When I saw this thread, the first thing I said was “Paper Tiger, Sleeping Dragon.”
That’s all. I have nothing contructive to say. Interesting thread. Go back to your normal lives.
Actually, Gen. Aideed died a few years ago. His son has inherited his father’s influence and still leads his faction. Curiously enough, this was the son who was in active service in the US Marines in 1993.
I suppose we’re going to find out exactly how tough the United States is any day now.
Right now, as many as a thousand al-Qaeda gunmen and their close associates are holed up in Kunduz. This is exactly the situation many of us were hoping the U.S. could orchestrate.
It is at this point that America and the UK has a choice. We can either negotiate with the Taliban and others for the release of these people, the very ones who helped make the attacks of 9/11 possible. Or, we can go in there and try to fight them toe to toe, like men, on the defenders’ terms. Or…
…We can try to guarantee their fruitless, unmartyred deaths, ostensibly at the hands of their Muslim brethren within the town of Kunduz itself.
If that last eventuality plays out, every pissant warlord, dictator, and frontman with a lick of sense will be quaking in their riding boots, because what it means is a return to the bad-old-days when the United States had the power and the inclination to raise masses of people to knock their countries over with a wave of the hand.
And the message would be that when you’re a paper tiger in a paper jungle, you’re still the King of the Jungle.
Credit where credit is due Sofa King. The US has bombed the crap out of all visible targets. But its the Afghans on the ground who forced back the Taleban, in a ground offensive. Right now US forces are deployed on the ground in twos and threes. Don’t go stealing the credit off the people who lost their lives on the ground.
When was that? The US public’s disinterest in anything over the horizon means the “bad ole days” as you described them never happened.
What are we interested in here? A lasting solution or a macho display of nationalistic muscle?
The public shows a strong tendency to not like their citizens killed by the thousands over things that do not directly affect them. Even with this tendency, the US still has the reputation of being a big bully.
Bitchslapping every nation that we have a difference of opinion with does not make us the opposite of a paper tiger. We do not want or need ground troops flooding Afghanistan. Not now. Especially not to prove some misguided idea of “whose the baddest country out there.”
From Chapter VII of the same work:
I rather suspect that the NA hit the Taleban as they were pulling out of their positions to avoid the bombing. The presence of the NA forced the Taliban to mass their troops which gave the US a splendid target. The NA could not have succeeded without the US nor would the Taliban have been exposed without the NA.
I first heard the label “paper tiger” applied to the U. S. at the start of the Vietnam era–by Red China; and perhaps Mao created the term.
If he did, his memory must have been short: He had been a librarian and, handling as much paper as a librarian does, he must have received quite a few “paper cuts.” They are miserabele to get–although not as dangerous as a tiger’s claws or teeth. It’s a pity Mao didn’t live to see what happened in Destert Storm.
Its a good suspicion, its true, and I won’t attack your opinion for merely be a suspicion until we are all a bit more in the know. I guess we shall wait for
historians to tell us what happened.
Big Girl - there is nothing macho about any of this. Clausewitz said famously that war is an extention of politics (I paraphrase). I personally think that’s less true now than when he said it, but the essence remains the same: if a country makes a threat, it has to be prepared to back up that threat. My position is that, with the exception of Kosovo, the strategy employed by the US of using only airpower is ineffectual. Even if I’m wrong, then its certainly no short term solution. But I don’t think I’m wrong - even Afghanistan is being won by the Northern Alliance, on the ground, with US air support. Having a sizeable force of friendly troops on the ground to help is different to what we saw in the Balkans.
