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Originally Posted by BBC
The Taliban expressed defiance in the face of Mr Obama's commitment to send additional forces.
A Taliban commander, who did not give his name but is part of the ruling council in Wardak province, told the BBC there could be no peace talks until all foreign troops had left Afghanistan. He said: "Obama is sending more troops to Afghanistan and that means more Americans will die. With just a handful of resources we can cause them even more casualties and deaths." |
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Originally Posted by Cylon Baby
 Well that ^ convinces me we've learned nothing from Vietnam, never mind the previous attempts to conquer Afghanistan.
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Originally Posted by The Rain Dog
What I've come to realise in the last decade or more is that the only thing the US military learned from Vietnam was to not let non-embeded independent media into their warzone so they could report what was actually going on and sway public opinion against their efforts.
If the Battle of Fallujah had been covered like the Tet Offensive was, I doubt the Iraq war would have continued in the same way, or that there'd even be an Afghanistan war today. |
| THE US military is funding a massive protection racket in Afghanistan, indirectly paying tens of millions of dollars to warlords, corrupt public officials and the Taliban to ensure safe passage of its supply convoys throughout the country, according to congressional investigators. The security arrangements, part of a $US2.16 billion ($A2.44 billion) transport contract, violate laws on the use of private contractors, as well as Defence Department regulations. They also ''dramatically undermine'' larger US objectives of curtailing corruption and strengthening effective governance in Afghanistan, a report released yesterday said. The report describes a Defence Department that is well aware that some of the money paid to contractors winds up in the hands of warlords and insurgents. The report said military logisticians were focused on getting supplies where they were needed and had ''virtually no understanding of how security is actually provided'' for the truck convoys that transport more than 70 per cent of all goods and materials used by US troops. Alarms raised by prime trucking contractors were met by the military ''with indifference and inaction'', the report said. ''The findings of this report range from sobering to shocking,'' Democrat congressman John Tierney wrote in an introduction to the 79-page report, Warlord, Inc, Extortion and Corruption Along the US Supply Chain in Afghanistan. The report comes as the number of US casualties is rising in the Afghan war, and public and congressional support is declining. |
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Originally Posted by Khaunshar
There never was anything to win in Afghanistan in the first place. Its too big, rugged and divided a country to control or rule even by local government, the US and allies are not capable of controlling it effectively, and our armies are not trained or experienced at this sort of slow meatgrinder.
However, there has always been something to win in Afghanistan for a lot of people not necessarily caring about the original reasoning of the war, which has always been, and quite obviously so, the main drive behind the continuos effort in the 'stan. A lot of companies, both mercenaries like blackwater and arms manufacturer like lockheed etc. stand to win, as they get paid for the goods and services at quite amazing rates. Remember the poorly armored humvees? You can only get away with this during wartime, when the army needs every vehicle they can get. Also, the political gain of a war to the Bush administration cannot be dismissed. Here was a chance to force the focus of the american public to foreign lands, away from a dismantling of their civil liberties, economy and basic rights. Wars, as Bismarck said in the early 20th century and probably hundreds of emperors, kings and chancellors before him, are a great distraction. Also, let us not forget that the USA in 2001 was out for blood at large, and the public wanted revenge. They were given exactly what they wanted, which in no small part paid off during re-election of the worst president in, if not history, at least a long time. So, while the war in afghanistan isnt possible to win in a military sense, it has served its purpose, made some people rich, and others dead. Its just that apparently people are still deluded as to why it was started in the first place. |
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Originally Posted by Bluelouboyle
"...and lets not forget its now been discovered to be sitting on a quite staggering amount of mineral wealth. "
Raindog: What does that have to do with the last 9 years? |
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Originally Posted by Khaunshar
The problem I have with that reasoning is that the perpetrators of 9/11 were at first not known after the attacks, later on turned out being from all over the place, trained somewhere else, and partially from nations allied to the USA.
Afghanistan as target was a knee-jerk reaction without proper intel, because everyone put their weight behind the idea almost immediately. And I simply claim there were a multitude of reasons that had little to do with 9/11. |
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Originally Posted by Bluelouboyle
Yt, are you saying 9/11 was NOT a provocation?! And there was a formal decleration from congress. I hope you're not one of these people who say the US brought 9/11 on itself.
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Originally Posted by Bluelouboyle
No. Iraq obviously had nothing to do with 9/11. Nor did the Taliban. But the Taliban were giving shelter to Bin Laden and the rest of Al-Queda. The people responsible for 9/11 were in Afghanistan, even if they were not the government.
