlords and give them control of various parts of the country and then leave.
Most likely some of those warlords will be taken out, some will fight with other warlords et cetera–who cares, not our problem. Our only real national security interest is making sure the Taliban (or Taliban-esque) powers in the region aren’t permitted to harbor people of the Al-Qaeda bent as they were pre-9/11.
Long term we’ll have to employ a carrot-and-stick approach. Once we leave, if one of the local warlords starts harboring anti-American terrorists, we go in and destroy his region of Afghanistan (with no intentions of staying to rebuild or any lengthy occupation), then leave–with a new warlord in his place. Eventually the Afghan warlords will realize it isn’t profitable for them to harbor Al-Qaeda, and they’ll focus on what their business should be–maintaining their own power base. We’ll pay off the “good” warlords, they can use that money to buy weapons to make infrastructure improvements–it is irrelevant to us, as long as they keep their people from being threats to the United States.
It’s a tragic truth of history that this course will leave Afghanistan a human wasteland, but you can’t right all the wrongs in the world, just isn’t possible. These periodic punitive expeditions will most likely keep us safe from Afghanistan as a terrorist refuge and will cost vastly less in both American lives and money than trying to build infrastructure and civilization in what is one of the least civilized places on the planet.
Except we actually won in Iraq. The mistake George W. Bush made was staying in Afghanistan after the initial routing of the Taliban, we should have left right then with the warning that any group harboring terrorists would suffer another punitive expedition.
I’m waiting for Obama to call a press conference to announce that he has sent an ultimatum to Karzai to rescind this disgusting law or face the withdrawal of all American support.
The British Empire (repeatedly) and the Soviet Union both eventually fled Afghanistan with tremendous losses, so why would Nato do any better?
Indeed. Plus all those murderous foreign invaders, you know.
About the only thing the population agree on is killing foreign Christian invaders and marketing heroin.
Ah yes, the “identify members of the Taliban and kill them all”.
Sadly the Taliban are indistinguishable from the rest of the population.
And of course, once you foreign devils have slaughtered 200,000 local Muslims, the rest of Afghanistan (including the Warlords) will all be Taliban.
And of course stopping all the fellow tribesmen in Pakistan from attacking nuclear bases there.
Which has ‘worked’ so well in the past. :eek:
And of course is ‘working’ now - with the Taliban stronger than they’ve ever been and the heroin trade at record levels. :rolleyes:
Once we’ve left, how do we identify which Warlords are harboring anti-American terrorists?
Immediately the Afghan warlords will realize it’s profitable for them to use their profits from the heroin trade to finance Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, and they’ll focus on what their ‘business’ should be–getting hold of nukes to use on the US.
We’ve suffered an essentially negligible amount of losses in Afghanistan, we’re already doing so much better than the British Empire it is laughable–and that is with the “wrong” strategy, one that involves us trying to be “builders” instead of the punitive force we should be acting as.
Doesn’t seem like you have a very accurate view of Afghanistan, I think you may have confused this for some sort of Western-centric “political” argument. Afghanistan has no sort of united hatred of “Christian” invaders, or even the marketing of heroin, actually. It shows that you don’t really understand the nuances of the situation and makes me think you aren’t well prepared for this discussion.
Ludicrous. Do you really think that the other warlords don’t know what regions are Taliban controlled? Of course they do, they have to, or they couldn’t operate. If some backwoods warlord knows something, we know the same thing. It doesn’t really matter what each “precious little individual” inside Taliban regions supports, any more than it mattered whether or not all the Germans we killed supported Hitler. We know the power base and we have the means to hit it, we should.
People respond very well when given options, especially warlords. I am quite certain if we support the warlords who make sure their regions don’t become anti-American terrorist training grounds with weapons, money et cetera they’ll make sure they don’t. The warlords have a much greater ability than we do to police their own people, both due to logistical concerns as well as having a greater degree of legitimacy and intimacy with the situation at hand.
To be honest, way back at the beginning we probably could have made the Taliban bend to our will if we’d buttered them up properly. However I think the American public needed to see us hit someone, and the Taliban were very vulnerable to being hit, whereas Al-Qaeda wasn’t nearly as “static.” The Taliban liked being in power of a large portion of the country, they probably would have happily kept anti-American terrorist training to a minimum in exchange for the proper amount of support.
It’s no different than bribing the Barbary pirates. Unfortunately the situation with the Taliban has come to the point we can’t go this route with them, but whatever similar entity springs up in their remains we can probably work with.
Looks like you’ve wandered off the point, learn to focus.
How has it been used in the past? It certainly isn’t being used now. In fact virtually none of the things I’ve suggested are being actively pursued as U.S. policy. Yeah, Obama is offering farmers the chance to great wheat instead of poppies. Which is laughable, you don’t negotiate with the farmers. For one, the farmers will get shot if they stop growing poppies because they’ll be seen as collaborators and they’ll be taking money from the Taliban. Secondly, wheat sells for much less per pound than poppies, it isn’t in the farmer’s interests to sow their fields with wheat.
But anyway, they’re ignorant peasants–below negotiating with. The people you employ carrot and a stick with are the warlords, not the locals. As long as American leadership is hell bent on a “people-friendly” “Afghan-unity” democracy you won’t see us treating with and installing local warlords like we should be.
That’s why we spend billions of dollars on intelligence–but still a lot less than the $12 billion/month it’ll cost (assuming no price increases) to maintain a true military presence in Afghanistan in some fruitless quest to bring light to the darkness.
I didn’t realize you were Dick Cheney. You’re living in fantasy land.
