Did Santa deliver a few extra bales of straw to the AK household this year?
When you say we are leaving do you take into account that up to 10,000 troops including our elite Special Ops Units have been negotiated to stay after 2014? The tribal elders had a Loya Jirga that approved those troops staying. The entire country’s tribal elders want US troops to stay. Nothing like that took place for all of Vietnam.
Some Muslims do celebrate Christmas, but I’m not sure he’s one.
If you allow your mind to accept the historic decision by Tribal Elders as part of a most recent Loya Jirga to allow US troops to remain after 2014 you’d know that US troops in Afghanistan after 2014 will be there by invitation and cannot therefore any longer be considered to be invaders.
I will discuss every issue with regards to Afghanistan and what our troops and the Afghans have accomplished and failed to do. The number of girls in school is a highly significant marker in what our military partnership with the Afghans has accomplished.
Malala lives in the part of Pakistan where the Taliban have been driven from authority which is not only similar to what’s happening in Afghanistan it is directly related to the elimination of both Pakistani Taliban and Afghan Taliban extremist policy against girls and women of all ages. That border region is the core region of Taliban insurgency in our COIN in Afghanistan as well as the Pakistan governments civil war with their Taliban militants.
We’ve been lobbing drone strikes on Taliban militants misty in areas where the courageous young Malala wants gills like herself to be able to go to school. it is all closely related. I’m glad you brought Malala into this thread. Her story deserved more coverage in the US than what she got.
Afghans are doing these operations on their own:
Girls being able to go to school is important (boys too), but yeah, it’s not going to make a lot of difference to people to whom things like this are happening.
Why can it not be stated with your agreement that the war is winding down for the US Military as well as all the other ISAF forces? You appear to have pounced upon one snippet of my message and is that as far as you can go. IF you take my two statements together you’d see that what I wrote is quite accurate. I have written that the total US combat fatalities are lower than we had in 2008. In 2008 the mission was damn near lost because the Taliban were in control of 80% of the territory and had fully established their reign of terror on the inhabitants of Kandahar City which is the spiritual capitol of the Taliban. So the war was escalated by a tripling of the number of troops that were there in 2008. And American soldiers and our allies suffered a great number of casualties. But that sacrifice has driven the Taliban out of control of all that 2008 territory and they no longer control the population of Kandahar City. The peak in the fighting and casualties for foreign troops was 2011 or 2012. The war for out troops is winding down and winding down significantly.
You say the war is not winding down and I accept that the war is ongoing now as mostly Afghan vs Afghan… And there are indications that the domestic conflict is winding down as well. The Taliban can set off bombs and IED’s against civilians and launch some significant attacks on government outposts and structures etc but just about all the Taliban attacks are suicidal whether the intent is suicide or not. The Afghan Police and Army are in the lead on all missions and in defense of the government we helped establish there.
That is what I meant about the war winding down. When measured in combat injuries and deaths for our troops the war is winding down faster than at the rate that we are leaving. That is because the Afghans are fighting in place of our troops as they should. No reports of Taliban retaking any territory they lost since 2009.
Four million girls attending school in Afghanistan as well as six million boys when in 2000 when Al Qaeda attacked us on our soil, girls could not attend school at all and looked at living out their lives trapped inside a Burka. No one is denying that so many Afghan families have suffered great pain and agony during this conflict and struggle, but what great achievements in human enlightenment and improvement of the human condition has come without tears and suffering by many.
It is incredible to me to see the significance of the numbers being mocked or ignored. Its as if cliché rules the day on Americans longest war and anything outside of cliché is not worthy of attention. And it is taboo to speak of any aspect of success.
You really have no sense of history, do you? US combat forces remained in Vietnam in 1972 but were no longer undertaking offensive military operations. The smaller number remaining combined with no longer having the stomach to conduct search and destroy - or cough sweep and clear operations meant very low US combat fatalities. The entire government of the Republic of Vietnam wanted us to stay. Nixon had to strong arm Thieu into accepting the Paris Peace accords with the stick that the US was going to have to leave regardless of Thieu’s objections to the terms and the carrot of a promise that the US would return again with the airpower that broke the 1972 Easter Offensive if the Republic of Vietnam was in danger of falling to another NLF offensive. Nixon was of course making promises to Thieu that he was in no position to actually keep; first of all because it would require congressional support which wasn’t going to happen and second of all because he had resigned in the wake of Watergate.
Again, no sense of history whatsoever. The rates of US casualties in Vietnam dropped faster than the rate we were leaving because we were no longer undertaking offensive actions against the NLF; instead we were handing the war over to the Vietnamese to fight the war in the place of our troops as they should in the policy of Vietnamization. Care to take any guesses how that turned out? You might want to look up the phrase “decent interval” while you’re at it.
