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Afghanistan gains will be lost quickly after drawdown, U.S. intelligence (WAPO)

Saddam Hussein was NEVER EVER capable of producing a mushroom cloud over any US city. But hey, the fear-mongering worked, Bush got his dirty war and to this day we still have people right here defending it. Amazing!
 
annata said:
Afghanistan gains will be lost quickly after drawdown, U.S. intelligence estimate warns - The Washington Post

Afganistan, and some US "officials dispute (are in denial) this. ( see link)
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Was there any doubt that nation building would not work? That forcing democracy on a people that did not want it was the wrong thing to do. We had 14 tribes of the Northern Alliance on our side as they drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan with the help of our air power and their troops on the ground. This was before we put in the troops, all we had as a few SF and paramilitary advisors on the ground. Then nation building began along with all the troops we put into Afghanistan to enforce it.

This is not what our 14 tribe allies wanted. They wanted to return to tribal government and their own areas of Afghanistan they had ruled prior to the Taliban trying to take over all of Afghanistan and giving sanctuaries and safe haven to UBL and AQ. They just wanted to return to their way of life and government they had know for over a thousand years. But that was not the U.S. idea. Today, we only retain the loyalty of a couple of the 14 tribes that were first loyal to us. This is what happens when we force our ideals and ways of governing on a people who have no wish to live under our idea of how they should govern themselves. The right of self determination was taken from them in our attempt to nation build.

Afghanistan is lost, only those in government do not know it yet. Iraq has only a 50-50 chance of succeeding. Such is life and the world of geopolitics when a foreign power tries to force something on a people that they do not want.
 
Montecresto said:
Saddam Hussein was NEVER EVER capable of producing a mushroom cloud over any US city. But hey, the fear-mongering worked, Bush got his dirty war and to this day we still have people right here defending it. Amazing!
Click to expand...
Yep...that George Bush guy...
"We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country. Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."
"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
"The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons..."
 
joG said:
You really think so? The US is much clearer than most countries. But just think of Obama's drone attacks, NSA surveillance, "all options on the table" or "red line" statements.
I got the prediction pretty well (though I had not expected the escalation of drone strikes to the extent they came) and I am sure the specialists around the world were not surprised. But the public was surprised and that is costing us.
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Obama is clear as mud. Escalating/de-escalting Afg. withdrawl dates of 2011, except not really.

Signature strikes that target in Pakistan
Over the span of more than a year, drones killed 114 people, and the CIA couldn't determine the terrorist affiliations of a quarter of the victims, a new report shows.
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CIA classified 25% of drone victims as 'other,' couldn't identify terrorist affiliation | Circa News

taking a "no fly" in Libya to regime change....I can understand you're lack of clarity... Obama just makes **** up.
 
Montecresto said:
Saddam Hussein was NEVER EVER capable of producing a mushroom cloud over any US city. But hey, the fear-mongering worked, Bush got his dirty war and to this day we still have people right here defending it. Amazing!
Click to expand...

I don't think Nukes were ever a serious consideration. Possibility maybe, but it was the their other WMD's that concerned us the most.
 
Hamster Buddha said:
I don't think Nukes were ever a serious consideration. Possibility maybe, but it was the their other WMD's that concerned us the most.
Click to expand...

WMDs concerned "us" most?


Genocide twice (250k Iraqis), invading neighbors twice (500k Iraqis) and selling food-from-oil (400k, children) concerned a few of us. Also, 17 unscrs violated, firing on no-flies created to stop genocide, institutional rape...
 
Perotista said:
Was there any doubt that nation building would not work? That forcing democracy on a people that did not want it was the wrong thing to do. We had 14 tribes of the Northern Alliance on our side as they drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan with the help of our air power and their troops on the ground. This was before we put in the troops, all we had as a few SF and paramilitary advisors on the ground. Then nation building began along with all the troops we put into Afghanistan to enforce it.

This is not what our 14 tribe allies wanted. They wanted to return to tribal government and their own areas of Afghanistan they had ruled prior to the Taliban trying to take over all of Afghanistan and giving sanctuaries and safe haven to UBL and AQ. They just wanted to return to their way of life and government they had know for over a thousand years. But that was not the U.S. idea. Today, we only retain the loyalty of a couple of the 14 tribes that were first loyal to us. This is what happens when we force our ideals and ways of governing on a people who have no wish to live under our idea of how they should govern themselves. The right of self determination was taken from them in our attempt to nation build.

