This is almost a General Question, but since the degree of the opposition will vary, I’m just looking for any instance. My timeline would start with “his” surge technique in Iraq under Bush (when he came on the scene) and move forward. I’m not sure there’s much too debate, I just want to know how often higher ups disagree with him and how much support is behind the disagreement.
My direct question is above, my overarching question is do we rely too much on military assessment of things?
The afghanistan war (against the Taliban and associated groups) is unwinnable. This is because the USA cares about soldier’s lives. The Taliban doesn’t care about civilian’s lives ( or their own). So, as long as the money keeps flowing (from the Saudi Wahabists), this war wil continue. I doubtthat this conflict is worth the money we are spending…and I belive that we will begin withdrawal soon.
That analysis is quite incorrect in that we already won against them. They lost Afganistan, and are now reduced to raiding across the border. The next show will be in Pakistan, really - the attacks across the border are really a consequence of the internal mess they’ve had going for years there. Our defense of Afganistan is fundamentally a defense of Pakistani free society (even limited as it is) against what can charitably be described and evil barbarian marauders. But they won’t stop with Afganistan - or anywhere else.
I wish I could agree but we are not going to be there forever. All they have to do is not lose until then while creating more chaos.
Add to that the Afghanistan Government is essentially the same collection or murdering, drug-dealing, corrupt rapist warlords the Taliban were welcomed in to replace in the first place and each time we kill a bunch of civilians we strengthen them.
We simply do not have the will to do the toe-to-toe, limited air-strikes and artillery fighting needed to beat them. We won’t take the casualties and we seem completely powerless to deal with the plutocratic, looting nest of vile corruption that is the Afghan government.
Most governments in the middle east are loosely organized beds of corruption. No matter who we back they will steal and not take care of the people. That assures an unsatisfied populace that will eventually fight the government. No matter what we do ,we lose. All solutions are temporary. We waste treasury and lives over and over.
The problem with saying ‘the US beat the Taliban’ is that there are unpleasant Warlords taking their place.
And there are 40,000 Allliance troops tied up, with no sign of a proper Government in control of most of the country.
Heroin production in Afghanistan is at an all-time high. Since this funds the Warlords, who are the ‘allies’ of the US, the drugs flow freely.
This means that ‘victory in Afghanistan’ equals ‘loss in the War on Drugs’. :smack:
Afghanistan is essentially a failed state and much worse for corruption than the average corrupt government. We also forget there really isn’t any such country as Afghanistan.
There’s a bunch of ethnic tribes whose territory does not coincide with lines on the map and below that the clan and the family. Primary loyalty is to the family and the clan and then the tribe. Not to mention to whatever backward version of Islam the individual, family, clan, tribe subscribe to.
The only thing that unites them is hatred of foreign invaders.
They are agency executives, so like State Department Foreign Service Officers, or DoJ attorneys, or DoL labor economists, they have a fair amount of expertise in their areas. However, the military has constituencies of its own (there is a revolving door from the officer corps to defense contractors; also, the Pentagon has been known to butter up TV military analysts, again former officers, to use them as a mouthpiece for DoD objectives) and I’m not sure enough people incorporate this into evaluating the weight to give to Defense Department pronouncements. The military is aware of its brand’s goodwill, so to speak, and is not diffident from using it to reach the agency’s political goals. None of this should be understood to say that Defense is unusually venal, but few agencies enjoy the mythologizing that the military does.
And the US did not beat the Taliban. We bribed a collection of the most brutal, corrupt, scum to do it for us (thus allowing OBL to bribe his way to freedom). As in the past those very same warlords will switch sides in an instant if they sense a shift in the wind.
One major problem with our nation-building foreign policy is that it hasn’t recognized the readiness of a society to become part of the ‘community of nations’. Afghanistan just isn’t ready to be a real country. We should accept that. Instead of throwing good money after bad we should work to contain Afghanistan and work on propping up the nations that ARE capable of making the right moves. I guess this is complicated because Pakistan is on the verge of becoming a real nation capable of peaceful internal commerce.
At the same time, we are letting Mexico collapse right next to us. We should be focusing on the more solid investments. There should be a finer degree of gradation amongst developing nations, a tier system where we help the top tiers get setup and then they in turn help us with their regional neighbors over time.
Maybe this can be done in Pakistan, maybe it can’t. I am not sure yet. Iraq despite dogmatic assertions to the contrary, seems to really be making progress toward this. This is also the reason I would like to see a shift in our policy toward Iran. Iran could be a major stabilizing force in the Middle-East and Central Asia.
The War on Drugs needs to be lost, the sooner the better.
There are parts of the world, first world even that experience morphine shortages. We should be working with those warlords to setup contracts with worldwide pharmaceutical companies to fill those gaps and to siphon off production in the region so that there isn’t any available for the black market.
