It’s a great question. You’ll notice a + in the bottom right of people’s posts. If you want to respond to multiple posters in one post: click the + to “add” them up and them when you respond, all the posts you + will be in one response. I’m not a great or frequent poster, so if this explanation is not great, someone better than me will hopefully show you.
I like to the OP and what you want to debate. This board is mean, but take it in stride and learn the real rules and unwritten rules and it gets better.
The way I see it, the General is saying that reducing the conflict to a low-level one fought mainly by the localss is what we’re going to have to accept as the new definition of “victory”.
Thanks, I appreciate it, and all will always be taken in stride.
Anyway, I was writing the following before I saw your post. Some things take a bit of summary to make it clear what an overbearing concern with ‘rules’ and ‘tradition’ is all about.
I know of about half a dozen issues that have been set up for debate here… So why the confusion?
On 03-10-2013 at 11:17 AM John Mace mocked General John Allen’s statement, “Yep, victory” and then cited this report, “Taliban attack trends: Never mind; WASHINGTON (AP)”, and continued the mocking with, “I’d hate to see what defeat looks like.”
At 10:39 PM that evening, I wrote, “I don’t see what the point was here, since the quote from General John Allen in no way said that things like this were not happening or would happen.”
But Today, John Mace 03-11-2013 06:26 PM, says that, “We still don’t understand what the heck you want to debate.”
I want to debate current events, based upon as much facts as possible, and by actually citing what people like General John Allen said to start with.
I contested quite thoroughly that General Allen’s use of the word ‘victory’ as in ‘this is what victory looks like’, is not limited to the end of all hostilities after conventional WWII type warfare between nation states, but John Mace wandered off from that ‘debate’; and then asks, “We still don’t understand what the heck you want to debate.”
You are correct that this conflict will go on for a long time as a “low-level one fought mainly by the locals”, but I would like to add that this objective is not anything new. I cited President Obama’s speech at West Point earlier today. I will post it again to show that turning this over to the locals was the path chosen all along.
I think that is very clear as to the military objective that was the result of what the Rightwingers called Obama’s dithering upon General McChrystal’s recomendations in July 0f 2009.
In this context, I think any fair minded American would see that General Allens’s choice of inspirational words that were directed to Afghan troops who are expected to be transitioned to taking over ‘all’ security this summer was fair, honest and proper.
No one is saying that it will be over this summer. But it is acknowledgment that our troops and our coalition and the Afghans have stepped up to do what Obama set out for all of them to do.
This is what victory looks like.
Considering no one is saying this is over and it will be a cakewalk anytime soon… But as bad as it was in 2008, saying this looks, like Victory doesn’t disturb me at all.
I’ll give it a go. The 200,000 ‘army’ with its 33% annual churn makes the ARVN look like the Roman Legions. What morale it has will collapse at the first shove. Most are loyal primarily to tribe and clan and will switch sides when their clan leaders switch, which this being Afghanistan and all, they will as soon as they think something is in it for them.
A large but unknown % of the army and police are Taliban anyway and more will become so as what little check on the northern warlords rampant violence, greed and corruption packs up and goes home.
Meanwhile the ordinary people, yearning for peace, stability and justice will grow in sympathy for the Taliban and hark back to the ‘good old days’ when women were kept in their place and the local police didn’t spend their time raping little boys and shaking them down.
US Special Forces will not be able to prop up the Northern Alliance warlords on their own. Nor will the political will to have them do so be present, the endgame for the US being the same as for Vietnam - get out and pray that a decent interval passes before the whole deck of cards collapses.
Now will they stop an increasing wave of suicide bombers in major cities from killing with near impunity.
Within 18 months Karzai and his alliance of corrupt monsters and looters will look at the slow motion collapse of the army and government, take the what remains of the national treasury and relocate to their globe-spanning empire of mansions and secret bank accounts.
In a sense I can see what Obama did in 2009; he basically said ‘we’ll do everything we can to give ‘our side’ of the indiginous population a fighting chance, but we’re out of here in 2012/13 and they’ll have to take their chance then’.
Agreed. Especially as ‘our side’ is nothing more than us pointing at a group of hated warlords (who want us out as well). Here’s an interesting Brookings Institute Survey on happiness in Afghanistan. This survey did not survey Taliban controlled areas and women under-responded (but as politically and socially they do not count thenit doesn’t matter).
What some people fail to understand is that this is a medieval patriarchal, tribal society totally in thrall to the hardest of hard line visions of Islam. They are not secular liberals yearning for women’s rights. They are not even Saudi Arabian in their ‘liberal’ Islam let alone Indonesia.
The people who count - men and especially the Clan and Tribal Leaders who control the vote - have attitudes and desires much more in line with the Taliban. The Taliban are working with the grain of the country from a solid Pashtun base.
‘Our’ side, outside of urban areas, is not. ‘Our’ side, in the form of Karzai and his allies, have no interest in Afghanistan other than looting it dry. They are not even trying to build national unity or whatever. In the end ‘our side’ remains the northern warlords. They are simply grabbing whatever isn’t nailed down and stashing it away against the inevitable day it all goes tits up.
No amount of wishful thinking or happy-clappy headcounts of a substantially paper army will change that.
These people make the rotating door governments of South Vietnam in the final years look like the Roosevelt administrations.
It is about time for John Mace’s game to be over. The use of ‘we’ in the quip, “we don’t know” will no longer be appropriate. Tagos has put together a complete thought and a reasonable and applicable opinion together on why it is likely that General John Allen and 400,000 Afghans would be wrong to even believe that they will ever see victory by being able to hold off the Taliban after 2014 when all but ten to twenty thousand of foreign forces will be withdrawn.