Afghanistan is lost, only those in government do not know it yet. Iraq has only a 50-50 chance of succeeding. Such is life and the world of geopolitics when a foreign power tries to force something on a people that they do not want.
Click to expand...


What's ironic is it's the same thing that happened in Vietnam for the US and Afghanistan for Russia. We simply don't have the ability or sheer resources to change a societies thousand year old culture, especially when it's foreign and unwanted by them.

And by fighting/killing locals or insurgents who are sympathetic extremists we only inspire a steady supply of enemies. It's really kind of a stupid, hamster wheel endeavor trying to fight an ideology that feeds on the very terror we provide.
 
vancemack said:
yep...that george bush guy...
"we know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country. Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as saddam is in power."
"we have known for many years that saddam hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
"the last un weapons inspectors left iraq in october of 1998. We are confident that saddam hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons..."
Click to expand...

mushroom clouds over us cities!
 
grip said:
What's ironic is it's the same thing that happened in Vietnam for the US and Afghanistan for Russia. We simply don't have the ability or sheer resources to change a societies thousand year old culture, especially when it's foreign and unwanted by them.

And by fighting/killing locals or insurgents who are sympathetic extremists we only inspire a steady supply of enemies. It's really kind of a stupid, hamster wheel endeavor trying to fight an ideology that feeds on the very terror we provide.
Click to expand...

Yep, in Vietnam we made the South Vietnamese change their government from a mandarin style into a democracy while a war was going on. The Romans created and ruled their Empire which lasted 500 years or so because once they conquered a people, a nation, a state, they let them basically government themselves, maintain their culture and traditions with a Roman overseer to collect the taxes due Rome. They did not try to change the people into Romans, they let them be themselves to be ruled locally by their fellow tribesmen or countrymen.

We accomplished our original mission pretty darn quick, within a couple to few months. We with air power and the Afghani on the ground drove out the Taliban thus stopping the training grounds and safe havens for AQ. We didn't get UBL, but the Northern Alliance, a group of tribes allied together against the Taliban were our friends. We could have let them set up their local government as they wanted and saw fit. Keep our air power at the ready and let the Afghani fight on the ground. But those in power here thought they new better and started this nation building stuff which was nothing more than forcing our type of government upon those who didn't want it. Now we are left with what we have, most likely a nation that will revert in the near future to what they originally wanted once the Taliban were driven out. Except this time, the Taliban is coming back and probably quite a lot of those tribes that fought to drive them our, will be fighting by their side to return them power. What a mess nation building has caused.
 
Perotista said:
Yep, in Vietnam we made the South Vietnamese change their government from a mandarin style into a democracy while a war was going on. The Romans created and ruled their Empire which lasted 500 years or so because once they conquered a people, a nation, a state, they let them basically government themselves, maintain their culture and traditions with a Roman overseer to collect the taxes due Rome. They did not try to change the people into Romans, they let them be themselves to be ruled locally by their fellow tribesmen or countrymen.

We accomplished our original mission pretty darn quick, within a couple to few months. We with air power and the Afghani on the ground drove out the Taliban thus stopping the training grounds and safe havens for AQ. We didn't get UBL, but the Northern Alliance, a group of tribes allied together against the Taliban were our friends. We could have let them set up their local government as they wanted and saw fit. Keep our air power at the ready and let the Afghani fight on the ground. But those in power here thought they new better and started this nation building stuff which was nothing more than forcing our type of government upon those who didn't want it. Now we are left with what we have, most likely a nation that will revert in the near future to what they originally wanted once the Taliban were driven out. Except this time, the Taliban is coming back and probably quite a lot of those tribes that fought to drive them our, will be fighting by their side to return them power. What a mess nation building has caused.
Click to expand...
hey. since you know about the Northern Alliance ( about the time Afg. appeared on my radar screen)..

can you tell us/me how they were defeated?? The Taliban beat them -yes??
 
Hamster Buddha said:
I don't think Nukes were ever a serious consideration. Possibility maybe, but it was the their other WMD's that concerned us the most.
Click to expand...

We specifically were asked if we had to wait for the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud over a US city!!!! Do you know why that rhetoric was ratcheted up? Because Hans Blix had exclusive access to everything, even the presidential palaces and was coming up with nada. That's point number 1, but secondly, what would any WMD's that Saddam may have had (though of course he had none) have to do with 9/11??? Which is what became the big drive behind invading Iraq. Why is it that our government always enjoys such immunity from prosecution of war crimes from willing American citizens. This is really a riddle.
 
