So the options are:

Leave Afghanistan. Just pick up and leave. Let whatever happen to Afghanistan happen (the Taliban taking the country back and brutalize the populace for daring to go against them in the first place) and allow Al Qaeda leadership a break in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Stay in it for a few more years, build up the country's infrastructure and give the Afghans a shot at some normalcy at the expense of corruption in the central Afghan government and incompetence in the US military's upper leadership.

I'd take the second option. The people calling out for an end to the war are incredibly short sighted and were calling for the intervention of US troops when the reporting of the brutality of the Taliban occurred in the late 90's.

@tsarsfield, I used to think the same thing, but I'm not sure it'd just take "a few more years". Obama was basically trying the strategy you suggest, and this is what the people executing that strategy had to say about it.

I think it's time we declared victory and went home.

Stay a few more years?

And accomplish what, exactly, that couldn't have been accomplished in the past eight?

And we're still not doing shit about Taliban brutality. Never have, never will.

We're there fighting Al Qaeda, remember?

America doesn't give a shit about brutal dictators or regimes.

We only have a problem with the ones that don't do as they're told.

Let's not beat about the bush here, if the US leaves it will create a power vacuum, likely inciting a civil war that will engulf the country and have a much higher death toll than currently. Not to mention, the last time the US left Afghanistan in a state of disarray, it didn't turn out that well.

>> ^RedSky:

Let's not beat about the bush here, if the US leaves it will create a power vacuum, likely inciting a civil war that will engulf the country and have a much higher death toll than currently. Not to mention, the last time the US left Afghanistan in a state of disarray, it didn't turn out that well.


So what should we do?

>> ^RedSky:

Let's not beat about the bush here, if the US leaves it will create a power vacuum, likely inciting a civil war that will engulf the country and have a much higher death toll than currently. Not to mention, the last time the US left Afghanistan in a state of disarray, it didn't turn out that well.


A civil war between whom?

The USA isn't helping Afghanistan. It's just bombing it and shooting its people.

There has been no reconstruction, no real progress of any kind.

If you asked the average Afghani if they wanted the USA to stay or to leave, I'm pretty sure you know what the answer will be. So why not respect their wishes?

*military *worldaffairs

Adding video to channels (Military, Worldaffairs) - requested by kronosposeidon.

@NetRunner

I'm not sure.

@rougy

A civil war by different groups vying for control because of the power vacuum the US leaving will create.

They will say it is better for the US to leave because they would be comparing now to back when the Taliban was indisputably in power, and when despite enforcing an Islamic theocracy, at least the country was considerably more stable. Obviously if the US were to leave right now, that is not what the country would immediately return to.

If once they were to leave, a civil war did ensue that was far more bloody than it is now and there was an outcry for the US to return, or at least blame of the US for causing the worsening violence, would you support sending troops back in? I'm guessing not, and unfortunately you can't have it both ways.

I don't believe there is a right answer here. Everyone has brought up the options and the problems that come with each of them. The only thing I can think of is that we don't belong there, we never had a right to go in there in the first place. Osama Bin Laden wasn't the reason because they still didn't have proof of him being there 8 months after the war started. The Afganistani asked for evidence of Osamas crimes and we refused, instead started to bomb the civilian population.

Look the US wants to be the policeman of the world, I think it's our job as a populace to fight our government on that. There's no just cause, so we should leave. If we want to we can have the UN go in and do something, maybe fund the Red Crescent who's actually helpful.

There's no right answer, except that we shouldn't have ever went there. Pay them reparations and get out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War



When I was younger I had an interest in wars. One war that caught my attention was the Vietnam War. One battle that caught my I was Ia Drang which was the first battle directly with uniformed combat troops. Immortalized in the movie We Were Soldiers.

But soon the war began to take on a different tone, moving from rice paddy to rice paddy, village to village. Where one village worked with the US Troops and another didn't. Where one village ended up burned to the ground by US Troops, and one village killed by the Viet Cong. The use of Firebases.

