The War in Afghanistan

We are in agreement here. Also, mind stopping by that christian thread and respond to the Mormon Polygamy vs. Gay Marriage infographic?

I agree with both Paul and Kucinich on this. I agree with Kucinich on everything else.

Every military engagement can be defined by its detractors in exactly the same way; these pacifists generally cite the least popular elements of the war and demand a cessation for this excuse or that along the lines that "It's time to come home" despite the goals not being met. Moreover, those demanding the cessation often totally ignore the reasoning for it. This is not a new phenomena by any means; every American war and military action had its detractors and in some cases these vocal minority pacifists often drowned out the majority supporters; case in point Vietnam. Even farther back, during the Civil War, loud opponents of the war, in the north, screamed for its conclusion before its goals were achieved. The U.S. withdrawal from the Vietnam theater, for example, caused incalculable harm to the South Vietnamese and yet their plight was largely ignored by the detractors. Examining our current Mideast operations, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, demonstrated areas of success are clear. More to the point, just three years ago, no less a figure than then Senator Obama, opined loudly that the surge of troops into Iraq would not achieve its desired end. Yet today that surge is counted as the singular element that achieved a peace in Iraq and is counted today as a victory for coalition goals in Iraq. Turning to Afghanistan, we have faced ups and downs since our engagement began against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and one of the primary drivers for the war, as a fulcrum against the Al Qaeda terror camps, has been largely achieved. Yet the larger driver, to defeat the Taliban, remains illusive. "Time to come home?" I think that's a question for the soldiers fighting the war and the generals directing the fight, rather for politicians looking for votes.

I wrote that in response to first post in this thread.


Initially, our foreign policy is hardly one of interventionism but instead homeland security. Secondly, our engagement of terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lesser engagement of terrorism elements around the world (example: Yemen), was prompted by repeated terror attacks on United States assets as a reactionary measure. Lastly, your over-the-top rhetoric of "quagmire" validates my earlier thesis on the pacifists screaming for surrender; not hardly surprising that "quagmire" was the maxim of the Kent State radicals/Democrats urging an end to the Vietnam engagement.

If the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were in reaction to terrorism, (specifically 9/11 as claimed by both prior and current administrations), then what was the rationale for drawing up the agenda in 1999, releasing their think tank publications in 2000, and drawing up the detailed plans as early as January 2001?


From reading any reliable history of the era, the student unrest was a product of a mandatory draft to fight an unpopular war which was sold on the basis of a lie (the Gulf of Tonkin "incident"... which never happened). It is entirely understandable that students (such as those at Kent State) would get pissy if their lives were put on the line for no valid or justifiable reason. As a result, the powers-that-be learned an important lesson: If you want to fight an unpopular, or unnecessary war, don't instigate a draft.. most especially in current times. Woe betide a government which drags students away from their computers, videogames, iPhones, Spring Break, frat parties, or whatever.

If there was a draft in the 2000s, the resulting civil unrest would have (most likely) made the 1970s Vietnam protests look like a picnic in the park.

I have no doubt you could find "plans," drawn up "agenda," and think tank "publications" on every conceivable issue, both pro and con, for whatever you cared to justify or condemn. But in reference to our war in (not "against" as you misleadingly claim above) Afghanistan and Iraq, but rather against terrorism, as theaters in the larger War on Terrorism, as approved by members of the Senate and Congress, in October 2002, as a result of a large bipartisan majority in the United States Congress that specifically authorized the president to use military force, domestically or worldwide, against elements of terrorism wherever found, to achieve homeland security.


Specific to your latter comments above, I have no doubt that our bastions of liberalism in ivy academia contain far too many faux American youth unwilling to defend their nation in a draft; instead the residents therein at progressive academies of alleged learning choosing to let others fight and if necessary die within our all-volunteer military, to defend the liberal want to burn the flag and ingest cannabis. That is, as others say, a given; does not, however, make it right or honorable.

So hypocrisy is cool with you, got it.

It's really not rocketscience: American soldiers in Saudi Arabia provoked 9/11, committed by 15 saudi-arabs.

The US knows that relationship and logic now and has therefore withdrawn the US-troops from Saudi-Arabia and wants to retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan as well, although not without leaving stable puppet-regimes behind.

Mormons were denied polygamy on moral grounds. Mormons deny gay marriage on moral grounds. Mormons want it both ways. Mormons are hypocrites. What's not to get?

Our men and women in Afghanistan are fighting for our freedoms, allegedly. Your faith should have the freedom to have polygamous marriage. That should not be denied on moral grounds. Your faith also shouldn't try to deny gays the freedom to marry each other. It is especially hypocritical when that denial is based on alleged moral grounds.


CONNECTION TO THIS THREAD ESTABLISHED!