Perotista said:
Yep, in Vietnam we made the South Vietnamese change their government from a mandarin style into a democracy while a war was going on. The Romans created and ruled their Empire which lasted 500 years or so because once they conquered a people, a nation, a state, they let them basically government themselves, maintain their culture and traditions with a Roman overseer to collect the taxes due Rome. They did not try to change the people into Romans, they let them be themselves to be ruled locally by their fellow tribesmen or countrymen.

We accomplished our original mission pretty darn quick, within a couple to few months. We with air power and the Afghani on the ground drove out the Taliban thus stopping the training grounds and safe havens for AQ. We didn't get UBL, but the Northern Alliance, a group of tribes allied together against the Taliban were our friends. We could have let them set up their local government as they wanted and saw fit. Keep our air power at the ready and let the Afghani fight on the ground. But those in power here thought they new better and started this nation building stuff which was nothing more than forcing our type of government upon those who didn't want it. Now we are left with what we have, most likely a nation that will revert in the near future to what they originally wanted once the Taliban were driven out. Except this time, the Taliban is coming back and probably quite a lot of those tribes that fought to drive them our, will be fighting by their side to return them power. What a mess nation building has caused.
Click to expand...

After 2 years in Afghanistan when the bulk of troops was transferred to the new Iraq War was the error. They should've came home and left the CIA and Defense intel to monitor any imminent terror attacks coming from certain groups and let a Special Forces team deal with it.

I believe when you show patience and react with justice it's difficult to invoke extreme behavior. But when you act as brutal and more vicious than your enemy, then you create endless War.
 
annata said:
hey. since you know about the Northern Alliance ( about the time Afg. appeared on my radar screen)..

can you tell us/me how they were defeated?? The Taliban beat them -yes??
Click to expand...

Afghanistan has/had 18 tribes and at one time each tribe ruled their own little area of Afghanistan with shifting alliances among them that suited their needs at the time. The Taliban which is the largest tribe and 3 smaller tribes united in an attempt to bring the entire country under their rule. The other 14 tribes united and formed the Northern Alliance, a loosely united group to be able to fight back. By the time we became involved the Northern Alliance held only a small portion of mountains in the northern sector of Afghanistan and were facing the real possibility of defeat. But when the Taliban failed to hand over UBL and put an end to the AQ training camps after 9-11, the United States allied themselves with the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance hadn't been defeated yet.

With a few SF and paramilitary on the ground to coordinate the air attacks and Afghani ground action in a couple of short months the 14 tribe Northern Alliance was able to drive the Taliban and the other 3 tribes allied with them out of Afghanistan or into the mountains ranges bordering on Pakistan. The Afghani's failed to capture UBL and then we began pouring in our troops and nation building began in an attempt to capture UBL. Pretty much the rest is history.

How many of the original 14 tribes have remained loyal to us, I really do not know. But they saw our placing Karzi and his tribe in charge of them as a slap in the face. Here they had fought the Taliban to avoid just that and here we go placing someone from another tribe in charge of them. All they wanted was to go back to their original area of Afghanistan and let the tribal elders or their chief rule them as they had for thousands of years. Not to come under some leader from a different tribe. In this way we became no better than the Taliban or the USSR or for England even when they tried to subdue Afghanistan way back when.

Tribal rule is important to most of these people. When one tribe or another needs help, their shifting alliances provided that. But even then each tribe had their own ruler. This I think is too engrained in them to be overcome. To most of the tribes, the country of Afghanistan didn't exist. Most didn't know or even heard of Kabul. To them prior to us, there was no such thing as a central government, only their own leaders. The only close thing I think you could associate these tribes and Afghanistan with is our own American Indians. Each tribe of our Indians ruled themselves with their own leaders, they fought each other and they also had sifting alliances at times. But they never became fully united.
 
grip said:
After 2 years in Afghanistan when the bulk of troops was transferred to the new Iraq War was the error. They should've came home and left the CIA and Defense intel to monitor any imminent terror attacks coming from certain groups and let a Special Forces team deal with it.

I believe when you show patience and react with justice it's difficult to invoke extreme behavior. But when you act as brutal and more vicious than your enemy, then you create endless War.
Click to expand...

