The answer in my opinion is nothing with regards to foreign policy. We should have just hardened our national defenses, increased intelligence-gathering operations, leveraged our connections with Saudi Arabia to try to learn more about possible terrorist plots against the country, and…not invade other countries.
Well, I don’t know off the top of my head, except it was in Tora Bora. If I looked at a map though I could probably recall roughly where AQ was and I know how the initial battles played out and why our early strategy failed, so I think I give some insights that would be useful. At a minimum it would be a focus for our various Intel organizations to build some good target lists for where the bombs could be dropped, and I recall one of the early issues was the cave systems were able to defeat some of our bomb missions due to their depth, but that we did have bombs in the inventory that would have been more effective.
Regardless, strategically we simply needed more focus and less reliance on local forces, which turned out to be pretty ineffective, even when they weren’t actively aiding AQ and the Taliban.
Well, there is one factual statement in this otherwise collection of nonsense. However, the poster is far from alone in his ignorance among respondents in this thread.
Stranger
Given your utter and complete failure to make any kind of intelligent criticism of my post, I choose to assume that you consider the ‘one factual statement’ to be ‘everything after the blank line’.
I make this assumption because any other interpretation of your meaning makes you look significantly worse. So I’m doing you a favor!
In hindsight, the initial invasion of Afghanistan was proper after the Taliban’s refusal to hand over Bin Laden or close the training camps. Once the invasion begun, we were fools to let them handle the supposed capture of him at Tora Bora. We should have known that at the outset. Somebody is going to pay off somebody else to let him get away. That seemed, even at the time, like a Benny Hill moment.
Then the “spreading democracy” idea was foolish, even in hindsight. We are using our guys in the military to protect us, not to spread social progress. So, if they are growing opium or denying women the right to vote, those are bad things, but not the job of the United States or its armed forces to correct. Kill the terrorists and come home.
Iraq was just a clusterfuck. I start a thread every few years asking how we were so wrong about that, because I really don’t think that Bush got us into that war on false pretenses. The threads get bogged down in politics. I just wonder how our intelligence was so wrong. Before that war, I thought the United States wore the white hat and told the truth. After that war, we looked, at minimum, like a bunch of buffoons.
You don’t need to do me any favors. Given that the stated presumption is “Put troops on the ground in a position to engage in a ground battle with their army…[in] an area where no civilians, cities, or villages are involved,” as if this is some kind of 18th Century Napoleonic battle between mass infantries speaks to the complete disconnect to modern warfare or how the Taliban and tribal forces operate in Afghanistan. That we’ve engaged the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan for over fifteen years now and less of the country is under control of the official government than any time since 2004 speaks to how poorly any conventional warfare strategy has or will work in Afghanistan, a surprise to exactly no one who read a history book about the Anglo-Afghan Wars or studied the Soviet occupation.
Stranger
Our “intelligence was so wrong” because the Executive Office told the CIA to go find information of weapons of mass destruction and lo-and-behold they found “something” even though the CIA, DIA, UN Monitoring and Verification Commission, and International Atomic Energy Agency all found no evidence indicating that Iraq had engaged in a uranium enrichment program, nuclear weapons development, or an evidence of chemical and biological weapons post-1991 Gulf War. It is unambiguous that Bush, et al, used manufactured evidence and innuendo to stroke fear into getting Congress to vote to invade Iraq as Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell, and others have subsequently admitted to. The US administration had long looked for an excuse for “regime building” in the Middle East in order to establish a permanent military presence there that didn’t depend upon keeping the Saudis satiated, and the furor over the September 11, 2001 attacks (which had absolutely nothing to do with Iraq but Hussain was being sold as a purveyor of global terrorism) plus the posturing of Saddam gave the opportunity to engage in direct action. This is not ambiguous or some kind of conspiracy theory; many of the principals have as much as admitted to this.
Stranger
But there was an official government in 2004, right?