Here are some photos of the firebases in Vietnam. http://www.landscaper.net/lzpics.htm#FSB%20Aries

Turn to Afghanistan. Moving from opium field to opium field, village to village. The use of Fire Bases.

http://www.google.com/images?q=Photos+of+Afghanistan+firebases&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=M
qEoTOa4AYH68AafrIi6Dw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CB0QsAQwAA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_support_base

There were some good reasons to be in Afghanistan, just like there were good reasons to be in Vietnam. But the bad reasons always out weigh the good reasons, on bad reason is Civilian Death, on both sides. Would these people be better off left alone? One can argue that Afghanistan is not vietnam because there is no Communist Influence there, some argue that there are only 100 Al Qaeda there. Another large difference is the casualty difference between Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Here's the big difference. Vietnam was about Communism, and Afghanistan is about Terrorism. Wait, doesn't seem that different.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/president-obamas-secret-100-al-qaeda-now-afghanistan/story?id=9227861

@rougy

Just wait until Wikileaks releases that Afghanistan civilian bombing video.

>> ^NordlichReiter:

Vietnam was about Communism, and Afghanistan is about Terrorism. Wait, doesn't seem that different.

Actually, it's worse -- Communism at least was a coherent political and economic philosophy, Terrorism is just a tactic.

If it's a war to stamp out Islamic Fundamentalism, then what Al Qaeda tells people to recruit them is wholly true, and this is far worse than a new Vietnam, it's a new Crusade.

>> ^RedSky:

@NetRunner
I'm not sure.
@rougy
A civil war by different groups vying for control because of the power vacuum the US leaving will create.
They will say it is better for the US to leave because they would be comparing now to back when the Taliban was indisputably in power, and when despite enforcing an Islamic theocracy, at least the country was considerably more stable. Obviously if the US were to leave right now, that is not what the country would immediately return to.
If once they were to leave, a civil war did ensue that was far more bloody than it is now and there was an outcry for the US to return, or at least blame of the US for causing the worsening violence, would you support sending troops back in? I'm guessing not, and unfortunately you can't have it both ways.


The obvious response to that is that we had effectively driven the Taliban out of the country within the first year. We've spent the rest of that time -- eight years -- trying to build up a government that could defend itself against the remaining rag-tag groups of Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The end result of those eight years is that Afghanistan is still nowhere near ready to defend itself, and the Taliban has rebuilt, and is starting to make headway in convincing the Afghani people that life would be better under their rule than the corrupt government in Kabul.

There are no good answers. If we leave, the Taliban is quite likely to take control of the country. If we stay, it's probably not going ever end unless we pour ridiculous amounts of blood and treasure into the project, and even then it might take another decade or two.

I say we cut our losses and get out. I can be persuaded to give Obama the benefit of the doubt until his July 2011 deadline, but unless things look radically different from how they do now, he's going to be facing a full-on revolt from his own base going into the year of his re-election campaign if he tries to extend our presence there.

It isn't complicated...
1. The anti-war left is never happy when America engages in military action.
2. Obama and the Democrats heavily courted the extreme anti-war left to get elected on the premise that they were going to shut down Iraq, close Gitmo, and bring the troops home.
3. Obama and the Democrats heavily courted the pro-war right to get elected on the primise that Afghanistan was "the right war" and they would get it done properly.
4. As the actual CiC of the armed forces, Obama now realizes Bush wasn't just some neo-con crackpot and there were actually darn good reasons for following "The Bush Doctrine".
5. The pro-war right is dissappointed over Obama's failure to support the Afghan troops.
6. The anti-war left is dissappointed over Obama's failure to close Gitmo and escalating the Afghan fight.

I'm going to come right out and say it. The only way you win wars is to attack POPULATIONS and INFRASTRUCTURE. You don't win wars by killing soldiers, or taking out individual military commanders. You can certainly demoralize the enemy by killing soldiers & commanders, but if you never touch the population that produces the soliders or the infrastructure that supports them then you'll never win. It is impossible.

Yes, it is entirely possible to win in Afghanistan. But the way to do it would be so horrifying and bloody that the United States has no stomach for the process. If we aren't going to go in there to WIN this thing, then what's the point? McCrystal & the others sounded to me like soldiers who were frustrated at not being able to run a military action in a way that would be effective. That policy is being dictated to them by politicians who don't mind the bleeding of money and soldiers because that doesn't impact their approval ratings as much as would happen with a full-scale offensive or a whole-scale pullout.

The only option is to leave. Now.

COIN in Afhganistan and "The Surge" in Iraq have been utter failures.

In Iraq, "The Surge" is not why there's been a decrease in the amount of violence. We can start with Muqtada al-Sadr's cease-fire that happened before Petraeus' little surge ever happened. Armed Shiite militias pushed out almost all (unarmed) Sunni's from Baghdad, Patreus built huge blastwalls between ethnically opposing neighborhoods, complete with a maze of checkpoints to keep out "insurgents", and made most markets pedestrian only - to keep car & truck bombs from blowing the fuck out of innocent citizens.