Allegedly I said. Way to dodge the rest of it.

There were civilians killed during the Civil War here in this nation; yet the larger goals of uniting the nation and ending slavery were preserved. Should we have ended the Civil War simply because collateral death of civilians? Asked another way, the unfortunate civilian death in a war zone does not negate the larger goal(s) of the war.

The Civil War is not comparable to the War in Afghanistan other than they are both wars that involve the United States.

Once again the point goes over BR's head without notice!

The example being advanced was one of collateral civilian deaths, that while tragic, do not stand in the way of the larger imperative of the war.

The scope and purpose of the war must come into qusetion when debating the "larger imperative" of it. You miss the point.

The wholesale killing of civilians in the war in Afghanistan and Iraq was both a byproduct, and a essential element to the strategy of "shock and awe". Pentagon war planners are well aware how the development of modern warfare and weaponry have drastically altered the ratio of combatants:civilians killed in warfare. To put it very approximately, in medieval times, most warfare casualties were soldiers killed in battle. By WW1, the combatant:civilian ratio was approximately 1:1, and today, the ratio can reach 1:20, or even 1:100, for example the Israeli attacks against Southern Lebanon and Gaza respectively.

The trend is towards an even more lopsided casualty ratio, especially with the development of remote controlled drones and other weapons in which the delivery can be accomplished from the safety of an armchair thousands of miles from the "combat" zone. The nature of the target, on the other hand, is only determined by intelligence on the ground, as we have seen repeatedly in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, in which the usual victims are non-combatants.

The hardline neo-conservative think tank PNAC in their publication "Rebuilding America's Defenses" even recommended the "development of biological weapons targeting "specific ethnic genotypes"". Such a (psychopathic) mindset highlights the rapid narrowing of the difference between "collateral" and "deliberate" as warfare and weapons evolve.

I am unsure of your source for these allegations but they seem wildly inflated and not at all based on historical references. For example "in medieval times" as you cite above, the warfare casualties were greatly eclipsed by civilian casualties as armies moved about the countryside and often spread communicable diseases that severely impacted civilians in the war zones; today this effect of war is almost negated! Moreover, your WWI ratio of "1:1" doesn't even take into account (1) the secondary effect of chemical weapons (ex: mustard gas) used on the battlefield that became an even greater threat to civilians or (2) the hundreds of thousands of mines, used for the first time, that greatly impacted civilians. Lastly, I would like to see an authoritative source for the "1:100" example you alluded to for the Israeli attacks? Where did this come from?

Hmm, the 'imperative' of the Afghan War?

Originally it was in response to 9/11: to deny 'Al Queda' the use of the country as an operating base, and to remove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Both I agreed with, and both have arguably been accomplished.

How are we now supposed to 'defeat' the Taliban (a political idea with no territory to take or leadership to kill) with traditional military force (occupy land/kill people)? Particularly now that they are based mostly in Pakistan, our 'ally' (at least on paper)?

Besides, it's quite possible long term that we are drawing down in Iraq and Afghanistan to prepare for the next phase of the PNAC plan: attacking/invading Iran so we'll have unopposed control of the Gulf oil routes. So we'll still have the 'Forever War' in effect, and you'll be able to continue posting your NeoCon talking points.

I would disagree with this. Pillaging entire villages and killing all males and raping women to death was a very common practice at the time.

When considering invading armies of those times rape and piliage was standard operating proceedure. You didn't want them producing any more male children to come after you later and it was a good excuse for the mayhem. War is and always has been ugly ( usually very ugly ).

The war in Afghanistan (alongside the wars against Iraq, Iran and other mideast nations) was planned long before 9/11. The planners even admitted, in the late 1990s, that it would take an event on the scale of 9/11 to generate public/congressional support for such a war agenda. The Afghanistan and Iraq war plans were amongst the first items on the G.W. Bush admin's discussion list, in January 2001, within days of the Bush staff moving inti the White House, and some 9 months prior to 9/11.

When the Taliban requested evidence of Bin Laden's involvement with the 9/11 attacks, and possible locations where (OBL) could be found, in response to the Bush Administration's demand for the Taliban to go after OBL, this evidence was denied. Furthermore, the FBI has admitted publicly that even though (OBL) is on their most wanted list in connection with other attacks, "we (the FBI) has no hard evidence connecting OBL with the attacks of 9/11. Furthermore, the DoJ has not indicted OBL in connection with 9/11. Furthermore, the CIA has said that there is "no connection between OBL's (considerable) financial wealth and funding for the 9/11 attacks.