I don't see why there is any doubt about this. |
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Originally Posted by Shan
I seem to have a memory at the time that the government of Afghanistan at the time of the World Trade Center Attack (ie the Taliban) offered (or at least said they'd consider) to hand over the accused perpetrators (Al Qaeda) in their country if they were actually showed some evidence first. Which I don't think was forthcoming at the time and followed by the allied invasion instead.
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Originally Posted by Shan
There was also something along the lines of representatives of the Taliban government being invited over to Texas (it might have even been GW's ranch) to discussed an oil pipeline before 2001. Anyone else remember that?
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Originally Posted by Bluelouboyle
No. Iraq obviously had nothing to do with 9/11. Nor did the Taliban. But the Taliban were giving shelter to Bin Laden and the rest of Al-Queda. The people responsible for 9/11 were in Afghanistan, even if they were not the government.
I don't see why there is any doubt about this. |
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Originally Posted by yt
They wanted him tried in an objective court and not in the U.S., as I recall. Probably googlable.
I believe it is a natural gas pipeline and, yeah, shock of shocks. |
| SPECIAL FORCES have begun a manhunt for an Afghan soldier who killed three British colleagues inside a patrol base in Helmand province. The soldier shot dead a British Army officer in his sleeping quarters in the early hours of Tuesday. Two members of the Royal Gurkha Rifles, one a British-born junior officer and the other a Nepalese Gurkha, were also killed by the Afghan, who fired a machinegun and a rocket-propelled grenade. Four others were wounded. The incident prompted an apology from the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai. It was echoed by the top US and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, who warned against letting the deaths damage the NATO-Afghan alliance. ''We have sacrificed greatly together, and we must ensure that the trust between our forces remains solid in order to defeat our common enemies,'' he said. The killings happened at a British patrol base in Nahr-e Saraj, just eight months after five British soldiers were shot dead and several seriously wounded by an Afghan police officer, also in Helmand province. The Afghan soldier who carried out the latest attack fled the base. A British general said the killer, a non-commissioned officer holding the rank of sergeant or higher, may have been ''turned'' by the Taliban. A message on the Taliban website said the Afghan soldier had joined the insurgency. The incident has raised concerns about the Western strategy for Afghanistan, which is based on training the Afghan National Army until its members can secure the country themselves. Professor Michael Clarke, the director of the Royal United Services Institute, said: ''The fact that he [the killer] was a senior NCO is a worry - he was not a raw recruit just out of basic training, he was a senior man, someone who was trusted and respected.'' One British Army source said: ''It massively undermines our exit strategy. Without a functioning Afghan police and army there is no way we can begin reducing our forces.'' Questions have been raised about the loyalty of rank-and-file Afghan soldiers, who receive only two months of basic training and often go absent without leave. Last month a Pentagon audit found NATO commanders had exaggerated the quality of many of the Afghan units in the rush to expand the army's numbers. NATO said yesterday that four members of its force in southern Afghanistan had been killed by an improvised explosive device, while a fifth foreign soldier died following a small-arms attack. It also said that three of its soldiers, an Afghan police officer and five civilians were killed in a car bomb and machinegun attack on police headquarters in the southern city of Kandahar late on Tuesday night. |
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Originally Posted by Dr Vivisector
So what's supposed to happen when we do leave Afganistan. Clearly the national government never really had a chance. Do we simply withdraw and use Predators against the terrorist camps that will spring up like mushrooms after it rains?
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| The Soviets couldn't tame Afganistan with their tactics, and we've demonstrated we can't with ours. Who's next? |
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Originally Posted by MoonBaseNick
I would not be surprised if that idea is used.
Maybe China will give it a shot. |
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Originally Posted by MoonBaseNick
Maybe China will give it a shot.