Yes, I agree we could have very easily keep our air power ready and a few SF on the ground to ensure the Taliban never returned and let the Northern Alliance govern themselves as they saw fit. It probably would have mean having 14 teams, at least one for each tribe, but it was doable. If the Taliban, UBL and AQ tried to come back, we could have very easily coordinated our air power once again with the Afghani's on the ground.

In some countries, the less of a footprint we make the better off we are.
 
Montecresto said:
We specifically were asked if we had to wait for the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud over a US city!!!! Do you know why that rhetoric was ratcheted up? Because Hans Blix had exclusive access to everything, even the presidential palaces and was coming up with nada. That's point number 1, but secondly, what would any WMD's that Saddam may have had (though of course he had none) have to do with 9/11??? Which is what became the big drive behind invading Iraq. Why is it that our government always enjoys such immunity from prosecution of war crimes from willing American citizens. This is really a riddle.
Click to expand...

The fact was that Saddam wasn't producing the weapons that, at the time, we knew he had. And even Blix said that he wasn't satisfied with the results. Going back and knowing what we know now is just monday morning quarterbacking. And to acuse anyone of war crimes is the cheaper what war crimes. We didn't go in and willfully target civilians without mercy, in fact, our strategy was about causing as minimal damage as possible. And tell it to the Kurds and the Shia that they're better off than they were with Saddam.

All that being said, we should of waited for more time, but he wasn't the most cooperating. And to imply otherwise is to distort history. If anything though, it has given the country a sense of caution when it comes to other engagements, like with Syria. We probably would of attacked them had we not gone through the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan... and the whole question of WMDs. Ultimately, it was bad intel we were fed and everyone, (15-0 vote remember) believed it.
 
Perotista said:
Yes, I agree we could have very easily keep our air power ready and a few SF on the ground to ensure the Taliban never returned and let the Northern Alliance govern themselves as they saw fit. It probably would have mean having 14 teams, at least one for each tribe, but it was doable. If the Taliban, UBL and AQ tried to come back, we could have very easily coordinated our air power once again with the Afghani's on the ground.

In some countries, the less of a footprint we make the better off we are.
Click to expand...


The whole philosophical approach to this "War on Terror" (btw stupid phrase), became flawed after the initial success of suppressing and eliminating AQ and Taliban. If we would've pulled out Afghanistan, never created Gitmo or invaded Iraq, the terror situation might have been tamped down to pre Kuwait levels.

Preemptive strikes on presumptive future threats is a militaristic approach, which is why we usually let the civilian leadership have executive command. To the Defense Department everything is solved with fighting because that's what they do. Ask a surgeon how to fix a medical problem and it's surgery, to a hammer everything looks like a nail.
 
Perotista said:
Afghanistan has/had 18 tribes and at one time each tribe ruled their own little area of Afghanistan with shifting alliances among them that suited their needs at the time. The Taliban which is the largest tribe and 3 smaller tribes united in an attempt to bring the entire country under their rule. The other 14 tribes united and formed the Northern Alliance, a loosely united group to be able to fight back. By the time we became involved the Northern Alliance held only a small portion of mountains in the northern sector of Afghanistan and were facing the real possibility of defeat. But when the Taliban failed to hand over UBL and put an end to the AQ training camps after 9-11, the United States allied themselves with the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance hadn't been defeated yet.

With a few SF and paramilitary on the ground to coordinate the air attacks and Afghani ground action in a couple of short months the 14 tribe Northern Alliance was able to drive the Taliban and the other 3 tribes allied with them out of Afghanistan or into the mountains ranges bordering on Pakistan. The Afghani's failed to capture UBL and then we began pouring in our troops and nation building began in an attempt to capture UBL. Pretty much the rest is history.

How many of the original 14 tribes have remained loyal to us, I really do not know. But they saw our placing Karzi and his tribe in charge of them as a slap in the face. Here they had fought the Taliban to avoid just that and here we go placing someone from another tribe in charge of them. All they wanted was to go back to their original area of Afghanistan and let the tribal elders or their chief rule them as they had for thousands of years. Not to come under some leader from a different tribe. In this way we became no better than the Taliban or the USSR or for England even when they tried to subdue Afghanistan way back when.

Tribal rule is important to most of these people. When one tribe or another needs help, their shifting alliances provided that. But even then each tribe had their own ruler. This I think is too engrained in them to be overcome. To most of the tribes, the country of Afghanistan didn't exist. Most didn't know or even heard of Kabul. To them prior to us, there was no such thing as a central government, only their own leaders. The only close thing I think you could associate these tribes and Afghanistan with is our own American Indians. Each tribe of our Indians ruled themselves with their own leaders, they fought each other and they also had sifting alliances at times. But they never became fully united.
Click to expand...
thanks! I knew about the tribal nature of Afg, did not know that history though...
man. all we had to do was wait it out, and suppress any terrorists (AQ) camps..let them fight it out, and go back to fiefdoms/warlords..