With regard to the following; that is quite a fair observation, and I would like to point out that no one, including myself would say that this is not “GOING TO BE MESSY”. The major point is that foriegn troops will not be doing the dying for the Afghans to achieve self-protection from the vast majority of Afghans that do not want a return to government control.
But BrokenBriton does demonstrate the better sense of what to do by Obama versus, the Republican Bush Guard of such Senators as John McCain and Lindsay Graham. Does anyone remember the Republicans bitching about Obama demanding the US Military have an exit strategy and gave his expectation that the surge forces he announced in December 2009 would beging to be withdrawn by July 2011 because his objective was that Afghan’s needed to step up because the US and our allies were not going to be able to fight this fight for the Afghans indefinetyly. The Republcans swore up and down that setting a timeline for withdrawal would demoralize the good Afghans and give the Taliban a huge boost in morale.
Republicans are beginning to eat crow on that score big time. Bush had a policy called “Endless Drift” by Jt Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen. Obama certainly put an end to endless drift in Afghanistan. And I for one think that was a smart move.
That being said, I and I appreciate writers who think in complete thoughts and sentences, and state their case without slurs and personal insults and complaints.
Unfortunately, right now I have to get on the road headed for a meeting at 10:00
But I will challenge several of the points that Tagos has made, such as the first paragraph about the Afghan Army’s loyalty and switching sides.
I will attempt to dismiss the “tribal argument” by suggesting we consider the ‘modernized and westernized’ era when Afghanistan was under Soviet Influence up until the Cold War victory that Reagan inflicted upon the Evil Empire when the Mujahadeen were given free reign over Afghanistan as the Soviets hastily departed. Women In Kabul and other cities wore western dress, they watched western movies, women and men were engineers and doctors.
One argument for success as seen as a return to that era of Afghanistan past would be that since 2002 there are now close to three million girls in Afghan Schools. Under Taliban rule there were none. That is about three million families across Afghanistan who are sending their daughters alongside their sons to schools that are not probably more advanced that some schools in Texas with regard to science and the arts.
I will point out that Karzai is not running for office in the next election, which I believe takes place in 2014… I’ll have to check that. But the US Military has been planning for expecting the Afghan Security Forces to be fully in the lead for that election - so as to give the impression that the foreign forces have nothing to do with it other than keeping people safe to vote. So if Karzai packs up to head for the French Riviera then there is likely to be a ‘voted’ in government that will replace him.
I will gladly get back to this with further points and some depth into the above points hopefully this evening.
Pretty much, except that “everything we can” was really “everything that was politically possible for Obama to do”. We could have done much, much more had there been the political will to do so. Not that any of that “much, much more” would have a made much difference in the long run, IMHO.
The tribalism of Afghanistan is a fact that cannot be hand-waved away. Afghanistan was never ‘modernised’. The Soviet regime was just like ours. Small urban enclaves in a hostile medieval sea.
However many million women are in schools is irrelevant. This isn’t a democracy. They have no social, political or cultural weight.
Their votes? Don’t make me laugh. This isn’t a democracy. Elections are rigged and women’s voted unimportant.
And don’t come back with hand-waving - this is Great Debates. Come back with cite backed reasoned arguments informed by a knowledge of Afghan history and culture. Given your profound lack of knowledge of the Vietnam War, given your misguided waving around of army numbers and women in schools, I doubt you have this.
So I will take a minute to point out that I did not claim that the existence of Afghanistan’s tribalism should be hand-waved away. That is not what I wrote, because historical and societal reality cannot be hand waved away and it will always be part of the reality in Afghanistan. The history and reality of tribalism, however does not negate that the people of Afghanistan have capacity and precedent to rise above tribalism and seek to join the modern civilized world.
So I said this morning that what I would do later this evening was (look right there above) that “**I will attempt to dismiss the “tribal argument” by suggesting we consider the ‘modernized and westernized’ era” **.
I bolded it for emphasis this time since apparently Tagos" did not catch what I actually wrote.
You see dismissing the “tribal argument” which Tagos has made, is not dismissing that tribalism exists in Afghanistan.
Can we be clear on that?
And I will provide further information on the extent of modernized Afghanistan in the 1950s and 1960s later this evening but for now you may look at this:
I beg to differ that modernized Afghans were confined to small enclaves in the cities.
Just food for thought until later
Women are not close to where they need to be but strides are being made with nealry 3 million girls now attending schools where there were close to none in 2001.
A sea change in Afghanistan’s politics / For the first time, a woman is head of a province
I don’t need to watch a youtube video in order to know that the literacy rate in Afghanistan is < 30%. You can talk about all the modernization you want, but if 2/3 of the population can’t read, there isn’t much else to say. This is no modern society.
Things may be slightly better now, but in 2011, 86% of the ANSF could not read, write or recognize numbers. Link.
You don’t know what life expectancy was in the 60’s. You’re number is from one year. Here’s another.
You cited low life expectancy and literacy and (someone else) that women can’t vote, ect. It’s possible that can change, right? Or do you think this is a lost cause?
They Don’t? On what authority do you declare that.
My point was that there is a ‘precedent’ that Afghans have shown the capacity for being modern and far from tribalism. So unless you can show that the photos are fake, you have no argument that a precedent does not exist as I have argued.
First, those pictures mean absolutely nothing. They are anecdotes.
Secondly, I was making a joke about the life expectancy. Look at the people in those pictures. You don’t need to know what the life expectancy is or was to know that most of them are dead.
I think it takes a long time to change those things. At least a generation or two. We won’t be around long enough to protect Karzai and his cronies until that happens.
Your point was a Google dump. That doesn’t count as a “point” around here. What tagos said was absolutely correct-- aside from a minority of the urban elite, Afghanistan was and is a tribal society.