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| War logs show troops gave cleaned-up accounts of incident in which they killed 19 civilians Brevity is the hallmark of military reporting, but even by those standards the description of one disastrous event is remarkably short: "The patrol returned to base." It started with a suicide bomb. On 4 March 2007 a convoy of US marines, who arrived in Afghanistan three weeks earlier, were hit by an explosives-rigged minivan outside the city of Jalalabad. The marines made a frenzied escape, opening fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way – teenage girls in fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded. None of this, however, was captured in the initial military account, written by the marines themselves. It simply says that, simultaneous to the suicide explosion, "the patrol received small arms fire from three directions". And the subsequent rampage as they drove away – which would later be the subject of a 17-day military inquiry and a 12,000-page report – is captured in five words: "The patrol returned to JAF [Jalalabad air field]." The soldiers' initial concern, it appears, was a wounded marine – their only casualty. Forty-nine minutes after the initial bombing, they requested a "routine medevac" for a private with "shrapnel wounds to the arm". He was evacuated to safety. An hour later came the first news of the trail of blood they left behind. A local government official told the marines there were "28 LN WIA", which in layman's terms means 28 Afghan civilians had been wounded. This later transpired to be a gross underestimate. It was not the last one. Two hours later Americans returned to the scene of the bombing to conduct an "exploitation of the blast site with pictures/grid cords as well as debriefing ANP leadership on scene". Journalists on the spot gave a more detailed account. They said angry marines tore their cameras from their hands, insisting they delete the pictures they had taken of bullet-pocked vehicles on the roadside. Rahmat Gul, a freelance photographer working for the Associated Press, said two soldiers and a translator came up to him and asked: "Why are you taking pictures? You don't have permission." Then they deleted his photographs. Later, Gul said, one of the soldiers came up to him and raised his arm, as if to hit him. Taqiullah Taqi, a reporter for the private Tolo TV channel, said the Americans told him through a translator: "Delete them, or we will delete you." But the Americans could not prevent anger surging through the local community. In those months, as the fighting escalated, concern about careless, trigger-happy Americans was rising in Afghanistan. The previous May, riots had spread across Kabul after a US military truck with faulty brakes careered into traffic, killing one man. The logs report that nine hours after the shooting, the governor of Nangarhar province appealed to the marines to stay at home. "He did not want more CF [coalition forces] in the area due to public hostility." At about the same time the Americans stopped issuing internal reports. "Event closed at 1349Z" it read. But that was not the end of the affair. Demonstrations ran through the streets of Jalalabad over the following days, the logs report, in which protesters broke windows and blocked roads. A month later, in April 2007, the Afghan Human Rights Commission published a report into the shooting which said the victims included a 16-year-old newlywed girl carrying a bundle of grass and a 75-year-old man walking back from the shops. The report said the marines may have come under fire from one source straight after the suicide bomb but challenged the assertion they suffered a "complex ambush from several directions". By then a US army colonel had admitted to the Afghans that the shootings were a "terrible, terrible mistake" and "a stain on our honour". He paid $2,000 to the families of each victim. The special forces commander in Afghanistan, Major General Francis Kearney, ordered the marines to pull the 120-man company out of the country, an unprecedented step. But there would be no punishment. The marines, angered by the criticism of their unit by an army commander, held their own inquiry into the shootings and issued their findings a year later. It exonerated the marines. The troops "acted appropriately and in accordance with the rules of engagement … in response to a complex attack," said Major General Samuel Helland, the commander of marine forces in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The inquiry lasted 17 days and heard from 50 witnesses, including Afghans who testified by videolink. But it did not hear from the four soldiers who fired their weapons, because they had not been granted immunity from prosecution. The findings of the court of inquiry, which ran to 12,000 pages, were not released. No criminal charges were brought against any officer, although some did receive an "administrative reprimand". As the war logs might have put it: "Event closed". |
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Originally Posted by Mr.Crowley
I think the people in the west have got to realise that there is not much thay can do about that. The only thing that can get rid of the Taliban is the afghan people themselves.
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Originally Posted by Dr Vivisector
Then I suppose we'll have to have a modern day version of the Evacuation of Saigon, complete with post-American-presence slaughter of the innocent.
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Originally Posted by Jacob Singer
You keep questioning our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, and constantly ask us if we have solutions, but never seem to offer any strategies or solutions of your own. Do you feel we invaded the country to keep allegedly adulterous women from having their noses cut off? Are we fighting the the Taliban because of their archaic social practices or their aggression against the U.S.? Did we invade the country to set them straight on human rights abuses or to destroy an alleged terrorist infrastructure?
I guess what I'm asking is, how long do YOU think we need to stay there, what measures do YOU think we need to establish to curb human rights abuses, when if ever do YOU see us pulling American troops out of harm's way there? EDIT: I'm not trying to be confrontational, I'm genuinely curious as to how many American lives you feel we need to spend in Afghanistan to right these wrongs. |
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Originally Posted by Dr Vivisector
So, Jacob...I think it's a lost cause.
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Originally Posted by Jacob Singer
Welcome to the general lefty consensus of 2002. Gung Ho we weren't.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but you seem to harbor a kind of fatalistic glee about these huge mistakes of international hubris. Apparently at least we can agree now, after thousands of deaths and loss of unrecordable treasure, that it has indeed been a "lost cause". |
