Obama's War Surge

[awepittance]

i like this quote that someone posted in the comments of Salon today

 

Obama is a priori a better man/president/CIC/husband/father/etc than Bush.

Therefore, even if his decisions are exactly the same as Bush's decisions, even if they kill, impoverish, and imperil, the same people Bush did, to the same degree, we are somehow obliged to conclude that the results will be better, because the decision is being made by a better decider.

[kcinsu]

Just a side thought... Those WH party crashers have proven that if someone wants to do something bad enough... They will. TWO people had full access to the leaders of our country... Supposedly the most well protected people on earth. Those guys, while not having guns could have snapped obamas neck if they were trained to do it, and willing to die/ get caught. This is why you can't fight a WAR on terrorism... It's small groups of people that WILL find a way to do what they want.

 

Just a thought

[Alzado]

The knee-jerk anti war crap that's being spouted in this thread is just as bad as the knee-jerk war mongering that we suffered through under the previous administration.

 

You don't have to be a war college strategist to know that when you go into a country and displace its government, you will leave a power vacuum if you just up and pull out without securing the country first. I'm pretty sure that Obama will stress two points tonight: (1) the need to train the Afghan army and police; and (2) the need to establish security.

 

"That's the same thing Bush was calling for in Iraq" you will probably say. True, but they're two completely different conflicts. The Afghan invasion was necessary, unlike the Iraq war. So yes, we need to finish what we started.

[awepittance]

if coalition forces were pulled out now then the entire country would implode.

 

again where is the evidence for this? implode how exactly? be in a worse state than it was before we invaded? even though afghanistan has technically a centralized government, it has almost no control over the populace they operate mostly on tribal law, it's extremely fragmented. I see no logic behind what you are saying.

 

The Afghan invasion was necessary, unlike the Iraq war.

 

you had some interesting points before you said this. Care to explain how the Afghan war is 'necessary' ? you criticize people in here for being knee jerkish, but what is it when someone accepts the logic that 'the afghan war is necessary' and forms opinions based on that?

 

The knee-jerk anti war crap that's being spouted

 

funny to me being anti war can be classified as knee jerk. i lol at this perspective sometimes when people think if they are in the middle or center of a debate and they can 'see both sides' (usually both sides are talking points) they think they are wise and can scoff at those who despise war.

you say that the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan are different and they are, but the rhetoric used to explain why we need to increase is practically exactly the same. This where i split hairs, because yes we could argue all day about how every war is different, and some wars are necessary as you claim. but when it comes down to it Obama is using the same vocabulary, phrasing as George W Bush to rationalize the same thing but in a different country. You hold out some sort of hope that doing the same strategy in Afghanistan will have a positive effect, I personally think it's a terrible idea. And the belief of yours that people who are 'war mongers' are just as bad as 'anti war' people to me screams of a false sense of older aged 'pragmatism' that a lot of people tend to grow into when they stop being passionate about issues. It's like when you are too lazy and not committed enough to take a position on an issue, default to the centrist position.

[kcinsu]

"edit: did you guys just read the recently leaked report from the Pentagon saying that General Tommy Franks and Rumsfeld let Osama Bin Laden go on purpose, and they did not take any steps required to make sure he was caught . hilarious shit "

 

Can you link this please? You'd think this would be front page news...

[delet...]

if coalition forces were pulled out now then the entire country would implode. i think it's quite rude to leave the place in a worse state than it already was. the strategy now is to engage moderate taliban, ie. the brunt of the enemy who could be pursuaded to bat for the other team. s'all about realpolitik

 

how could that devastated country be more imploded than it already is mate .. come on seriously ,.. we illegally attacked the country in the first place .. there is a taliban leadership structure we should be talking and reinstating as the rightful pre-invasion rulers, and there are massive reparations to be paid.

 

end of, under international law, we must stop this bloody crime.

[Guest Adjective]

is this one part of the war on drugs or the war on terror, or did they merge those?

[awepittance]

http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/world-mainmenu-26/asia-mainmenu-33/2427-donald-rumsfeld-let-bin-laden-escape-into-pakistan

 

 

new york times originally ran the story but i can't find the original.

[Guest Rightsidedrive]

I think those are being merged, if not already.

[awepittance]

is this one part of the war on drugs or the war on terror, or did they merge those?

