Re: President Obama To Announce Details of Afghanistan Strategy On Wednesday
this is incorrect. the endstate in Afghanistan is simple to state and merely complicated to accomplish - an Afghan state chosen by it's people capable of defending itself against Islamist attacks from the Taliban and like/allied elements, such as the Haqqani Network.
And why is that an essential goal for the United States? With Osama Bin Laden dead, fewer than 100 Al-Qaeda fighters left in Afghanistan, and fewer than 300 Al-Qaeda fighters left in Pakistan (these are CIA estimates), the terrorist group is pretty much defunct. The Taliban without Al-Qaeda is merely an unpleasant group. There are plenty of those all over the world, some with a lot more power and influence than the Taliban has.
this is also incorrect. the situation on the ground is entirely dependent on locality - in the areas' where we have applied a proven counterinsurgency strategy (commonly called "the Surge", after the manpower it requires), the turnarounds have been dramatic in some areas, and amazing in others.
Yep, it's the whack-a-mole approach. Of course they disappear when US troops roll in, and pop up somewhere else. But even with the surge we don't have the manpower to police every single part of the country indefinitely.
on the contrary, trend analysis, local measurements of state improvement, and step/tests for military and police professionalization all provide strong metrics that indicate nearness to the goal.
And more important metrics (e.g. the number of casualties - military and civilian) point toward the opposite conclusion. One can always find individual encouraging trends, but looking at the "big picture" it's difficult to make the case that Afghanistan is more secure today than it was a few years ago.
:shrug: again, it depends on where you are. It also depends when you are - this foolish withdraw plan that has us pulling troops out in the middle of the fighting season literally forces the enemy to accept victory.
From what I understand the troops won't start withdrawing until late fall.
as for the facts on the ground, however, they do not indicate at large an insurgency in its' death throes - though in some places that is an accurate depiction. However, when we are speaking of the areas into which the Taliban ran free and into which we surged, we can speak of a general tipping point that has been passed wherein the insurgency is losing. Losing freedom of movement, losing his ability to conduct effective M&I campaigns, etc.
Again, the whack-a-mole approach. And I'm still not seeing why this entire strategy is even necessary for the United States. Let's suppose that we withdrew from Afghanistan tomorrow, and the Taliban overran the country and set up their own government again. (I think this is far from the most likely outcome, but for the sake of argument suppose that it happened). Is that outcome so geopolitically horrible that it's worth the exorbitant cost ($427 billion so far)? I think not. Afghanistan isn't the center of the universe and there are other, far more important problems to address than a nasty rebel group in a mountainous country on the other side of the world.
the only thing he's not losing is he's not losing the populace's active advantage to the Americans. Because we have a commander in chief stupid enough to put out a withdrawal date. Which means that every Afghan Peasant knows that if he sides with the Americans, in two years, they will abandon him and he will be murdered along with his family by an enemy that the American President was too weak to defeat. In order to win active support of the populace (which is the final Big Piece in a counterinsurgency campaign), you have to convince them that you are the winning side. We have the ability to do that, and we did that in Iraq. But apparently we don't want to do that in Afghanistan, because that might piss off our liberal base, and so instead we will take a course that guarantees that the Afghan civilian populace will largely try to sit this one out. They don't wish to side with the Taliban; not just because they are wildly unpopular, but because wherever Americans are, we are winning - and they don't want to side with Americans, because the Americans have already announced that they intend to lose.
And everything in this paragraph is predicated on the assumption that we should A) care who they side with, and B) that we should care SO much that it's worth the $427 billion price tag.
invading Afghanistan will only prove to have been a mistake if we decide to lose.
Even if the goal you set forth in the first sentence was accomplished tomorrow, Afghanistan will still prove to be a horrid mistake...because that goal doesn't begin to justify the costs.
quite the contrary, we owe them quite a bit. that they cannot personally receive does not make our debt any less.
Yes it does. Sending more people to their deaths and spending hundreds of billions of dollars because we don't want to admit we've made a mistake is a tragic waste of resources and lives.
we do here as well. the American decision to lose in Vietnam immeasurably harmed this nation
How so? 15 years later the Cold War ended, Vietnam is a rapidly developing nation today, and we have a good relationship with them on both the government and business side.
the decision on our part to withdraw will be a decision to leave an entire populace to the tender mercies of hyper-violent, xenophobic, murderous Islamist Fundamentalists. We will be choosing to abandon the innocent to the murderer and rapist. We will be choosing to let pscyhos pour acid on little girls faces for the crime of wishing to know how to read, or listen to music. We owe it to posterity not to be the kind of people who would do that.
This is an emotional appeal that fails to acknowledge the fact that we can't have everything we want. There are lots of brutal regimes, and lots of people living in nasty conditions (even aside from the human rights violations). How about we take the money we're spending on Afghanistan and use it to fight AIDS or malaria in Africa then? We'll save a lot more lives, we'll improve the standard of living a lot more than we would fighting the Taliban, and we won't make as many enemies in the process.
:lol: well, if its not on CNN who cares, right? ****it!
We can care about it as human beings without caring about it from the strategic perspective of the US government. And yes, if it's not on CNN there's a pretty good chance it isn't relevant to the US.
awesome idea. and how do you plan to pull this off when the doctors you send are kidnapped and have their throats slit by a pscyhotic paranoid Islamist government?
A couple possibilities:
1) Send them in anyway, and accept the fact that a few of them will probably die. Far better than the thousands of casualties occurring today, especially when you factor in the lives they save.
2) Send them somewhere other than Afghanistan, with better security but equally severe health problems.
Healthcare, sanitation, better farming methodology, education; all these are important - and all of them are part of our long term strategy. But Security Comes First Or The Rest Will Come Not At All.
Actually, those things would improve security. One reason the Afghan people don't especially trust the US is because many of them see us as just another military faction that has been dropping bombs on them and shooting them. They've dealt with that for decades. If we approached it from a more humanitarian perspective, people would naturally trust us more than if they only know that we're killing them. And who can blame them?
so maybe it depends where on the Border you did your time.
