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Taliban joins Bush's growing coalition of "Surge" supporters

post #1 of 7
1/12/07 at 4:45pm
Thread Starter 
9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq are evidently enduring components of the Bush administration's marathon three-card-monty session. In the beginning, as now, the Afghanistan front pays the price for escalating Iraq:

From The Baltimore Sun:

As a last-ditch effort, President Bush is expected to announce this week the dispatch of thousands of additional troops to Iraq as a stopgap measure, an order that Pentagon officials say would strain the Army and Marine Corps as they struggle to man both wars.

Already, a U.S. Army infantry battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks in order to deploy to Iraq.

According to Army Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Tata and other senior U.S. commanders here, that will happen just as the Taliban is expected to unleash a major campaign to cut the vital road between Kabul and Kandahar. The official said the Taliban intend to seize Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city and the place where the group was organized in the 1990s.

"We anticipate significant events there next spring," said Tata.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nat...tack-headlines
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post #2 of 7
1/12/07 at 6:34pm
I think the chances of the Taliban seizing Kandahar are zero to none. What they intend to do and what they can actually accomplish are vastly different.

It might be a good thing if the Taliban foolishly decide to fight straight on because of reduced Western troops. They will get there asses kicked instead of effectively sticking to their best tactics; hit-and-run attacks, suicide bombs and IEDs.
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post #3 of 7
1/12/07 at 10:08pm
The ironic thing is that things in Afghanistan seem to be in somewhat better shape, since the US is actually leaving the bulk of the work there to other countries.
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post #4 of 7
1/12/07 at 11:26pm
Another reason Afghanistan is more stable is that the capitol, Kabul, is mostly secure and fairly safe and the Taliban is mostly stuck doing its attacks out in the hinterland of the country.

I think things would be better for Iraq if the same thing could be said for it's capitol, Baghdad.
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post #5 of 7
1/12/07 at 11:58pm
Who says that Afghanistan is doing better? The Prime Minister can't leave the capital and the rest of the country is being run by either warlords or the Taliban. Afghani women are increasingly losing the "freedoms" they achieved after the invasion and anyone trying to teach non-approved coursework in Taliban-controlled is dragged out of their homes, tortured and killed. So yeah, Afghanistan is much better off.
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post #6 of 7
1/13/07 at 12:33am
Quote:
Originally Posted by donde
Who says that Afghanistan is doing better? The Prime Minister can't leave the capital and the rest of the country is being run by either warlords or the Taliban. Afghani women are increasingly losing the "freedoms" they achieved after the invasion and anyone trying to teach non-approved coursework in Taliban-controlled is dragged out of their homes, tortured and killed. So yeah, Afghanistan is much better off.
Why did you put scare quotes around "freedoms"? Aren't you hurting your own arguement that they are actually losing something of value?
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post #7 of 7
1/13/07 at 7:43am
Quote:
Originally Posted by donde
Who says that Afghanistan is doing better? The Prime Minister can't leave the capital and the rest of the country is being run by either warlords or the Taliban. Afghani women are increasingly losing the "freedoms" they achieved after the invasion and anyone trying to teach non-approved coursework in Taliban-controlled is dragged out of their homes, tortured and killed. So yeah, Afghanistan is much better off.
In better shape than Iraq, is what I'm saying. It's more stable. There's no civil war. The soldiery there isn't just bulldozing its way through innocent civilians and retroactively labelling them "insurgents". The people they're fighting are legitimate outsiders, from Pakistan, who aren't well liked by the populace, as opposed to Iraq, where the natives themselves are the enemy. And the Afghanistan campaign features actual negotiation tactics.

I'm not a supporter of the Afghanistan war. Like I said, I'm still not convinced it will make any difference in the long run, and I'm certainly not trying to apologize for the conservos. But that's the thing: Bush and America have pretty much jack-all to do with what successes have been achieved in Afghanistan, which is why you rarely see them pointing to it to distract people from Iraq. If people paid too much attention to Afghanistan they'd notice that an international coalition works at least slightly better than trying to bend reality with your mind through sheer willpower.
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