 

they merged them, my friend who served in Afghanistan for over a year came back and the first thing he told me about the war is 'the war in afghanistan has nothing to do with terror it is an extension of the war on drugs'

 

he spent the better part of his time there burning poppy fields, destroying crops, and sieging farms

 

edit: oh and do you remember the US gov propaganda commercials airing around 2002-2005 that would show kids doing drugs and somehow link that to terrorism funding. Like 'you do drugs and you're helping bin laden' it wasn't that cartoonish but it was damn close.

[Guest idrn]

The knee-jerk anti war crap that's being spouted in this thread is just as bad as the knee-jerk war mongering that we suffered through under the previous administration.

 

You don't have to be a war college strategist to know that when you go into a country and displace its government, you will leave a power vacuum if you just up and pull out without securing the country first. I'm pretty sure that Obama will stress two points tonight: (1) the need to train the Afghan army and police; and (2) the need to establish security.

 

"That's the same thing Bush was calling for in Iraq" you will probably say. True, but they're two completely different conflicts. The Afghan invasion was necessary, unlike the Iraq war. So yes, we need to finish what we started.

 

i started writing a proper reply but this sums it up. the vast majority of the populace are in a feudal system where their 'vassals' have varying degrees of allegiance to the taliban, amoungst others. people don't vote or champion their new found 'democracy' because they think that at any minute the twats with the big guns might fuck off and leave them at the mercy of the pious twats with the AK47s. as much as i hate the war and the reasons we went to it, i would be embarrassed if we decided to instead watch the country bloodily regress.

[awepittance]

if coalition forces were pulled out now then the entire country would implode. i think it's quite rude to leave the place in a worse state than it already was. the strategy now is to engage moderate taliban, ie. the brunt of the enemy who could be pursuaded to bat for the other team. s'all about realpolitik

 

how could that devastated country be more imploded than it already is mate .. come on seriously ,..

 

this is what im trying to figure out. A country like Iraq already had an infrastructure that we helped destroy when we invaded it. Afghanistan has no electricity, or running water in most areas, the city Kabul is practically the only place where you will see an advertisement for something. What more damage can be done to the populace and to the country itself if we leave that is not already being done with us there?

[delet...]

is this one part of the war on drugs or the war on terror, or did they merge those?

 

The taliban had stopped the cultivation of poppies for manufacture to virtually zero, then we invaded and invited down warlords that had been funding their actions through heroin and you get an explosion in illicit drug exports form afghanistan.

 

At the same time a country being quite negatively effected by this trade, iran. Is being completely ignored when they offer to help sort out the internal political problems of afghanistan. No because we in the imperial west know so much better than a neighbour does.

 

Ultimately we have to look beyond the groundless rhetoric justifying the endless and bloody occupation to the underlying motivation behind it, one indeed being the containment of iran as someone stated, which would seem to be mostly in the strategic intrests of that close US ally israel.

 

anyway .. i'm sure i'll be back for more .. but i'm thread hopping ..laeta

[Guest idrn]

is this one part of the war on drugs or the war on terror, or did they merge those?

 

they merged them, my friend who served in Afghanistan for over a year came back and the first thing he told me about the war is 'the war in afghanistan has nothing to do with terror it is an extension of the war on drugs'

 

he spent the better part of his time there burning poppy fields, destroying crops, and sieging farms

 

edit: oh and do you remember the US gov propaganda commercials airing around 2002-2005 that would show kids doing drugs and somehow link that to terrorism funding. Like 'you do drugs and you're helping bin laden' it wasn't that cartoonish but it was damn close.

 

i must've been grossly misinformed because i thought we didn't burn their poppy fields. essentially because it's not cool to fuck with your hard-working all afghanistani family just trying to get by.

[awepittance]

i don't know how wide spread it is , but he personally helped burn many of them

[awepittance]

 

 

i started writing a proper reply but this sums it up. the vast majority of the populace are in a feudal system where their 'vassals' have varying degrees of allegiance to the taleban, amoungst others. people don't vote or champion their new found democracy because they think that at any minute the twats with the big guns might fuck off and leave them at the mercy of the pious twats with the AK47s. as much as i hate the war and the reasons we went to it, i would be embarrassed if we decided to instead watch the country bloodily regress.

