The U.S. military has suggested that the use of drones will work in Afghanistan in dealing with insurgents. I have my doubts. To me it is little different than Germans bombing England during WWII, or the U.S. using B52s during Vietnam. It will give the population something impersonal to rally against.
Yes, it will protect our boys from harm while allowing us to inflict death and punishment on the enemy, but doesn’t it create something of a terminator for the local population to hate?
I don’t mean this to sound too snarky (a little snarky, yes), but have you even been paying attention to how much we’ve used unmanned aerial vehicles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere? Have you noticed a lot of hate directed at the drones?
From what I see, more of the hate is directed at manned aircraft and ground troops.
How visible/noticeable are the drones? Your point somewhat assumes that they would form a ubiquitous part of the landscape or have some sort of easily observable presence. OK, so a sudden explosion is a bit hard to miss, but I thought most of the time they fly high enough such that they were virtually silent and are small enough so as to be hard to see without looking for them. (Note that aside from what I know from the Raid on Bungling Bay, I don’t know much about them and could be absurdly wrong.)
Regardless, your point does have some merit, if there is an unknown fear up in the sky. But how weighty it is depends on how that fear is communicated amongst the various villages and areas of the region.
When the drones blew up an innocent wedding party killing families on the biggest day of their lives, it created a lifetime of hate.
They are working, and are extremely effective and cost-efficient (for the USA). The major problem with your WWII comparison is that our modern drones carry very little payload compared to those old bombers, so there’s no carpet bombing, and they fly much lower and slower, and have very precise munitions. They also have video cameras mounted on them so the operator half a world away can play their deadly video game.
I think they would do wonders if not used in towns.
Take that recent firefight where we had men in a valley guarding a pass and their guys were on the hills. Something that could come in and pick them off without risking a helicopter full of men would have turned that battle around. Even if the drones just return coordinate data and images, they can aim the ground munitions.
In towns, the problem is taliban being billeted by civilians, and there you really need commando raids, or ways to draw them out.
Sure they can work patrolling the rugged landscape and killing terrorists and whatnot. They are very effective tactical weapons. The question is how do they fit into our overall strategy (such as it is) for winning (whatever that means) in Afghanistan?
The problem with not killing civilians is that the Taliban will lure civilians into areas populated by Taliban soldiers. They tell civilians to come for fuel or other supplies when they know they are at risk for being bombed by the US. The US bombs them and ends up killing some of the civilians coming for the fuel.
Also, even if the US does not kill any civilians, the Taliban will say that civilians were killed anyway.
Then best the US can do is tell the Afghan population to associate with the Taliban at their own risk.
As for the drones, they are a lot better than maned air crafts. Like **FoieGrasIsEvil ** said, they are more precise and more cost efficient than older air crafts. And obviously they are safer since no US soldiers are being killed when one of them goes down.
I thought we were there to fight Al Queda. They were the people who brought down the towers, not the Taliban. Are you for another round of nation building ? It does not work well, you know. Once we leave the Taliban will finish taking over the country. They have been very successful so far.The Taliban is not a threat to America. They have no designs on attacking America. That is Al Queda.
The Taliban supports, funds, and harbors Al Qaeda members. I did not think there was any dispute about that.
Actually we are starting to decouple them. The administration sees the Taliban as a local phenomenon with no designs of killing Americans or attacking America. But Al Queda only has about 100 soldiers in Afghanistan. If you see them as the same, you have to enter an enormously expensive war for a decade or so in Afghanistan which we probably can not win.
The best idea would be to negotiate with the Taliban, since they will win anyway, and have them keep Al Queda at bay. If they agree to that ,we can go home. We have plenty of soldiers in Iraq if we suddenly need them. Staying there and fighting is a mistake.
Drones are a lazy way to fight a war. You may observe a place for long enough to think that you know who is in there, but you really do not know who you are killing. Makes enemies.
There are enough personal feuds and bias’ on the ground from the locals that the informants can’t be trusted.
A nice, clean, sanitized war is a fools dream. We already tried the ‘bombing into the stone age’ thing, didn’t work in Vietnam and won’t work in Afganistan. Put the boots on the ground or get out.
Afganistan is actually Pakistan’s problem, yet they have refused to deal with the outlaw northern areas of their own country. It is time that they did. Or they will fall too. Make that clear to Pakistan and see an improvement in the situation. Until then Pakistan is quite willing to let us bear the risks and pay the costs.
And that is who we are fighting in Afganistan, we are fighting the people from the northern tribal territories of Pakistan.
Show me a cite where the administration does not consider the Taliban a threat to America.
As for negotiating, do you really think we can trust the Taliban to keep Al Qaeda at bay? Where does this belief come from?
Al Qaeda is very clear in it’s mission to destroy the US. Osama has been talking about it since the 1990’s. The only reason Al Qaeda has been able to survive for so long is because of the support it gets from the Taliban. Both organizations need to be destroyed for the safety of America. Negotiating isn’t going to cut it.
Very true. The foreign minister of Pakistan was on Charlie Rose last week and said that Pakistan wants to fight the Taliban, but that they can’t do it on their own, and the US is not trusting them enough to provide help. Others have said that Pakistan knows exactly how to get rid of the Taliban but their government has been too corrupted by the Taliban to take them on. I have no idea where the truth lies in this.
All I know is that our military leadership has a very complicated task ahead of them.
No. Al Qaeda isn’t restricted to areas the Taliban has any control over. And it’s more of a brand name than an organization; trying to destroy it by force is impractical.
Team Obama: Afghan Taliban Not a Threat to U.S. | HuffPost The World Post Bingo. The admin knows they can not fight a decade in Afghanistan. We can not afford it. we can not win it. The Taliban has been fighting endlessly for decades. They have a leadership that has had great experience in fighting on their turf. Their soldiers have been fighting their whole lives. They know the mountains and have had generations to build tunnels and stash arms. Our soldiers don’t even know what they are there for. It must look like we are protecting wacky weed and opium farms. The soldiers will find drugs too handy to escape a horrible reality. It is ugly and will get uglier.
From the same place that produced the Anbar Awakening in Iraq, which resulted in a major reduction in violence towards Americans and Iraqi civilians. All we had to do was pay millions to the Sunnis who were previously aligned with Al Qaeda and planting the IEDs that killed many Americans. Now they are aligned with us, and not so many IEDs are going off.
We will do the same in Afghanistan; pay our enemies to be our friends. All is forgiven, just don’t blow us up anymore.
Drones are only as good as the intelligence we get to point them in the right direction. Our intel comes to us from the Afghan narco-warlords currently on our side there, and it’s very likely that they’re using it for score settling, taking rivals out etc. It’s impossible to “win” anything using drones but it’s impossible to win by any other method either and the drones give us the ability to withdraw troops and still look like we’re doing something constructive there to the folks back home.
They have drug money. I am not sure that will work now. I see huge drug wars whoever wins. There is just too damn much money in the drug trade for it to melt away. The Taliban stopped drugs before. This time it will be more difficult.
The Afghan opium trade generated $4 billion in exports in 2007, with about one quarter going to the farmers. We spend that every two weeks in Iraq. Why don’t we just buy all the raw opium? That would cut off revenue to the Taliban, plus we would win a significant battle in the War on Drugs. Spread it around, buy off the farmers, warlords and traffickers; kill two birds with one stone.
Often we say the battle is for the hearts and minds of the people. How does shooting people with drones accomplish that? The military always lies about how well their weapons work. They can not be trusted this time either. Innocent civilians will die as we use them.