There was no "political reconciliation". Unless that means dividing the citizens, arming the shiite militias, and kicking the Sunni's to the curb.

Baghdad has gone from 50/50 split of Sunni/Shia, to a horrible 15% Sunni.

Over 4 million Iraqis have been displaced. The vast majority have lost ownership of their homes and can never return.

We have 100,000 soldiers in Afghanistan to fight 50-100 members of the Taliban. The Pashtuns want US and NATO forces the fuck out of their country right now, and are not afraid of either the Tajiks or the Hazarahs.

We are not, nor have we ever been in that country to end "safe havens" for terrorists. If so, Tora Bora would've been the last day our soldiers were there. Which was in fucking 2001.


Also, remember those "mineral treasures" we recently found (years and years ago) there? Yeah, that's never had anything to do with Bush's invasion mindset.

@Winstonfield_Pennypacker you are truly an inhumane monster.

You literally just expressed annoyance and displeasure that America doesn't "have the stomach" to directly attack civilian population centers.

You never even touched on why this particular fight is even one we should be engaged in, much less made a case for why Americans should support mass murder to "win", whatever that would mean here.

If the US won or left, what would happen to all the people making the weapons and supporting the military? You want them to lose their jobs? And where would the weapons companies and the military try out new weapons? You are talking about hindering real progress. Very unpatriotic.

@Winstonfield_Pennypacker double facepalm

@NetRunner

Don't worry.
He's just another one of the internets trolly fuckity stupidiest fucks.

He compartmentalizes reality to accept only a version of events that agrees with the delusional logic he's managed to piece together.

Which probably is a result of him: not.knowing.a.god.damn.thing! -_-

In reply to this comment by NetRunner:
@Winstonfield_Pennypacker you are truly an inhumane monster.

You literally just expressed annoyance and displeasure that America doesn't "have the stomach" to directly attack civilian population centers.

You never even touched on why this particular fight is even one we should be engaged in, much less made a case for why Americans should support mass murder to "win", whatever that would mean here.

.

*Quadrupleupvotepromote Genji's comment-

I'm sure people like WP and QM don't even know what a Pashtun is. They just want to put on their big "USA #1" foam finger and advocate for the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, while they pontificate anonymously on an interwebs forum.

There's your pseudo academic patriotism right there in a nutshell.

I don't make the facts NR - I just accurately identify them. You win wars by targeting the infrastructures which allow your defined enemy to fight. These infrastructures are usually housed in dense civilian population centers and employ civilians as workers. If you go to war then you will inevitably blow up civilians and their stuff. Am I a fan of it? No. But that's how it is.

The question is whether or not terrorism is an enemy that is worth seriously fighting or not. I see radical Islam as a worldwide source of constant unrest, violence, and oppression. It is certainly an enemy worth fighting. Is the opportunity cost of fighting it EFFECTIVELY too high? That's a tough question. One thing is absolutely certain... Terrorism is not an enemy you can fight with a toothless, feckless 'policing' mentality, or with half-hearted temporary military operations.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

4. As the actual CiC of the armed forces, Obama now realizes Bush wasn't just some neo-con crackpot and there were actually darn good reasons for following "The Bush Doctrine".


Ha ha ha ha ha!

Yeah, I'm sure Lockheed and Dyncorp and GE and all of the other defense leeches agree with you whole heartedly.

Why, there are billions and billions of good reasons to follow "The Bush Doctrine" according to them.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

I don't make the facts NR - I just accurately identify them. You win wars by targeting the infrastructures which allow your defined enemy to fight. These infrastructures are usually housed in dense civilian population centers and employ civilians as workers. If you go to war then you will inevitably blow up civilians and their stuff. Am I a fan of it? No. But that's how it is.


You just advocated committing war crimes.

You are a war criminal.

America is soaring.. like the Hindenburg.

Well, in a straight up war I would tend to agree with you, but this is not a war. We are not at war with afghanistan or iraq or iran or basically anywhere in the middle east. It's a "war" against terrorists. There are terrorists inside the United States too, and you wouldn't destroy infrastructure there to get to them, would you?

Attacking the infrastructure in afghanistan is hardly putting a dent in the terrorists own infrastructure since they are no more than 10.000 people anyway, we're just fucking with a whole bunch of afghanis instead.