In this particular case, we didn’t need troops on the ground; there was already a whole army there who’d been trying for years to do what we would’ve done…They just needed a little help…
I think the Mogadishu Factor mentioned earlier is the wrong lesson from Somolia…Pressure to pull out of Somolia did not come because Americans died, it came because they died in an ineptly run PR campaign at the hands of the people they were supposed to be helping…It was more an act of spite than squeamishness, directed at the people of Somolia (F***'em, let’em starve) and the Administration (If you can’t do it right, DON’T DO IT)…
But I think the reluctance to use ground troops since was more a reflection of Clinton then Somolia…We didn’t really like it when he sent troops around, because that’s not what he was hired for…It was years after he got into office before we grudgingly let him send troops to Bosnia, under the condition they only stay a year…of course, that was years ago, and they are still there, but that’s not the point…
Just as a clarification for Dave Stewart, this sort of war-by-proxy used to be the bread-and-butter of the CIA during the tenure of Alan Dulles. Using foreign insurgents to do our bidding is sort of the point of what I was trying to say.
According to former CIA agent John Stockwell, the U.S. overthrew twenty democratically elected governments in the 1950s and 1960s, usually by offering material aid and military advice to insurgent groups like the Northern Alliance.
Yes, the Northern Alliance did most of the physical work on the ground, but what we’ve seen here was orchestrated by the United States and Great Britain, above the board this time but still reminiscent of the “bad-old-days” when the United States was willing to overthrow the government of any country, democracy or otherwise, if it suited its interests.
The message is clear to me: the United States is royally pissed off, and is again willing and able to project its power through the use of foreign peoples on the ground in other countries. That should give governments of all stripes around the world pause, because if an authoritarian theocracy like the Taliban can be knocked over in a matter of months, everyone is vulnerable to some extent.
The more I think about this, the more I think it is correct. The success thus far in the war against the Taleban should give countries with internal problems (such as standing rebel armies - a sizeable problem!) pause, because it means the US can provide the rebels with massive air support.
The list of countries antagonistic to the US, though, with these sort of problems can’t be too long.
Sudan is certainly one. Iraq might be one, depending upon the extent to which Saddam has wiped out the Kurds in the north and the Shi’ites in the south (I don’t know). Syria might be one: again, I don’t know. Libya, North Korea and Cuba aren’t. North Korea especially has nothing to fear as a result of the Afghan example, because it has massive chemical and biological weapons depositories along the South Korean border. No American president is going to bomb these from the air, nor risk US troops being exposed to these sort of weapons.
Ranging out further, to less adversarial but tetchy world actors, China would have seen the Mogadishu Factor at play here and would think that the US would support Taiwan with air power, but not ground troops. The Afghan example would give China pause, perhaps, because Taiwan has ground forces to resist an invasion (very unlikely anyway, I know, because of China’s littoral restrictions). Russia doesn’t seem to fall into the category of adversary anymore, at all, after Dubya’s Texas BBQ.
Guys, I’m not sure the sleeping giant has changed that much. What has caused this particular response is an outlandish attack on the US at home and public support for all and anything that Bush cares to do in response.
One need only go back to 8/11 to be reminded of this Administrations radical lack of interest in anything non-oil related – and that includes the Israeli-PA issue. There was no political will, little or no regard for international affairs. I hope I don’t overstate the case.
In addition, the US public has repeatedly demonstrated indifference to Foreign Policy and a sharp distain for body bags resulting from actions they didn’t particularly understand or care about. No electoral votes in dead Americans in normal circumstances.
Things may have changed but I don’t think we can really say just now with any conviction. 9/11 was an exceptional event (one hopes) generating an exceptional public reaction and military-political response.
The key, as ever, will be whether any future military action can be spun to engender votes, if it don’t, it don’t fly. IMHO, that crucial dynamic hasn’t changed.
That has often been the problem in the past for Administrations and why the US may be perceived as a ‘paper tiger’ – the ethical or any other value in most foreign actions isn’t apparent so the public won’t countenance – or vote for a politician - bringing home dead Americans in pursuit of a (possibly) questionable agenda… It’s got to have credibility.
Well put, London Calling.
What the US really needs is a Foreign Legion. Loads of foreigners living the good life in the states, and no-one to bother if the body bags start piling up in the event of war.
Those French are damn smart.