The War on Drugs is one of the stupidest ideas ever. Lets spend resources to stop a market, rather than using economic factors to eliminate the black market by buying up the product on the white market. White market distributors then have a vested interest in keeping tabs on the the unregulated black market version as it’s a competitor that they can legally stifle.
Wow. I agree with you on almost everything in your post here. I would only disagree at all by saying that we are containing Afganistan.
That is basically our strategy there: create a relatively safe space, get the warlords to slowly decide that peace is more profitable and enjoyable than constant war, and keep he Taliban out. Yes, they can raid, but as long as the Afganis themselves don’t want them they can’t control anything. It’s not peasant, but it works, we have ridiculously low casualties, bleed the Pakistani crazies, and so on.
I highly doubt the Afganis care if we blow up Pashtun tribesman - there’s a lot of bad blood there.
Of course, I’m generally against the “War on Drugs.”
It seems to me great weight is given to their assessment of things (by citizens). I understand they have better insight, but is constant deference to military generals a good way to go about things? I’m guessing from your reply, you’d say no, or that too much deference is given. But, how could a civilian, like President Obama, really, meaningfully, challenge a top military general. Or does a President just use them as a credible talking heads to implement what the President wants (ie, more troops in area X).
That isn’t why. We can kill Taliban for the next hundred years if we set our mind to it. But there would be no purpose to it. The reason why it is “unwinnable” because we haven’t defined what a victory would actually look like. A peaceful, self-governing Afghanistan that rejoins the world community? Is there even an example of succesfully restoring a failed nation-state?
Afganistan has already become as good as it will get. No, it’s not our version of a nation, because it’s not a nation. But it’s not int he midst of civil war and life is going there as normal as it ever did.
The current fight against the “Taliban” has nothing to do with the Taliban anymore. These are raiders coming over from Pakistan, and a few terrorist cells inside the country.
MoveOn’s “General Betray-Us” ad comes to mind. I’m not sure that was the most politically effective way to convey their views, but of course it got lots of attention.
Can anyone dispute whats posted in the
[quoted link]
(https://pol.moveon.org/petraeus.html). I instinctively think it’s outdated, but I’m going to put to see if others on this board no more about it than my limited Pentium 2 processor brain. I’m not familiar with the organizations that dispute what he’s done.
To me, he’s always right, and rarely disputed (certainly by elected politicians and the President’s cabinet).
As other posters have said, “You can’t fight a war on the enemy’s terms.” Well you can but you won’t win.
We learned that you can fight a guerilla war and win, but if you want to do this you have to do what the British did to the Boers in the early 1900s. Even back then there was a worldwide protest against the British, but they won.
Also problematic is we live in a PC world now. You can’t question the military or they say “You are against our soldiers.” You can’t be critical of a minority or your a racist. You can’t slam Muslim or you’re anti-religious.
The problem is the enemy also knows this.
I’m not for war in any sense, but it happens in civilan life too. In Chicago, we used to have gangbangers run drug operations from their granny’s homes. These grannies lived in public housing. When the city attempted to evict the grannies the African American community was in an uproar. “How can you evict grandmothers.” Totally oblivious to the fact these grannies were HELPING to spread drugs.
It took an African American alderman to stand up and say “You know what, the city IS RIGHT.” He pointed out if the grannies want city aid in the form of public housing they have to at least make some ATTEMPT to turn their gangbanging drug peddling grandkids in.
And it worked. But you see because it was Poltically Correctness at it’s worst, until a black alderman stood up, every media outlet was portraying it as racism.
So in civilian or war terms, these PC terms make it impossible to fight a war without being critical.
Israel LOST TWO wars because of PC. They won’t bomb civilians directly so it is very easy to put the arms in mosques or orphanages. Then when Israel bombs them the Muslim world reacts.
PC has become almost like a form of McCarthyism, were you can’t question anyone who isn’t a white male, without having it blown up in your face.
More often than not, I find “PC” to be a cry of right-wing types and other jackasses whenever someone calls them out on sexism, bigotry, racial profiling or just generally ignorant statements.
I was watching something on the Vietnam war last week. The Tet Offensive was ultimately a tactical victory for the US and South Vietnamese. They retook all the areas attacked by the Vietcong and NVA and killed thousands of them in the process. The Vietcong ceased to exist as an effective fighting force at that point. Strategically, it was a disaster. The American public lost whatever confidence they had in victory. For the remainder of the war (another six years or so), the war was fought in a kind of half-assed manner by the politicians. Instead of committing more troops and moving on Hanoi, greater reliance was made on distant air power and “Vietnamization”. So one wonders what would have happened if America had continued to push their post-Tet tactical advantage.
Also, is there still a war in Iraq? You hear almost nothing about it anymore. Does that count as a “victory”?