I understand your position, and I don’t agree. Can you cite former soldiers talking about the Afghanistan war in terms of American hegemony?
And there you go again with that “indiscriminate killing of civilians” again, which is what started this hijack in the first place. Why do you keep saying that? This isn’t 1945! Our military has changed much due to a lot of factors over the years, and with the political pressure in terms of rules of engagement that we are under, I hardly can see how you can continue on with this meme.
Again, isolated incidents occur. People sometimes go crazy in wars. But that’s mostly ground troops. Airstrikes otoh, are a bit different. There’s a big difference between “hey, there’s possibly a Taliban fighter amongst all those women, nuke them all!” and “this target doesn’t have the value we need, so don’t bomb it”.
Furthermore, if you understood the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan, you would know that air support is very limited. As in, close air support. Drones aside (which are very effective, btw), warplanes are generally called in by smallish groups of NATO forces to do a limited strike against known targets nearby their position, which is a cautious event, due to the closeness. IT IS NOT INDISCRIMINATE by any definition of the word.
Shit, the terrain in that country is so mountianous that it renders our armored vehicles practically useless. Our operation is organized in such a way that smaller groups of troops, generally no larger than the batallion level used lightly armored HMMV’s to traverse the terrain.
Give me a break, gonzo! Where has anyone stated that since they support a particular operation like the war in Afghanistan that they “love war”? I am a former soldier, and I can tell you…I do not love war!
And losing? Vietnam, maybe, due to the circumstances and lack of will to fight a war without clear definition. Iraq? Really? We lost? We didn’t lose the war, we lost political clout across the world, but we aren’t defeated. Not militarily anyway. Granted, that war also lacks a clear focus…but we didn’t lose.
Anymore there isn’t a clearly defined “victory” in wars where militarily superior forces have to fight an unconventional war against non-uniformed guerillas.
Iraq is a floundering mess. Does anyone think we will walk out and peace will follow? What did we win? What were the spoils of Vietnam? Panetta Acknowledged CIA Misled On Interrogation Policy: Dem Lawmakers | HuffPost Latest News Here’s Panetta saying the CIA has lied to congress for years. Where does anyone get the truth about wars.? They lie to everybody.
What is our aim in Afghanistan? Shooting people who may or may not be Taliban? They don’t have an army with clearly defined uniforms .We will take out enough civilians for their families to fill in with new recruits. It is a waste of effort and treasure. It is just another horror story in the making.
We didn’t win anything from Iraq or Vietnam other than valuable warfighting experience in fighting a “limited” “urban” “guerilla” conflict.
Seeing as how these are going to be the types of conflicts across the world going forward (as the confrontation of massive Cold War armies gets less and less likely), it is at minimum a learning experience. Provided we heed the lessons, of course. That I am not so certain of. And yes, it was a VERY expensive lesson, especially because we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq in the first place.
What is our aim in Afghanistan? Why, eliminating the Taliban, you silly.
Anyone else that claims it’s all part of some master American hegemony plan to establish airbases across the ME (which wouldn’t be a bad thing, btw) can make their own argument.
As long as we expect to maintain our standard of living and also are a global addict to oil, you can expect us to take measures to ensure our energy supply. Iraq may have been that, at least in part, Afghanistan, not so much.
Correct me if I am wrong, but no matter how I parse the above posts I end up with the same conclusion: you support the Afghanistan invasion under both a just or unjust scenario. And your support for the latter comes from The Big Dog scenario.
I love the smell of Social Darwinism in the evening.
And just because you keep repeating something (it’s not 1945!) doesn’t make it true either.
If you’d read the four cites I provided in my last post as well as my prior comments, you’d see that civilian deaths are trending upwards in the past and current century. I also mentioned one of the likely factors why this is so. There are more to be sure, not the least of which is the aversion of major powers to engage their enemies directly as to reduce in as much as possible the number of casualties on their side – a perfectly logical approach I might add. But with the obvious downside we’ve been discussing throughout this thread: the rising number of civilian deaths.
I do think that “indiscriminate” is more of a shock-word than it is a description of the tactics used. But once again, within the natural restrictions imposed by urban and/or guerrila warfare, the US has not hesitated much when it comes to using force. Again, although we have no official figures for the number of civilians killed in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the numbers are alarmingly high even when using the most conservative of sources: that would be Iraq Body Count cited by President Bush during one of his speeches defending the invasion. As for Afghanistan I offer the following study which also goes into quite a bit of detail as to why it is so: Operation Enduring Freedom: Why a Higher Rate of Civilian Bombing Casualties
So while I am not open to mantra-like repetitions of how careful the US has been in avoiding civilian casualties, I’d certainly welcome counter evidence proving me wrong. However, I will dismiss out of hand the absurd notion of just how much more “ruthless” you could have been. It simply falls on its face in light of the arguments made as to why you went in in the first place. Never mind the cynical names given to both operations – after all if you carpet-bombed and/or nuked either country, who’d be left to “free”? Never mind winning hearts and minds nor handing you flowers…
Isolated incidents simply do not produce the number of civilian casualties we’ve seen in both theaters. No matter how much you keep repeating it.
While I once again agree with you vis-a-vis the use of the word “indiscriminate” I also strongly disagree with you on the use of air support. Is is, in fact, the major cause of civilian casualties to this day – the infamous predator drones alone hardly qualify as “air support” and they are directly responsible for a very large quantity of civilian deaths. Never mind the countless number of missiles launched and air attacks – neither in “support” of anything but as targeted missions of their own. Read any of the reports for confirmation.