The connection between 9/11 and Afghanistan is hype: The Taliban/Afghanistan was the patsy nation. If the US Government's explanation/fairytale/conspiracy yarn of 9/11 represents reality, then there is a far greater connection between 9/11 and Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan and a host of other nations, rather than Afghanistan. Since the Taliban had already been negatively highlighted in the media via widespread coverage of the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhist statues only a few months prior, the "9/11" justification was an easy sell, corralling and stoking the public's distrust, then rage and anger, to support a war against an already tainted enemy. Involvement or otherwise, the public wanted revenge, and the Taliban was an incredibly easy sell.


The "Forever War" was the essence of the PNAC/neocon agenda, one only has to read their repertoire of published literature. "Rebuilding America's Defenses being one out of many dozens of essays pointing towards such desires". One "evil empire" (Communism and the Soviet Bloc) was neatly replaced by another (the Muslim world), on the strength of one catalyzing, most convenient and "timely" event. Since the huge majority within the DC neocon estabishment which stacked the 2001 Bush administration are hardline Zionist, dual US-Israeli citizens, many of whom have publicly admitted racist/hateful attitudes against Arabs and Muslims in general, and even Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu has also admitted that "9/11 was very good for Israel"..... it was an easy sell to get Americans to follow the same attitude, especially when bombarded with a similar battery of racist sentiments from a compliant, cowardly, milksop corporate media.

The usual reponse to airing these facts, is to invoke ad hominems. Protecting the comfort zone is priority #1. 2010, 1933.

Wars are mostly conducted because of ressources or trade-routes, it's no different with Afghanistan and Iraq.

Iraq is obvious because of the massive amounts of oil. Afghanistan was not so obvious for the public but for decades US-mining-firms and -scientists already know that Afghanistan is not only a possible route for the oil from the kaspic sea but also itself full of untapped ressources.

In former times an empire would have conquered the countries and made them part of their empire, but it would have forced it to conquer all the countries in between too, in modern times that is not necessary anymore, due to modern communication, military bases, puppet-regimes, decades-long-contracts an empire can control an empire and enjoy its rewards without occupying every inch of the territory.

Everything else is just opium for the masses.

Nightcrawler

You know it's all quite simple: people in Afghanistan and Iraq are the same as people all over. They want the same things. They want security for their families, a decent standard of living - to feel they are progressing.

The answer to these problems is simple: give them that. Or stop preventing them.

If the US and UK really wanted the Afghanis to have these things - and the Iraqis - then they would have them already and there would be no trouble.

Example: the Afghani army are not yet capable of defending their country. Why? Because there is nothing to defend.....the Taleban offer some sort of hope albeit a false one. If the country had been built up and developed as Bush and Blair promised (of course they were lying through their teeth) then 10 years down the road Afghanistan would be on the road to recovery and the army would be fighting to defend it with their lives.

Iraq the same: under Saddam it had a Western infrastructure and was very advanced - now it is rubble.

Why could they not just remove Saddam and leave the infrastructure? Build it up to a Dubai-like State?

Answer: because they don't want to: both countries are merely a bulwark and a strategic pawn. The West do not care in the least about the people.

That's why they will lose.

Ask the defense contractors' lobby. Manufacturing disposable weapons is most profitable when wars are being waged( like, duh). However,when the main focus of the theater moves to Iran, Afghanistan will probably go on the back burner, media wise... but that doesn't necessarily mean that the bombings and drone attacks there will stop.

It was, however, comical to see Obama/Biden trying to take credit for the success won so far in that nation, particularly when they both opposed the surge that GWB proposed and what eventually led to the success achieved!

What baffles me the most about all this is the near complete ignorance of what led to 9/11, espescially by americans, they often reacted in surprise. Al-Qaeeda and other groups tried to bomb the WTC a few years before 9/11.

The thing is that it all started with Carter and was then even more enthusiastically continued with Reagan... behind them Kissinger was playing the ropes and some others... the idea was to defeat the russian empire through a policy of "thousand cuts" that would bleed them out.

They tried to lure the russians into invading Afghanistan and there they wanted to give them their "Vietnam". But how should that happen, who should the deadly "Vietcong" be?

Muslims should be radicalised to join the independence-fight against the russians, the US together with Saudi-Arabia and Pakistan cooked this up, a simple to understand version of islamistic ideology encouraging the war of independence was drawn and put in millions of text-books by the americans and distributed in Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to prepare the children for future recruitement. That ideology was pretty simple: Armed unbelievers are occupying islamic territory and oppressing muslims, it's a religious duty to free the muslims and to defeat and throw out the unbelieving occupying army. Every muslim dying in that fight is a martyr who comes directly into paradise, all sins forgiven by God.