The idea would be to scare them into compliance with a threat of annihilation of that government. Them, personally. The guys who were refusing to cooperate with america in hunting down the terrorist leaders.
The idea of keeping the combat away from population centers would be because we wouldn’t be trying to subjugate the populace - it would be to try and make the leaders play nice. (And flexing military muscles would also have the effect of satisfying the american populace’s desire for revenge.)
But if you insist that Afghanistan wouldn’t so much as put forth an army as we marched towards the city in which their leaders resided, fine - just keep on marching, announcing through megaphones that people should stay in their houses and an they would be unmolested as we made our way to the government buildings (shooting back with force if fired upon.)
Upon having confirmed that the leaders were wallowing in their own piss, at that point follow the plan, telling them politely that they need to play nice or lose their jobs/lives, and then leave.
Our intelligence wasn’t that wrong.
The administration simply cherry-picked the intelligence that supported their case, and ignored everything else.
Ask for 5 or so military volunteers for a mission that will save the lives of thousands of their comrades and many more thousands of innocent civilians. Announce that the volunteers were the masterminds of 9/11. Execute them on TV. Or, fake the executions and give them new identities if you’re squeamish. Tell the American people the problem is solved, the guilty punished, and get re-elected in landslide. Work hard on the the diplomatic options Stranger and others have outlined here. Move away from an oil-based economy.
Your description of this “plan” is so incoherent I can’t really make heads or tails of how you actually intend to accomplish the goal of removing the Taliban or Al-Qaeda beyond that your inspiration for it appears to be drawn from the “Shoot the hostage!” scene from the movie Speed, to which all I can say is that there is a reason we don’t base military strategy and international conflict upon Keanu Reeves quotes.
Stranger
Quit flailing, it makes you look pathetic.
The desired goals of the operation (any operation really) would be:
- Convince the constituency that you’re doing something about the attacks.
- Reduce the chance of further attacks.
- Steal all the oil, destroy all the culture, convert everyone to christianity.
Okay, maybe not the last one.
Putting boots on the ground on its own accomplishes goal 1, and clearing the way for more conventional police work into the region accomplishes (or at least forwards) goal 2. It may not be perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than what we did.
Maybe just nuke the shit out of Tora Bora and call it a day? No TSA, no Patriot Act, no steady stream of flag-draped coffins.
We had good cause to invade Afghanistan. The Taliban regime was harboring and supporting Al Qaeda (along with a lot of terrible things they were doing domestically). We were justified in invading the country and returning the Northern Alliance to power. A lot of people forget that the Northern Alliance was still holding on to territory in Afghanistan in 2001 and was the internationally recognized government. We were not overthrowing the Afghani government; we were restoring it to power over the rest of its country.
I think what went wrong was mostly the Bush administration getting distracted by its desire to fight a different war; one in Iraq. That was an unnecessary and unjustified war. The situation in Iraq when we invaded was no different than it had been for the previous decade. Saddam was an old man and time would have removed him from power. Iraq was not a threat to America.
Coming from someone who has evidenced exactly zero comprehension of the military or political situation of Afghanistan before, during, or after the initial and subsequent American occupation, your personal insults (“pathetic”, “flailing”) go beyond meaningless and actually serve to illustrate that you have no basis whatsoever to render any opinion on the topic, instead resorting to ad hominem to cover for your lack of knowledge. The notion that we should attack the army of an ostensible ally on a hypothetical open battlefield in order to cause Taliban and other insurgents to be “wallowing in their own piss” is so divorced from any kind of reality that there really isn’t an intelligent discussion to be had about it.
For the record, in 2004 was governed by the Afghan Transitional Authority, which operated in cooperation with the US-led NATO coalition, the International Security Assistance Force. After elections, the ATA was replaced by the Hamid Karzai administration which also worked with the ISAF and established the Afghan National Security Forces which were being trained, if often ineffectually, by the coalition members. The United States has, of course, had “boots on the ground”, to the tune of as much as 100,000 people in 2009 to 2012. The US had about the same number of service members in the 2010 timeframe. In neither case did this achieve the “desired goals” that you’ve stated above as even a cursory perusal of recent history will unquestionably demonstrate.
