Your pessimism is my realism. In any case, since this is all about trends and hypotheticals, we really have no choice but to wait patiently and see what the future holds for Afghanistan. If we’re both still around here in 2014, one of us can jeer at the other that their election prediction was more accurate.
Again, all these benefits must be considered alongside their costs. I like the idea of Afghan girls going to school, but not that it took 2,000 American lives and billions of dollars.
Yes, I can do that too. The benefit of dumping Osama Bin Laden’s body into an unknown burial at sea, combined with the kill and capture of thousands of insurgents, Taliban leaders, both in Afghanistan and across the border inside Pakistan, plus the training if nearly 400,000 Afghan Soldiers and Police to hold all gains in territory and major cites taken out of Taliban control, are benefits that are worth the cost to date as part of our inherent right to self-defense in retaliation for the horrendous attacks on US Soil perpetuated from that part if the world on September 11, 2001. -NF 086a
Conducting a war requires proactive shaping of people, politics and events toward specific military and diplomatic objectives. I disagree with the suggestion that waiting patiently is all that we can do.
We did not go to war in Afghanistan to put girls into schools. Our primary and justified military objective continues to be to kill and destroy the enemy including those sympathetic and in material support of the enemy that attacked us on September 11,2001. The fact that the vast majority of Afghans wholly reject the Taliban’s archaic religious extremist restriction on girls being educated, is a positive result of removing the Taliban’s ability to enforce their will on Afghans that reject it.
If the Afghan majority demanded that girls not be educated there would not be so many girls in school. Our military objective would have no bearing on that outcome. I am happy the outcome is what it is. It is encouraging to see so many families send their daughters to be educated equal with the boys despite fear and intimidation from violent Taliban extremists that remain at large.
Sounds like a joint operation to me. And Afghan Government troops are shooting their “Taliban Brethren” quite dead quite often. Looks like we trusted good Afghans to shoot the bad Afghans yesterday.
Yes, but do you want my response or have you ‘given up’ again before I have a chance to respond.
There are many differences, but let’s call it the Gray Team consisting of John Mace, Dissonance, Tagos, ElvisL1ves, Little Nemo, Alleson, BrokenBriton, Ravenman, elucidator, Ryan_Liam, and XT. Excuse me if I missed anyone.
There’s ralph124c, and CoolHandCox whom I would say are on the Swiss Team.
And then there is me.
The original topic of discussion was on use of the word ‘victory’ in the context that General John Allen used it. The Gray Team turned that into many sub-debates mostly pushing the viewpoint that our side will lose or end in stalemate in Afghanistan and that General John Allen is out of his mind for uttering such nonsense.
That led to sub-topics on comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam, which I believe I refuted since my responses to the Gray Team’s points were never addressed.
And John Mace brings up a report about some flawed stats discovered about Taliban strikes and subsequently the ISAF is not going to use them anymore; so all is doomed for the good people of Afghanistan.
But again I cited from John Mace’s own link, the explanation that the progress made of driving Taliban out of populated areas was the reason the stats were no longer applicable, and that the Afghan’s being on the front lines did not give ISAF a degree of accuracy. But the point rather justified what General Allen said.
Genuine progress is being made with the Afghans providing security for their own people with continued ISAF backup until 2015. But not back up where ISAF troops are in harms way as much as in the past. John Mace walked away from that conversation.
It just always amazes me how credulous you are. One good news article and you’re ready to declare victory. Let’s look at DoD’s own reports:
I’m not saying that everything is a disaster there. The ANA is doing better. But the fundamental building blocks of a secure society simply don’t exist. Successful joint NATO-ANP raids mean very little when the goal is to have unilateral ANP operations. We’re 12 years into this, and a little more than one year to go, and we still haven’t taken off the training wheels. How you can crow about recent successes just demonstrates that you’re still taking every government-sponsored photo op, speech and press release at face value.
Do you admit that Bush squandered six of those years by abandoning Afghnistan for the more exciting military and occupation adventure into Iraq?
I mean we did not have the working policy or commitment to reversing Taliban momentum and training the the Afghan Army and police until Obama took office and was able to draw forces and hardware down from Iraq.
Seriously, is it your position to quit toward the end of admitted demonstrable progress being made, because the end of 2014 is your drop dead date for the Afghans being ready without perhaps 10,000 foreign special forces providing backup and some trainers mostly for the Air Force and Helicopter training and maintenance etc on military equipment?
I look at all information coming in, good and bad, and that is my point. There is more good than bad in terms of our troops losses, and things like 60,000 Afghan Commandos being put to the test every day are making headway at arresting or killing the Taliban leadership every single day for the past couple of years.
I assume you were refering to this ‘one good news article’ :
I see you have chosen declare me gullible for believing that this one report has readied me to declare victory. I have written nothing of the sort that this means we can declare victory.