Well they did have a death in the family, sort of. So go gentle on him.
How’s little AKSU holding up?
I haven’t seen anyone mocking or ignoring the increase in school attendence. It is, though, an indirect achievement of a long-term military occupation the purpose of which laid in very different areas.
So, in the wider context, why would the focus be on an indirect achievement?
No I did not. Malala’s issues derive from the history of Swat valley rather than simply Islamic militants and it is stupid in the extreme to conflate the two.
Ibn Warraq I find Christmas traditions fascinating, but I spend most religious holidays watching TV. Or on the Dope.
The military objective there was first to remove the Taliban from power but we have stayed their fighting a counter insurgency in support of a national government that can survive and defend itself from the insurgency on their own. One necessity of a modern army and police force that can help to sustain a democratic government that replaces the Taliban is literacy of both sexes. So Girls in school is a directly related achievement by the Afghans as doing their part to support the direct achievement of the US Military and other ISAF Forces in partnership with the literate Afghan Army and Police that we have developed as part of ISAF’s direct military achievement.
You have no sense of history or geography or political and sociological reality when you attempt to compare Vietnam to Afghanistan as similar in type of conflict and the respective outcomes. You wrote in response to me that “The entire government of the Republic of Vietnam wanted us to stay”. I wrote, "The entire country’s tribal elders want US troops to stay. Nothing like that took place for all of Vietnam. So simply you need to first realize that *‘the entire government of the Republic of Vietnam’ *IS NOT ALL OF VIETNAM. The tribal elders and Loya Jirga represents ALL OF AFGHANISTAN.
You are hugely incorrect on a major point of this discussion.
This to me is ‘mocking’ the idea that there is significance in the number of girls attending school that means that the outcome of the ISAF mission there is more likely to turn out as an accomplishment rather than failure.
IF that is not ‘mocking’ 4 million Afghan girls going to school when 14 years earlier barely a handful were permitted to be taught anything, I’d like to know what anyone else calls it.
Please explain how you came to that conclusion.
I am pointing out that 4 million girls now attend school in Afghanistan when none were permitted to do so during Taliban rule until the Taliban were toppled from ruling all of Afghanistan in 2002. And you chose to reply to a comment by an Afghan male who was recalling “Thirty or forty years ago my aunts were taken out of school here after the 6th grade. They are not literate.” … “He said this limits their ability to manage daily life – to take in news or read an expiration date on a food label. They even have difficulty making a telephone call to one of their relatives, he explained.”. Your reply was “Hold on. You need to go to school past the age of 12 to learn how to make a phone call?”. If it was not mocking what was your intent? That the man recalling his illiterate Aunts was lying? Are the Aunts stupid? What, if not mockery?
There has been a lot of aid and development progress in Afghanistan. It’s one of the world’s most backward and poor countries, as an official recently said the goal isn’t turning Afghanistan into Sweden but maybe Bangladesh in a decade or so.
As I’ve explained elsewhere, due to the massive amount of power concentrated in the Afghan military (I’m talking actual military power) then as long as Karzai signs the agreement he has had for weeks now there is no chance the Taliban rules Afghanistan ever again. They are too weak, too few in number etc. It’s far different to be able to continue on with insurgency versus running the country again. The Taliban was never able to completely rule Afghanistan even when it was the big dog among fractured groups of post-Soviet era Afghanistan and that was when it was significantly more powerful than it is now.
The limited long-term U.S. military presence will make any serious chance of the central government collapsing nil, especially since with it comes billions of dollars in aid. Without a U.S. security presence much of that aid will dry up because many of the NGOs cannot operate without some level of security guarantee and with no U.S. presence that will not exist. It’ll be akin to what’s happening in Iraq (who also refused to sign a status of forces agreement and had all U.S. troops pulled), but much worse–because Afghanistan is a much less developed and fractured country than even Iraq.
It’s telling that the Loya Jirga voted strong approval to signing the status of forces agreement and Karzai is refusing. Most likely it’s a power play, he wants U.S. forces to stay but he wants to be able to set himself up as permanent dictator in some way and he thinks he can somehow use leverage to get the U.S. to agree to that. What Karzai doesn’t realize is the long term SOFA will be deeply unpopular here in the United States as it will mean keeping some 40,000 soldiers overseas in Afghanistan for 10 years and potentially longer. Karzai thinks he has leverage he doesn’t, Obama is doing arguably the right but politically unpopular thing by even putting it out there that we will stay for 10 years. If Karzai is trying to threaten Obama with not signing it, then it shows Karzai is deeply ignorant of American political opinion. Obama’s approval ratings would go up, not down, if he pulled the SOFA offer right now and said there would be a complete withdrawal in 2014.