Afghanistan was the right place to hunt for Bin Laden.. in 2001. By now the wars are obsolete. If we started to catch the flies with honey instead of bombs, we would stop the supply of new terrorists or at least stem the tide. Which arguments do you think the terrorist leaders have for the newcomers? "We're getting back at the infidels who murdered your family" etc. Taking that away by not killing civilians and destroying their homes, would help security far more than powering through, unless, obviously, we really, really power through and nuke the shit out of it, and I don't think anyone wants that. To win this war, as you say, it will have to become bloody, very much more bloody than it already is; but we don't have to win it. It's a contrived war, like the war on drugs. There's no "losing face" when people's lives are at stake - I'd rather lose face than lose a limb. Pride has no place in a politician. The people who have already died or been injured have not died for nothing, even if we stop now, they died for whatever cause drove them to fight.

We shouldn't continue a bad thing, just because we've done it so far. "I've believed in this for years, I can't change my mind now!" Yes, you can.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

It isn't complicated...
1. The anti-war left is never happy when America engages in military action.
2. Obama and the Democrats heavily courted the extreme anti-war left to get elected on the premise that they were going to shut down Iraq, close Gitmo, and bring the troops home.
3. Obama and the Democrats heavily courted the pro-war right to get elected on the primise that Afghanistan was "the right war" and they would get it done properly.
4. As the actual CiC of the armed forces, Obama now realizes Bush wasn't just some neo-con crackpot and there were actually darn good reasons for following "The Bush Doctrine".
5. The pro-war right is dissappointed over Obama's failure to support the Afghan troops.
6. The anti-war left is dissappointed over Obama's failure to close Gitmo and escalating the Afghan fight.
I'm going to come right out and say it. The only way you win wars is to attack POPULATIONS and INFRASTRUCTURE. You don't win wars by killing soldiers, or taking out individual military commanders. You can certainly demoralize the enemy by killing soldiers & commanders, but if you never touch the population that produces the soliders or the infrastructure that supports them then you'll never win. It is impossible.
Yes, it is entirely possible to win in Afghanistan. But the way to do it would be so horrifying and bloody that the United States has no stomach for the process. If we aren't going to go in there to WIN this thing, then what's the point? McCrystal & the others sounded to me like soldiers who were frustrated at not being able to run a military action in a way that would be effective. That policy is being dictated to them by politicians who don't mind the bleeding of money and soldiers because that doesn't impact their approval ratings as much as would happen with a full-scale offensive or a whole-scale pullout.

Again. This is why I have WP on ignore.

The ignorance is so entrenched it is breathtaking. Listening to some war-mongering, western white dude pontificate about the destruction of innocent peoples countries and calls for mass slaughter is inhuman and disgusting. It makes me sad to be a human.

His constant need to somehow keep cracking about Obama shows just how much prejudice and hatred he has for humans. If only people like him would step away from their keyboards, gun-up, and go kill those innocent people they hate for no reason other than American dominance, would still not be a step in the right direction.

To people like this, only wholesale slaughter of innocent people, will ever be good enough. To watch their blood run in the gutters of their already decimated lives, is the only thing that will ever be able to bring a smile to their ugly faces.

This is the worst of human nature. Neverending war for no reason at all.


And AGAIN: WP shows he has no fucking knowledge whatsoever of Afghanistan. To ask him what the difference is between a Pashtun or a Tajik is would send him scrambling to Wikipedia. But only to momentarily pontificate on how glorious it is to kill one or the other. But in his mind, just kill them all. Their blood all spills the same, and his doesn't.

The real issue is that once we leave, heroin prices will go back down! Daddy needs to feed the smack whores. Opium for the masses is the opium for the masses.

*Edit ^Gwiz said it much better than me... But I will keep my post up anyway... muahahaha...

* Disclaimer: This became a wall of text as I explained my reasoning. Also it is really really late so spelling might be off.
I hate to do this but winstonfield actually has one valid point even though his way of saying it was clumsy/not PC.
Reader's Digest: Wars are not winnable in modern times.