I posted this as you can see in post #183 in response to tagos’ declaration that our troops no longer trust the Afghans to go on joint operations with them, when in fact this is one joint operation out of probably two to five a day that our troops go on with Afghan forces for the past two years.
Do you agree with tagos that our troops do not trust the Afghans so they no longer go on joint patrols?
I do not see what not to believe about the AP report, if that is what you meant.
I think it is very plausible that US troops may have taken a different approach to some Afghan forces, particularly in some areas. The article you quoted doesn’t seem to indicate which Afghan forces were involved in the raid. I think US/NATO cooperation with ANA special operations is probably still very tight, but cooperation with, say, a local police district in Helmand might be non-existent.
Why would it? I was responding to tagos’ claim after studying Afghanistan for 37 years that our troops don’t cooperate with any Afghan forces.
The Afghan national security police not requiring ISAF involvment is another sign of a good thing.
ISAF and Afghan forces have greatly weakened (not eliminated) the insurgents ability to conduct major offensives on coalition and Afghan forces. And they have weakened the insurgents’ ability to intimidate and threaten and harm large segments of the population.
Our plan, according to Obama in December 2009, was to ‘clear, hold and build’. The local police may still be in the ‘hold’ stage in some populated areas, but they are holding and ‘building’ has begun. It’s great that the police in many of these areas do not need foreign troops to back them up on a daily basis. That is the plan.
Not so says this report. It is not about ‘Helmand Province’ but it is in reference to the one remaining troubled Provinces, namely Wardak. US Special Forces are doing a great job, working with ANP and these ALP.
When the US Special Forces are not needed (See second cite of AP report below) by the ANP or ALP, that is a good thing, don’t you agree?
Why must you exaggerate such things as alleging I posted this report as some kind of ‘rousing success’?
I posted it in response to your questioning whether US Special Forces were working with Afghan police.
As far as success goes, however, I suggest you re-read the entire report.
And this:
And this:
US Special Forces ‘working themselves out of a job’ including in Wardak Province is good news to me. Would you prefer we stay longer because the Afghans can’t do it themselves?
I notice that I received no challenge to my intended purpose in citing this recent report. That the US Special Forces are in fact working closely with both the Conventional Police Forces and the Local Police Forces.
Wardak has been one tense problem area between the ISAF and the sometimes lunacy of Karzai.
I am aware of what is going on there… and this is not a bad outcome that you have cited.
You need to inform us as to why **‘ending a rocky episode’ **between US Special Forces and Karzai is in your view in some kind of context that makes it bad news.
The Special Forces got kicked out by Karzai. Talk about this being indicative of an orderly transition signifying the maturity of the ANSF or the coming of peace to Wardak Province is at best window dressing, and at worst BS.
It’s like someone getting fired from a job and then claiming that he has bravely chosen to pursue his own initiatives, or whatever. Let’s just be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that getting fired is not a positive development, and having Special Forces kicked out (probably for spurious reasons) of one of the most dangerous areas of the country is not a good-news item.
Wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to simply pay off the local warlords? I read that it costs us something like $15 million to kill a militant. If we simply bribed them, we could get by for a lot less.
Our Special Forces were not kicked out of Wardak province. And there may have been a speed up of ‘the transfer of control in Nirkh district of Wardak province’ from the ALP to the Afghan Interior Ministry, but nowhere in the report does it say the ALP are not ready yet.
And the report also tells us that US Special Forces will continue to monitor the situation in Nirkh District as they continue to oversee the transfer of ALP to full Afghan Government Control.
Also, did you see what I posted earlier?
I don’t know the numbers of police that were transferred in Nirkh District, but I doubt that Karzai’s flare-up over that area was a tiny blip in the entire orderly transition process that has been going on for over a year and will continue as planned into the forseable future.
Do you have a list of enough trustable Warlords that could lead a national securty ooeration that could kill and capture insurgents at the pace that the Afghan Security Forces with ISAF backup, mostly for air support and troop transport, have been doing for the past two years?
Aaaand the five o’clock follies continue. I swear, this is like debating the Iraqi information minister.
The 1230 report I linked to earlier as an assessment of ALP. Let me highlight some assessments:
In plain English, we don’t have enough troops to train all the ALP that we want. Maybe that’s why half of the ALP are not partnered with anyone?
Summary: uh oh.
[quote]
The proliferation of independent non-GIRoA sanctioned militias, which operate outside the VSO/ALP framework, threaten to undermine the legitimacy and progress of the program. Although limited in number, these unauthorized organizations threaten to damage the ALP “brand,” especially when they inappropriately use the ALP name to further their own interests./quote]Summary: uh oh.
Summary: oh, crap.
Summary: at least we’re doing something about it. I await your comments on what a smashing success this CI effort is going to be, and how the ALP are terrific institutions that are smashing the Taliban to pieces and guaranteeing democracy.