We really went overboard, and Karzai has been insanely impossible to deal with..
 
annata said:
thanks! I knew about the tribal nature of Afg, did not know that history though...
man. all we had to do was wait it out, and suppress any terrorists (AQ) camps..let them fight it out, and go back to fiefdoms/warlords..

We really went overboard, and Karzai has been insanely impossible to deal with..
Click to expand...

I wonder how different things would of been if that leader of the Northern Alliance weren't assassintated on 9/10/2001. What was his name?
 
grip said:
The whole philosophical approach to this "War on Terror" (btw stupid phrase), became flawed after the initial success of suppressing and eliminating AQ and Taliban. If we would've pulled out Afghanistan, never created Gitmo or invaded Iraq, the terror situation might have been tamped down to pre Kuwait levels.

Preemptive strikes on presumptive future threats is a militaristic approach, which is why we usually let the civilian leadership have executive command. To the Defense Department everything is solved with fighting because that's what they do. Ask a surgeon how to fix a medical problem and it's surgery, to a hammer everything looks like a nail.
Click to expand...

LOL, that is one way to put it. The generals had to have there men in place. The idea of a successful military mission with only a few SF and paramilitary on the ground is anathema to most army generals and there perceptions of how a military battle should be fought or a war waged. It was quite successful and if we had just left those there in the beginning in place, our foot print and future causalities would have been very small. There is a precedence for a small group of men, military men on the ground waging war against vastly superior odds and at least achieving a stalemate using basically native ground forces and our air power. That place was Laos and I was part of it. No more than 120 military men on the ground in that country at any one time for around ten years fought the PL and NVA to a stalemate and accomplishing something that 550,000 men next door in Vietnam itself couldn't.
 
annata said:
thanks! I knew about the tribal nature of Afg, did not know that history though...
man. all we had to do was wait it out, and suppress any terrorists (AQ) camps..let them fight it out, and go back to fiefdoms/warlords..

We really went overboard, and Karzai has been insanely impossible to deal with..
Click to expand...

Exactly..
 
yeah. I also recall whent the Taliban blew up the world's largest Standing Budda's ( idoltary in Wahabbism). Think that was just pre-9/11.
I was kind of pissed, then read some other Buddhists thoughts that "everything is impermanent"..
anyways i figured "at least they're on the other side of the world"

little did i know.. Fun folks.
 
Hamster Buddha said:
The fact was that Saddam wasn't producing the weapons that, at the time, we knew he had. And even Blix said that he wasn't satisfied with the results. Going back and knowing what we know now is just monday morning quarterbacking. And to acuse anyone of war crimes is the cheaper what war crimes. We didn't go in and willfully target civilians without mercy, in fact, our strategy was about causing as minimal damage as possible. And tell it to the Kurds and the Shia that they're better off than they were with Saddam.

All that being said, we should of waited for more time, but he wasn't the most cooperating. And to imply otherwise is to distort history. If anything though, it has given the country a sense of caution when it comes to other engagements, like with Syria. We probably would of attacked them had we not gone through the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan... and the whole question of WMDs. Ultimately, it was bad intel we were fed and everyone, (15-0 vote remember) believed it.
Click to expand...



Come now HB.

Blix's statements about the Iraq WMD program came to contradict the claims of the George W. Bush administration,[6] and attracted a great deal of criticism from supporters of the invasion of Iraq. In an interview on BBC 1 on 8 February 2004, Blix accused the US and British governments of dramatizing the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in order to strengthen the case for the 2003 war against the regime of Saddam Hussein. Ultimately, no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were ever found.[7]

In an interview with London's The Guardian newspaper, Hans Blix said, "I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media".[8]

In 2004, Blix published a book, Disarming Iraq, where he gives his account of the events and inspections before the coalition began its invasion.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Blix
 
While the Senate Intelligence Committee found in 2008 that his administration "misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq".[18] A key CIA informant in Iraq admitted that he lied about his allegations, "then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war".[19]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
 
Afghanisatan might sure fall bad after US retreat! Hope for the better but be prepared for the worse on this one.
 
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