 

i still haven't seen any convincing evidence that it will 'bloodily regress' once american and NATO forces leave. please help me understand this perspective better

too often this logic is thrown around as if its already universally accepted fact i feel.

[delet...]

i don't know how wide spread it is , but he personally helped burn many of them

 

 

They are burning fields. But one suspects given the buoyant export market, that the right people/areas are being protected. You might recall that karzai's brother was implicated in the trade.

 

What is happening is that in the machinery of the US government in afghanistan you have many competing interests. Many differing policy templates being implemented at once. So the DEA are ruffing up villagers, burning fields, blowing up depots, whilst at the same time consular and intelligence officials smooth the way for their favoured clients to carry on with business as usual.

[Guest Adjective]

is this one part of the war on drugs or the war on terror, or did they merge those?

 

they merged them, my friend who served in Afghanistan for over a year came back and the first thing he told me about the war is 'the war in afghanistan has nothing to do with terror it is an extension of the war on drugs'

 

he spent the better part of his time there burning poppy fields, destroying crops, and sieging farms

 

edit: oh and do you remember the US gov propaganda commercials airing around 2002-2005 that would show kids doing drugs and somehow link that to terrorism funding. Like 'you do drugs and you're helping bin laden' it wasn't that cartoonish but it was damn close.

yes, i was thinking of those commercials when i posted actually.

 

i had a longer reply but i'm sleep depped and it sounded CRAZY. anyway my mind was boggled by stats saying 90% of the world's opiates originate there

[Guest idrn]

 

 

i started writing a proper reply but this sums it up. the vast majority of the populace are in a feudal system where their 'vassals' have varying degrees of allegiance to the taleban, amoungst others. people don't vote or champion their new found democracy because they think that at any minute the twats with the big guns might fuck off and leave them at the mercy of the pious twats with the AK47s. as much as i hate the war and the reasons we went to it, i would be embarrassed if we decided to instead watch the country bloodily regress.

 

i still haven't seen any convincing evidence that it will 'bloodily regress' once american and NATO forces leave. please help me understand this perspective better

too often this logic is thrown around as if its already universally accepted fact i feel.

 

nah you're right, i can't find any peer-reviewed journals that say the taliban would dislike people who collaborated with the occupiers.

[Guest Benedict Cumberbatch]

1. war is bad

2. peace is good

3. drugs are bad

4. oil is good

 

 

 

 

 

all i can say is that i hope someone somewhere learns from this that you shouldnt invade a country without a decent/realistic exit strategy, if at all ever. what a fucking mess. but i'm sure all of this has happened before and will happen again and we learnt fuck all

[Alzado]

how could you not think the Afghan war was necessary? Before we dispersed them across the region, Al Qaeda was based there, having been given safe harbor by the Taliban. Those are facts. Had we gone in full throttle, rather than half assing it with one eye on Iraq, we might have gotten Bin Laden and stamped out the Taliban initially. Now, the Taliban still exists and we must deal with them. The Taliban is not the enemy unless they are in step with Al Qaeda. So I have no problem with the Taliban governing the country again, as backward as they are.

 

One point that I would agree with is the notion that we responded to 9/11 from a military posture rather than from a law enforcement perspective. Maybe we would have been better off going on international manhunts and bringing these people to justice (think Team America, World Police). But we would only be effective in countries where the government let us operate there. I'm pretty sure that they would have been able to find refuge in Afghanistan, Yemen, North Africa and other places hostile to the U.S. So, I'm not so sure that this would have been better than simply invading Afghanistan like we did.

 

Awepittance, how would you have responded to 9/11?

[awepittance]

its interesting it's taken over 8 years for there to be a legitimate debate in this country as to whether or not staying in Afghanistan is a good idea. For almost the whole Bush administration the only anti war protests i saw were entirely devoted to the war in Iraq.

 

anyways here is a good recent documentary called 'Obama's War' about the recent state of Afghanistan -

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/obamaswar/view/ its about an hour long and shows some soldiers dying in battle, its pretty heart wrenching to watch.

 

and below is one of the most in depth articles i've seen on why the recent rationale for Afghanistan makes no sense

 

By GARY LEUPP

 

There are now at present some 68,000 U.S. troops and 42,000 allied forces occupying Afghanistan, in league with the Northern Alliance warlords and the corrupt and feeble Karzai regime in Kabul. President Obama clearly wishes to increase the figure and will announce before an audience of West Point cadets Tuesday that he will add over 30,000 more while pushing the Europeans to add 10,000. This will bring the total number of occupation forces to around the level of the Soviet deployment at its peak in the 1980s.