Full text:
Wars are not winnable in modern times as the populations are too big and know too much to simply accept a new ruler, even in backwater places like Afghanistan. Back in the day before proper nation states and democracy and all that a farmer could probably not care less who he paid his taxes to as long as he was left alone and had enough to feed himself and his family, and if he wasn't what could he do? The king was a king because God wanted it to be that way and he had knights and armies and the farmer did not. Today a 10 year old can mass produce home-made bombs that cost under 100 dollars a pop whilst a Military drops bombs that costs over 100 000 dollars a pop from 20 000 000 dollar aircrafts that land on 200 000 000 dollar Carriers. Today we know that wars cost money. We know that if you drag out a war long enough the populace of the invading force will most likely falter in their support, war weariness and all that (Vietnam anyone?). When the 100 000 US soldier dies by IED after 50 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq somehow I doubt that the support for the war will be there any more.

IMO if you want to win a war militarily you have to commit to total war and genocide and simply kill of all of the natives and move your own people in to settle the area. As long as one person remembers what it was like to be free from invaders they will fight. It is human nature. Just imagine if the USSR had invaded the US during the Cold War and conquered it militarily. Would the US citizens who survived the initial bombings just say, after a year or two or 8: "Oh, well. Guess I will stop fighting now and join the invading side. Seems like they have some things going for them..."? I doubt it.

Clarification:
Is this (Genocide and total war) something I advocate? No, but as Aldous Huxley said: "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." IMO War serves no other purpose than to cull some of the human population. Nothing more and nothing less. It has served its purpose in the past, when countries could be conquered, but it has become obsolete in the modern world where populations are too large to control properly.

A couple of random thoughts:
To win a war today you have to break every single convention on warfare there is and use NBC weapons, or massive bombardments and just carpet bomb every inch of the country you are at war with, to annihilate the populace. If you are not prepared to do that you should not go to war as you cannot win, ever! (If you are prepared to do that I hope you never get into a position of power!)

Militaries are not for winning wars, they are for fighting them. When the politicians are bored of the fighting or it starts to affect their ratings negatively they sue for a peace treaty...

What is the definition of winning a war? Aren't wars supposed to be about conquest and getting new land and natural resources or perhaps vindication for a perceived insult to the crown or something? What would constitute a win in the Afghan and Iraqi wars? And is that a military goal or a political one?

WP isn't the only one in a pocket reality. He did not advocate anything and, even if he had, he wouldn't be a war criminal. Get a grip.

>> ^rougy:

You just advocated committing war crimes.
You are a war criminal.
<div><div style="margin: 10px; overflow: auto; width: 80%; float: left; position: relative;" class="convoPiece"> Winstonfield_Pennypacker said:<img style="margin: 4px 10px 10px; float: left; width: 40px;" src="http://static1.videosift.com/avatars/w/Winstonfield_Pennypacker-s.jpg" onerror="ph(this)"><div style="position: absolute; margin-left: 52px; padding-top: 1px; font-size: 10px;" class="commentarrow">◄</div><div style="padding: 8px; margin-left: 60px; margin-top: 2px; min-height: 30px;" class="nestedComment box">I don't make the facts NR - I just accurately identify them. You win wars by targeting the infrastructures which allow your defined enemy to fight. These infrastructures are usually housed in dense civilian population centers and employ civilians as workers. If you go to war then you will inevitably blow up civilians and their stuff. Am I a fan of it? No. But that's how it is.
</div></div></div>

Like it or not, this is fairly true. Not that you have to intentionally target civilians, but you have to be willing to accept massive civilian casualties to hit important targets.

Or at least it's true in a traditional war with an enemy. We're not fighting a war against an army, though; we're fighting against a tactic. Terrorism doesn't have a backing industry. We can't bomb terrorism's airfields and factories. Bombing Afghanistan's assets won't hurt the terrorists, either, just everyone else.

These guys make explosives out of garbage and cattle shit... they don't have or need any military assets. For every "terrorist" who is killed, 4-10 of his family members step in out of grief and anger. Bombs are the seeds from which the terrorist tree grows.

You combat terrorism by providing aide to the people who need it or, at the very least, minding your business and not making their lives worse.

People are too proud to give up on these stupid wars, but there is no victory (or defeat for that matter) to be had. Victory in the War on Terror is no more possible than in the War on Drugs.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

I'm going to come right out and say it. The only way you win wars is to attack POPULATIONS and INFRASTRUCTURE. You don't win wars by killing soldiers, or taking out individual military commanders. You can certainly demoralize the enemy by killing soldiers & commanders, but if you never touch the population that produces the soliders or the infrastructure that supports them then you'll never win. It is impossible.