Additionally the US and Saudi-Arabia worked out a deal to raise funds to recruit potential warriors from the whole islamic world, hundreds of thousands were eventually gathered in Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan and trained by Pakistan's secret agency ISI and the CIA in guerillia-warfare and terrorism, and of course equipped with weapons, usually smallweapons that should look like they could have come from soviet depots (that was important, there shouldn't be a direct link to the US), but eventually they equipped them with stinger-rockets.

That was the birth of Alqaeeda, as well as multiple other mujahedeen-organizations, that together achieved to bring down the russian empire in Afghanistan (and eventually fell into a civilwar).

That was in the 70's and 80's, the russian empire was defeated, it withdrew its army from Afghanistan.

But what happened in the 90's? The US seeing the russian empire defeated and broken wanted to reap the benefits of being the sole superpower and trying to get more control over the middle-east and its ressources (that was the grand prize so to speak), remember Kissinger's saying "Oil is much too vital and important to leave it under the control of arabs".. The US began to station troops in the middle-east, building military-bases in Kuweit, in the other small gulfstates and in Saudi-Arabia!

There was of course an official explanation for the ignorant masses: The threat of Saddam Hussein, the ex-ally of the US!

So what did happen? An empire and it's army of unbelievers left Afghanistan and a few years later another empire and it's army of unbelievers set up their bases in the middle-east. The same ideology that the US so heavily encouraged, supported and indoctrinated in order to defeat the russian empire saw a new enemy, the US itself.

Alqaeeda wanted to start the guerillia-warfare in Saudi-Arabia and the other gulfstates, but the regimes there said no and kept them out... so they attacked US-interests everywhere else.. (with 9/11 as the climax) in order to lure them into Afghanistan where they could fight the US-empire...

Nightcrawler

Just to add:


I guess that you, like 99% of the US public, have never heard of EMAD SALEM. Wiki link here.


The same folk behind George W. Bush's administration convinced the Nixon and Reagan administrations from the late 1960s through to the 1980s to inflate the threat to the US from the Soviets way out of all proportion. All manner of baseless propaganda was employed, and it really worked a treat in scaring ther living daylights of of the US public to support the war industry.


The Afghanistan socialist government around the turn of the decade (1979-1980) was relatively progressive, in comparison to the Taliban and the current regime, especially in the area of womens' rights and education, but laws governing land ownership were also being reformed and this was not going down well with the Islamist warlords who were fiercely opposed to these reforms, making the governance of Afghanistan all but impossible. In frustration the Afghanistan PDPA Government called for military assistance from the USSR no less than 4 times... all these calls were refused, before finally the Soviets invaded.


Yes.


To add:

When the "Soviet Bloc" disintegrated under the weight of its own inertia and inefficiency (an extremist ideology never sits well with people, and can only be enforced via a police state), the US and the West were left without a boogeyman to sell to their own public. The Clinton Administration reacted to the sudden "threat vacuum" by closing military bases overseas and at home, and the relentless growth of the US military budget came to a screeching halt. These cuts in big-government spending enraged the aforementioned "Friedmanesque" hardliners, who were in the political backwater in the 1990s.

Marshaling their resources into think-tanks such as PNAC, they outlined their agenda for redrawing the map on the Middle East in essays such as "Rebuilding America's Defenses". Many members of these ultra-rightwing think-tanks were selected to form the Bush Admin. in 2001, a large proportion being dual US-Israeli citizens, some of whom already had a track-record of bias (even hatred) against Arabs and Muslims.

The 9/11 attack was their "New Pearl Harbor" dream ticket, and the rest is, as they say, history. The worst ever attack on US soil was never even investigated.

Al Qaeda: The base (or even "the toilet"), in Arabic. A western term referring to the CIA database of Mujahedin fighters who took delivery of US state of the art weapons technology, such as hand-held heat-seaking missile launchers, which took out Soviet helicopters as if they were ducks at a fairground. The Mujahadin took delivery of $10s of billions worth of weapons, training, logistic support and cash directly (but covertly) from the US taxpayer, as a result of behind the scenes dealings with Central Intelligence.

Its about the US getting pissy with a bunch of folk who:

(a) wiped out Afghanistan's opium crop .... up until the Taliban, Afghanistan was the world's largest producer. This hurt the bottom lines of some household names and financial institution who/which are not popularly linked with big-time drug dealing.

(b) refused to cooperate with major players in the oil industry (Unocal et al) which had been planning to build oil pipelines from the Caspian, via Afghanistan, to Indian Ocean oil terminals.

(c) after the 9/11 attacks, offered to arrest and capture Osama bin Laden, which would have caused all manner of problems for the Bush Administration, and

(d) represented the most easily vilifiable group of a religious faith that the hardline neocons in DC had collectively targeted in 1999 as regards their plan to "redraw the map of the middle east".

Looks like the Heroin smuggling is coming to light in the MSM:


BBC