 

The Soviets were trying to protect the secular government in Afghanistan and to discourage Islamic fundamentalism, a potential threat to the neighboring Soviet Central Asian republics such as Uzbekistan. What is Obama trying to do?

 

Because make no mistake about it, this is Barack Obama’s war now. With this announcement he will have personally increased the force in Afghanistan by over 50,000 troops in response to appeals from his generals.

 

Obama’s mantra about the conflict in Afghanistan is that it is a “war of necessity.” But this is really just a version of the neocon “War on Terror” trope, which is to say that it implies that it is the natural, reasonable retaliatory response to the 9-11 attacks. (They started it, after all, so we have to take the war to them.)

 

But neocon strategy has always required the simplistic conflation of disparate phenomena, and the exploitation of public ignorance and fear, in the execution of policy. Who are they, after all? The invasion of Iraq required the Big Lie that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11. The earlier invasion of Afghanistan required the clever sleight-of-hand by which the mainly Saudi Arab but international al-Qaeda was equated with the purely Afghan Taliban. “We don’t distinguish between terrorists and the governments that support them,” Bush declared.

 

This was almost a boast that the U.S. would be boldly ignorant as a matter of public policy, and a warning to the empirical rationalists of the world that the White House was in the grip of truly simplistic minds and would indeed shamelessly exploit popular Islamophobia as they pleased even as they made elaborate public gestures in support of religious tolerance. (The calculated message was: Be scared, world, because we’ve got cowboys in power, and hell, we can get kinda crazy when we’re pissed!)

 

The fact is, there was and is a difference between al-Qaeda, an international jihadist organization that wants to reestablish a global Caliphate and confront the U.S., and the Taliban, which wanted to stabilize Afghanistan under a harsh interpretation of the Sharia but maintain a working relationship with the U.S. And now, eight years after being toppled, the Taliban are back with a vengeance, demonstrating that they have a real social base. Moreover a Pakistani Taliban has emerged across the border as a direct consequence of the U.S. invasion.

 

Any number of intelligence reports have pointed out the obvious: more troops just breed more “insurgency.”

 

Obama’s national security advisor, Gen. James Jones, has stated clearly, “The Al Qaeda presence [in Afghanistan] is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.” If there had been a “necessity” to destroy al-Qaeda in Afghanistan that matter has been taken care of. What does Obama think necessary to achieve now?

 

I imagine he will argue that the Taliban must not be allowed to return to power. But doesn’t that mean implicitly acknowledging that they have genuine roots in Afghan, particularly Pashtun society? The best military estimates put the number of Taliban militants at no more than 25,000, with fully-armed fighters around 3,000. There are about 100,000 soldiers in the Afghan National Army (ANA) in addition to all the foreign occupying troops. ANA forces are often described as of “poor quality,” meaning they are illiterate, and mainly attracted by the money. But the Talibs are also generally illiterate and many of them fight largely for the pay as well. Why is it whole provinces like Nuristan have come under Taliban control despite all the counterinsurgency manpower?

 

Why in attempting to “secure” Helmand province in an anti-Taliban offensive over the summer did the U.S. forces discover that their ANA allies included almost no Pashtuns but were disproportionately Tajiks? Why were U.S. forces unable to dislodge the Taliban from Marjeh, a city of about 50,000 people and hub of the opium trade?

 

The problem isn’t too few forces. Were that the case the increasing number of forces over the last several years would have produced a better, not worse, security situation. The problem is the premise that imperialists can re-colonize a country under the pretense of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency or liberation in the face of mass resistance.

 

But why is Obama so intent on staying the course in Afghanistan? What is so important about Afghan policy that the Man of Change can’t change it, even when 57 per cent of the people of the U.S. say they want out?

 

He will say on Tuesday evening, as eloquently as he and his speechmakers can manage the task, that we simply cannot afford to let Islamist extremists back into power so that they might harbor terrorists who’ll attack the United States.