I'll bet anyone here that WP is the same guy who writes his local paper every year to complain about fireworks on the fourth of July. "They scare my dog and make a mess of my neighborhood!"

Which is why advocating for the wholesale slaughter and destruction of a country A, because 19 people from countries B, C, D and E, flew an airplane into a skyscraper is an appalling, disgraceful, revolting thing.

Fifteen of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, and one from Lebanon. Orchestrated by someone who's family has long-standing ties to the Bush family and the CIA. (lest we forget to mention Bush calling off a full-scale attack at Tora Bora).


"In 1978, George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem bin Laden, founded Arbusto Energy, an oil company based in Texas.

Several bin Laden family members invested millions in The Carlyle Group, a private global equity firm based in Washington, DC. The company's senior advisor was Bush's father, former President George H.W. Bush. After news of the bin Laden-Bush connection became public, the elder Bush stepped down from Carlyle.

Interestingly, on Sept. 11, 2001, members of the Carlyle Group - including Bush senior, and his former secretary of state, James Baker - were meeting at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., along with Shafiq bin Laden, another one of Osama bin Laden's brothers.

While all flights were halted following the terrorist attacks, there was one exception made: The White House authorized planes to pick up 140 Saudi nationals, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, living in various cities in the U.S. to bring them back to Saudi Arabia, where they would be safe. They were never interrogated."


>> ^xxovercastxx:

Like it or not, this is fairly true. Not that you have to intentionally target civilians, but you have to be willing to accept massive civilian casualties to hit important targets.

>> ^xxovercastxx:

WP isn't the only one in a pocket reality. He did not advocate anything and, even if he had, he wouldn't be a war criminal. Get a grip.
<em>>> <a rel="nofollow" href='http://videosift.com/video/Afghanistan-We-re-f-ing-losing-this-thing#comment-1025305'>^rougy</a>:<br />
You just advocated committing war crimes.<br> <br> You are a war criminal.<br><br><br><div><div style="margin: 10px; overflow: auto; width: 80%; float: left; position: relative;" class="convoPiece"><a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/video/Afghanistan-We-re-f-ing-losing-this-thing?loadcomm=1#comment-1025300" rel="nofollow"> Winstonfield_Pennypacker said</a>:<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.videosift.com/member/Winstonfield_Pennypacker"><img style="margin: 4px 10px 10px; float: left; width: 40px;" src="http://static1.videosift.com/avatars/w/Winstonfield_Pennypacker-s.jpg" onerror="ph(this)"></a><div style="position: absolute; margin-left: 52px; padding-top: 1px; font-size: 10px;" class="commentarrow">◄</div><div style="padding: 8px; margin-left: 60px; margin-top: 2px; min-height: 30px;" class="nestedComment box">I don't make the facts NR - I just accurately identify them. You win wars by targeting the infrastructures which allow your defined enemy to fight. These infrastructures are usually housed in dense civilian population centers and employ civilians as workers. If you go to war then you will inevitably blow up civilians and their stuff. Am I a fan of it? No. But that's how it is.<br></div></div></div></em>


Fuck you. He advocated targeting civilian populations. That is a war crime.

And you advocated the same thing. You think it's a good idea to kill innocent Afghanis, people who have not attacked the USA, nor will they ever, and that is a war crime as well.

You're both a couple of cunt war criminals and you should be hanged.

Grip on that.

You should both be killed.

Hey, I'm just doing what you're doing, same philosophy, exactly, but from the side of sanity.

See, in order to stop this war, we'll have to kill its supporters.

Well - I'll try my best to list my war-crimes on my way to club baby seals and kick puppies. Perhaps in the interim some can pause to wipe the foam from their lips and engage in a rational discussion. Volump & Rogue in particular are amusing creatures whose unfounded and occasionally baffling ad hominem hyperbole bespeak the denizens of some sort of padded cell and straight-jacket arrangement whose messages are typed by feet between thorazine injections.

Well, in a straight up war I would tend to agree with you, but this is not a war. We are not at war with afghanistan or iraq or iran or basically anywhere in the middle east. It's a "war" against terrorists. There are terrorists inside the United States too, and you wouldn't destroy infrastructure there to get to them, would you?