Which is why when the original attack took place, instead of directly sending American forces into the area that Bin-Laden was supposed to be hiding, Tora Bora, you sub-contracted a bunch of Afghan warlords who were supposedly his enemies – but more than one report has come out since that what these people were most interested in was, unsurprisingly, money and power…with Bin-Laden a distant third or even an ally in some cases.
At this point in time I no longer “presume” anything about American objectives. While the PNAC appears to have gone underground since '05, with Bush, I thought it was pretty clear that the Neocon agenda had a strong influence in his actions. As for Obama, while I continue to give him the benefit of the doubt, to be honest, I simply don’t know here he is headed with this; nor how he aims to get there.
Unfortunately, pretty much my vision as well and not unlike what is happening in Iraq as we speak:
Not offhand, no; nor was I implying that soldiers’ criticisms of the war were necessarily as politically nuanced as that. The majority of anti-war soldiers I’ve spoken with simply want to get the truth of the war out to the general American public. Some, but not all, have read and talked and thought things out and come to more politically radical conclusions.
Killing doesn’t have to be wanton and uncontrolled to be indiscriminate. Bombs are designed to kill with maximum effectiveness, not to distinguish between civilians and enemy military personnel (i.e., illegitimate vs. legitimate targets in wartime). The US military is well aware of this and yet they use such weapons, ignoring the responsibility of distinguishing between civilians and enemy military personnel. This failure to distinguish is what makes the killing indiscriminate.
In short: just because you don’t pull the trigger every time you have a target doesn’t preclude you from killing indiscriminately every time you do pull the trigger.
In America we say we care about civilian deaths. In America we say we do not want to destroy cities, roads,bridges, hospitals and schools. But we do it over and over. Saying one thing and doing another, again and again, should give you pause. Who are we really? Are we what we say or what we do?
Soldier suicides are setting new records. We ask so much from young men who are just beginning their lives. Many are being scarred for life. They have seen and done things that will haunt them forever. I guess i have a much higher bar than some of you do, before I would send soldiers off to fight. We used to exhaust diplomacy before we went to war. Now it is a pettr annoyance to be avoided.
We have dropped 35 million tons of bombs in Afghanistan. There are 235,000 people displaced from their homes. Homes, farms and businesses are being destroyed. Why would they support America? Many were against the Taliban. Now they have a common enemy. They will have to deal with them, when we are gone.
Only if you exclude the sophisticated guidance systems used to deploy those bombs specifically to minimize civilian casualties. Otherwise, we’d just carpet bomb like we did in WWII.
According to this report by Human Rights Watch, 116 civilians were killed in US/NATO airstrikes.
In 2007, again according to HRW, 321 civilians died in US/NATO airstrikes.
In 2008, according to a graph in the New York Times (and reproduced here) and an LA Times article here, somewhere between 530 and 554 civilians died in US/NATO airstrikes.
Don’t airstrikes use these sophisticated guidance systems? It certainly doesn’t look like they’re doing a good job of minimizing civilian casualties. That is, I guess, unless you try counting the number of civilian deaths per ton of munitions dropped - perhaps (warning: ultrasnarky WAG ahead) it was one death per 50 tons in 2006 and one death per 5,000 tons in 2008. Of course, it would seem that an increase in airstrike munitions expended per year starts looking more and more like carpet bombing…
Not to be snarky in return, but you do realize that the war has been heating up for the last few years, right? Also, that the war has moved from the hinterlands in Afghanistan to more urban (or at least town/village) type settings, and that the enemy has changed their tactics over the last few years to negate (somewhat) our tech advantage…right? These tactics include putting themselves in closer proximity to civilian populations, which forces us to either not press home an attack or to do so at the risk of civilian casualties.
Our weapons are, sadly, not magical. Human beings create them and use them…so, human error is part of the system. Even leaving out the fact that the enemy deliberately puts themselves in proximity to civilians for the express purpose of putting them at risk (and forcing us and our NATO allies to choose between engaging them or killing civilians as well), mistakes happen.
BTW, to give some perspective to your numbers, IIRC the death toll from the series of earthquakes in Afghanistan and Pakistan was something like 80k. I haven’t looked it up, but based on the collateral causalities you are talking about here, I’d guess more Afghani’s die from malnutrition, disease or other non-violent causes (or killed by the Taliban and or one of the other warlord factions roaming about) in any given year than all the collateral deaths from the US/NATO during the entire conflict.
It puts the numbers into some kind of perspective wrt the every day dangers that Afghani’s face. When you see numbers like 321 killed in NATO air strikes (during 2007), the numbers are meaningless if you can’t see any context.
Not to them, it sure as hell isn’t. Not to me. Innocent people dying at my country’s hands is not something I ever took lightly, and I’m *damned *if I’ll start now. Your carnage may vary.
It all comes back to whether you think it’s a fight that we need to be fighting, then. If you don’t believe we should be there at all, then that is certainly going to impact how you consider ALL of the causalities…civilian and military alike.
Not perzackly. I said then I didn’t think this was a good idea, and still don’t. But execution can make a bad idea a disastrous one. Look, we do this airstrike thing to supplement and replace boots on the ground. But its not working! Now, the idea of swamping Afghanistan with American soldiers is a really, really bad idea, but this is hardly an improvement. We breed more enemies than we neutralize, even in the cold light of cynical realpolitik, this doesn’'t work.