 

But recall there was a time when the U.S. State Department was hell-bent to drive a secular government out of Afghanistan---one that wanted to educate girls and establish local clinics and curb the power of the tribal chiefs and mullahs---and determined to assist the most profoundly reactionary forces in Afghanistan with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar at their head in establishing an alternative Islamist regime. Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski thought the pro-Soviet Saur Revolution in 1978, in which left-wing Afghan Army officers staged a coup and the Democratic People’s Party seized power, producing a backlash from the mullahs and tribal chiefs, was a golden Cold War opportunity.

 

Even before Soviet forces crossed the border in December 1979, the CIA was organizing Afghan and international forces to challenge the leftish government and Brzezinski was urging the fighters to view their struggle as a jihad or Holy War. This continued of course through the eight bloody years of the Reagan administration. The jihadis won, Washington’s friends established a regime in 1993, immediately fell out among themselves plunging the country into Tajik-Pashtun civil war involving the bombing of Kabul (hitherto spared in the fighting). Washington politely distanced itself, having lost interest with the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving ally Pakistan to deal with the mess.

 

Pakistan opted to support the Taliban, a force which against the motley backdrop of opium-dealing, boy-raping warlords seemed attractive by virtue of its reputation for moral probity if nothing else. Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto later explained Islamabad needed to embrace the Taliban to maintain the trade lines through Central Asia. The U.S. kept its distance from the harshly fundamentalist group, which took power in 1996, withholding diplomatic recognition. But it was historically responsible for its inception and the descent of Afghanistan into the disaster of medieval reaction that began with the stoning of adulterous women in soccer stadiums and culminated with the blasting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001.

 

The sins of U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan are just staggering. Imagine what might have happened had the U.S. just stayed out of Afghan affairs from the late 1970s and allowed that experiment in secular. reformist government in a highly conservative Muslim society to take its course without billions in arms to precisely the sort of fighters who are being vilified as “Islamic extremists” and “terrorists” today. There may have never been an international CIA-coordinated mujahadeen movement, no young Osama bin Laden persuaded to suspend his studies to head up Arab holy warriors in coordination with the CIA, no total collapse of Afghan society, no “blowback.” Unfortunately people in this country are generally clueless about the recent history of Southwest Asia and the role of U.S. administrations in producing the very problems about which they complain. (I don’t include Obama among these; he knows what he’s doing. Hence total moral culpability.)

continued here - http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp11302009.html

[awepittance]

 

Awepittance, how would you have responded to 9/11?

 

i would have not rushed and gone to war without first investigating the facts. a proper criminal investigation not a 'war on terror' imo would have been the proper response to an event. The plans were on paper to invade Afghanistan when Bush got into office, long before 9/11. Would i have invaded an entire country to find one man who we suspect committed the 9/11 attacks? absolutely not. I would have at the very least had talks with the Taliban. Have you seen the video footage from the day of 9/11 of the world press speaking with Taliban leaders and asking them if they are going to turn over bin laden? Multiple times the Talbian said 'we will turn over osama bin laden if you provide us with evidence' , since the US knew all along that it wanted to invade afghanistan the country and not just go after Bin laden it ignored the offer of extradition of Bin Laden.

[awepittance]

how could you not think the Afghan war was necessary? Before we dispersed them across the region, Al Qaeda was based there, having been given safe harbor by the Taliban. Those are facts.

 

these are not exactly facts. Al Queda is not 'based' anywhere, the myth that somehow their headquarters is in Afghanistan is an assertion not a fact. Even the idea that Al Queda is a cohesive organization, with any organizational structure is not a fact, its an assertion that goes unquestioned. Taliban is no more responsible for giving 'safe harbor' to 'al queda' than the USA was for letting hijackers take flight lessons in florida. The Talbian in most of their public official statements when mentioning al Queda usually do not have very nice things to say, its common knowledge right now that the Taliban actually resents members of al queda for being the spark that led to the Taliban loosing power

 

this whole conflation of the two groups, the Taliban and Al Queda seems to be a very effective way to play on our jingoism. The less we know, the more ignorant we are about the actual groups, the more likely we are to believe they are in leagues with each other as one evil terrorist force that we must destroy.

[Alzado]

how would a criminal investigation work? what if countries such as afghanistan, yemen and Rwanda refused to extradite terrorists? then what? you really think they would have handed people over to us?

 

so if they refuse to extradite, we would face the choice of going in and getting him or being embarrassed on the world stage. invasion was the right move. we could have really hit them hard had we done it right.