Very good questions. That's why I mused on the question, "Is the opportunity cost of waging such a war too high?" Ultimately speaking 'radical Islam' is an enemy that is very diverse, diffuse, and is routinely sheltered behind sympathetic but "uninvolved" governments. You can't just go around like a bull in a china shop hitting anything and everything that supports the radicals. So what do you do? Bush (and Obama) have chosen to focus on specific hot-spots and draw the enemy there to fight in a specific theatre. But when you engage an enemy in a theatre and refuse to target their supporting infrastructure (in both material & population) then you fight a losing battle.

Wars not winnable.

Disagree. They are easily winnable. You just have to be willing to do the horrifying. Terrorists have shown they are willing to do what is necessary to win wars.

@Winstonfield_Pennypacker I think you're still not engaging the central criticism several of us are leveling at you -- there's a moral problem with military targeting civilian population centers.

Add to this that in the case of our "war on terror", what we're really involved in here is a sort of international law enforcement effort. We weren't attacked by the military of Afghanistan, and we're not fighting their military now. We're looking for what amount to organized criminals operating within the borders of sovereign foreign nations. We're not looking to destroy the effectiveness of the Afghani people to wage war on us with their military, we're looking to stop a bunch of Timothy McVeighs in a country that doesn't really have any sort of governmental enforcement of law and order.

What you're talking about is a tactic I would argue was only barely justified to stop the Axis powers in WWII, against a country whose only crime is failing to root out criminals within their midst who merely have aspirations of launching an attack on US soil.

Just imagine if Timothy McVeigh had decided to blow up some important building in China instead of the US. Would China be justified in invading us, overthrowing our government and installing a puppet government, then bombing our infrastructure and civilian centers until they felt sure they'd killed every last member of a militia group in the US?

This is me advocating targeting civilians:
>> ^xxovercastxx:

You combat terrorism by providing aide to the people who need it or, at the very least, minding your business and not making their lives worse.

That's the only place in my post where I advocated anything, so I guess that must be it.

It's entirely clear from my post that I am against the continuation of the war in Afghanistan. What I did say is that, in a normal war, against an opposing military, you have to accept that you will kill civilians when attacking some military targets. If you think I'm advocating killing civilians then you really ought to have a look at this because you seem to think "advocate" means "to discuss or mention".

Assuming for argument that I was advocating killing civilians, your argument/tantrum still falls apart because advocating a war crime is not in itself a war crime.

In conclusion: Fuck me? No, no, no, my friend, fuck you.

>> ^rougy:


Fuck you. He advocated targeting civilian populations. That is a war crime.
And you advocated the same thing. You think it's a good idea to kill innocent Afghanis, people who have not attacked the USA, nor will they ever, and that is a war crime as well.
You're both a couple of cunt war criminals and you should be hanged.
Grip on that.
You should both be killed.
Hey, I'm just doing what you're doing, same philosophy, exactly, but from the side of sanity.
See, in order to stop this war, we'll have to kill its supporters.

First off - congrats NR on a rare manifestation... Civil dialog. Here's hoping it becomes a habit rather than an exception.

there's a moral problem with military targeting civilian population centers.

Countries don't put production and infrastructure into "military-only zones". Fuel, electricity, steel, plastic, textiles, technology, computers, food, factories, manufacturing plants, and many other commodities are also critical military supplies. Action that effectively impacts the ability of a government to support a military by necessity will target civilian population centers.

We're looking for what amount to organized criminals operating within the borders of sovereign foreign nations. ...We're looking to stop a bunch of Timothy McVeighs in a country that doesn't really have any sort of governmental enforcement of law and order.

Hm - disagree on semantics. McVeigh was a radical that operated AGAINST the government he was within. Terror groups recruit locally by playing on local prejudices, but their heart and soul (and wallet) belong to some other nation. Case in point with the 9/11 bombers. A more accurate comparison would be your second one, where you hypothesized what a foreign government would do if McVeigh blew up their buildings - let's say Saddam's palace. If TMcV did that then the U.S. would have said, "Oh - terrible tragedy... We condemn it utterly..." but behind closed doors they'd pop champaign and maybe sponsor other radical groups in the hopes of getting a few more TMcVs to crop up.

The use of these kinds of 'plausible deniability' terror-ops forces is becoming more and more common. They can't do large-scale damage without nukes (thank goodness) in most areas. However, in Arab nations there are so many tribal rivalries and bad blood that they can do more than just commit random atrocities. They can topple nations, and win wars. And even in the U.S. they did billions in damage and killed thousands. My opinion is when nations in any way support these radicals they are culpable and have no right or expectation of immunity from a response.