Please do yourself a favor and read a book—even a coloring book might provide some help—on the topic of the US involvement in Afghanistan.
Stranger
Both you and begbert - knock off the sniping.
[/moderating]
As alluded to by Stranger on a Train, the intelligence was “so wrong” because the administration did not want accurate intelligence, only factoids that it could use to bolster their game plan.
Prior to the 2000 election, Bush was at the periphery of a bunch of guys who wanted to find a country that would provide a counterweight to Iran that did not have the baggage that Saudi Arabia brought with it. Wolfowitz wrote a term paper stupidly claiming that if we knocked Hussein out of power, the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms the way that Germany (in the utterly ridiculous world of Wolfowitz’s imagination) had jubilantly welcomed Allied troops at the end of WWII. Getting oil was a would be a nice benefit, (if we did not pay too much attention to how we were going to get Iraq to donate it to the U.S.), but it was not necessarily primary.
The WTC/Pentagon attacks were just a convenient event that pushed up the schedule.
Going into Afghanistan was not stupid, per se, but, of course, with Bush dazzled by the imaginary Iraq “opportunity,” we did it all wrong.
There are some interesting possibilities, that I make no claim to know that they would have worked. Afghanistan is very much a tribal country with various clans governed by a form of councils. An alternative to marching in and demanding a Western style democracy: gather the tribal elders and try to persuade them that we would let them run their own country, providing money and resources to rebuild, as long as they stuck to their own bailiwicks and re-instated the (surprisingly liberal) laws that were on the books before the Soviet intervention and the Wahhabist reaction. There would be the danger of tribal councils giving birth to (more) warlords, but the purse strings might have been able to get more cooperation.
Then if we were not removing all the intelligence officers who were schooled in Western Asia to go waste their time in Iraq, we would have had a better handle on events in Afghanistan so that we would not have been so often surprised at turns of events. (It was always a sad joke, to me, that Bush made a point of saying that we were not going to go into Afghanistan for the purpose of nation building, as he then turned around and attempted to “build” a new Iraqi nation.) We had a well-developed (not perfect) corps of intelligence people in Afghanistan who were summarily pulled out to go play in Iraq–where they tended to be ignored by the idiots in Washington who wanted to run things from their predetermined ivory towers.
To continue responding to the quoted remark/question: In Iraq we started with the nonsense that Wolfowitz dreamed up. Then the boys at the top downplayed the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisting on a smaller invasion force on the grounds that we would not need to hold the country once it was conquered. Then to make sure that only the “good” information made it into the Oval Office, Wolfowitz, supported by Rumsfeld, created the Office of Special Plans, an “intelligence” staff of 18 advertising flacks who did not report to the CIA, the FBI, Army Intelligence, or any other legitimate body, who spent their time going through all the unanalyzed data picked up by actual intelligence officers and passing the “good stuff” on to the White House without it being vetted by actual, trained intelligence personnel.
When people knock our Intelligence groups for failing to understand what we needed to do in Iraq, they are usually wrong. Our Intelligence groups had the correct information, but it was suppressed to publish reports from the Office of Special Plans.
Oh, and the oil? Iraq was so far in debt to the rest of the Gulf States after the Kuwait invasion, that sale of Iraqi oil (that the idiots claimed would pay for their war), was unlikely to be available to pay for anything. (Not that Cheney and his friends did not do what they could to get a piece of it.)
Go into Afghanistan, kill the leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Leave.
How do you do that exactly? Just go into the country and shoot every guy you see with a beard?
Bush’s promise to have the war/reconstruction pay for itself is reminiscent of Trump’s promise to Mexico pay for the wall.
Facts don’t matter, only the narrative that gets them what they want. Another similarity.