I think if it was a World War it would take place between more than just India and Russia…
I don’t see how a war between these two could avoid becoming a world war. Every one starts with just two…
Yeah, great, we’ll save the minorities persecuted by the Taliban by carpet-bombing the country. That’ll fix everything.
People talk about making the Taliban or Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein submit by reducing their nations to rubble. Unfortunately, this is not very effective, efficient or expedient (is that redundant?). Since our problem is not with the nation but with the nation’s leadership, why not target the leadership directly?
Of course, assasinating the leaders of other countries isn’t very nice, but neither is murdering thousands of citizens in the name of saving them from their leadership.
It just bothers me that many people (not necessarily here on the SDMB, just in the government and the media and my jingoistic next-door neighbor) are gung-ho about (or at least seriously considering) waging all-out war in these cases, but the thought of taking out the source of the problem is taboo. We’d rather kill thousands of soldiers and civilians than the despot behind the problem.
Now, I’m not sure if a few well-placed bullets would cause the Taliban to crumble and a happy, USA-friendly regime take its place or not. Probably not. But since we’re struggling to figure out what to do about the nasty Taliban, I thought I’d make a suggestion.
msmith really doesn’t care about Afghanistan. The Taliban are hardly a huge military power and it’s highly unlikely that they will be in a position to threaten India or Russia or whoever. Besides, India and Russia are big enough to take care of themselves.
Other than moral outrage, why should America involve ourselves in Afghanistan? They don’t export anything of significance to the US and they aren’t exactly a huge market for American products.
As people like to point out, America is not the “World Cop”. While we like to promote stability throughout the world, we hardly have the resources to enforce the peace every time there’s a conflict.
Afghanistan has had little wars for centuries. Expecting America to go in and provide some kind of McDonalds Drive-thru political solution is short sighted at best.
Sooo…it doesn’t bother you that many people are suffering?
I would say go in and take out the Taliban too…just make sure you KNOW that their successors won’t be worse. That’s sometimes the problem with assassination-make sure you aren’t getting someone worse in the bargain.
By way of balance, I thought I’d post a link to this article on MSNBC about how the Taliban is wearing out its welcome among the average Afghani. Their increasingly devout, draconian policies are being somewhat openly ignored, and they’ve apparently been forced to make silent concessions (the article says that Taliban law forbids women to go out in public unaccompanied by a man, but that women often do anyway with little apparent fear of punishment).
This article, also on MSNBC, describes the increasing resentment among the farming community due to the Taliban’s ban on growing poppies for opium. Poppies are one of the most reliable cash crops in Afghanistan for their hardiness, and their cultivation supported a lot of people who are now out of work. The lack of foreign income is also hurting the Afghanistan economy greatly.
I would say using dollar diplomacy would be the best bet. Offer a large amount of money to drive out the current goverment, and replaces it with a at least temporary goverment supervised democracy.
Lack of foreign income? Well, according to the LA Times, they’ve solved that problem: we’ve just given them $43 million.
Well Bush is a big fan of faith-based anti-drug efforts, right, Mekhazzio? :rolleyes:
I cannot possibly express the depths of my contempt for any administration that would pay one red cent to the Taliban, no matter the excuse.
Oh. My. God.
:eek:
I think Bush has lost every shred of credibility he had left-if there was any.
Dude, I hope this hits the media, and people scream at him. That’s just sick.
That just about sums up how I feel. I think Dubya may turn out to be worse than his father.
As I said in another thread (too lazy to look it up) the Taliban is a faith-based government and we would all do well to remember that. Bush and his buddies appear to be very willing to impose, by whatever means, their own particular set of values on the rest of us.
Sure it bothers me in a distant, CNN, sucks to be those people kind of way. But people are always suffering somewhere.
Your suggestion of assassination is asinine.
First of all, America is not in the assassination business.
Second of all, even if we were, why should we remove the Taliban? They aren’t a threat to America or our allies.
Third of all, just because you don’t agree with a countries politics, that’s not an excuse to assassinate their leadership.
By your standards, their behaviour is reprehensible.
By my standards, their behaviour is reprehensible.
By their standards, our behaviour is reprehensible.
Suppose for a second that Afghanistan were the huge great superpower and the US the little guy. How would you feel then about Afghanistan stomping out US atrocities?
When the Afghani people are ready for change, they will effect change. They may ask for help and we should be ready to assist if so. But we can’t unilaterally decide that we don’t like the way that another country conducts its own internal affairs. To interfere without their say-so is simply unacceptable. That is why international law prevents it.
It’ll sort itself out. Already some of the Taleban laws are being ignored, as referenced above. Such an unstable government cannot last if left alone. Provoking the people however via an act of aggression will only cause a seige mentality and ultimately allow the status quo to continue longer.
They’re adults. They can make their own decisions. They’ll come to you when they’re good and ready.
pan
Really? The way it sorted itself out in Germany when they started marking Jews and homosexuals and Gipsies?
The articles I linked said that the Taliban doesn’t have the unanimous support of the population. They said nothing about how far the Taliban was willing to go to retain power. Cultural relativism is a fine justification for tolerating differences between cultures, but the point of this thread is to answer the question about when differences become intolerable.
If you had, you would know that the $43 million is for famine relief and will be channeled through the U.N. and other international relief agencies. Now, I’m not so naive as to think that some of this money won’t end up in the wrong hands, but the implication that the U.S. is now handing bags of money to the Taliban (and therefore supporting their indefensible policies) is just plain wrong.
On another note, do those of you who support military action against the Taliban also believe we should take military action against, say, the Sudan or even China for their equally horrific human rights violations?
Sure, I read the story. Next time the Bush administration wants to do something about starvation in the world’s most hideously repressive nation, maybe Colin Powell should send food instead of cash, eh?
Not to belittle your point, but I think the US would have been slower to get involved if Germany wasn’t also busy conquering Europe. We sure as hell shouldn’t be supporting the Taliban, but as msmith537 said they aren’t a threat to us either.
I didn’t realize you subscribe to the Sam Kinison theory of famine relief–“just give them a sandwich and a truck so they can move out of the desert. We have deserts in America but nobody lives there.” (with my apologies to Sam for mangling what was a very funny bit…)
I’m not going to respond to the substance of your post because I don’t really see a debate here–you view an attempt to provide famine relief to the Afghani people as support of the Taliban while I see it as a humanitarian effort towards an oppressed citizenry, albeit one that is not likely to have its intended effect. I suppose the debate may be the more general question of whether economic sanctions or the withholding of aid to a particular country are warranted to put political pressure on an oppressive government even though the effects of such policies are felt by the citizens. The cases that come to mind are Cuba, Iraq, and South Africa. I’m not sure where I stand on the more general question, but I don’t see the U.S. actions in this instance to be reprehensible or as ratification of the Taliban’s policies.
I was all set to post a ‘yea, right’ kind of thing, based on the link provided in this thread, but decided to check out other sources. I found :this link to CNN that gives substance to the point KSO makes, - the 43 mil specifically is designated as ‘humanitarian aid’. It is not, as is reported in the other link, a ‘reward for not growing poppies’. The aid is to be funneled through the UN, and specifically consists of:
So, seems that the US is trying to give specific aid to those citizens of Afghan, w/o rewarding their leadership.
Other things that are possible would involve giving aid directly to the refugee camps, offering to take in refugees etc.