What say the board? Afghanistan - time to withdraw?

[Vympel]

I'm not bothering with a poll. Just because.

I say yes. The endeavour is a waste of time, the 'it's a haven for terrorists' argument is a joke anyway (what, they can't train anywhere else in the world, they need the Taliban in Afghanistan?) and the Mayor of Kabul is illegitimate.

[KroLazuxy_87]

They can certainly train in other countries, which they are doing and will continue doing. The benefits they receive from the Taliban is not only space to train though. It is also funding, food, public support from the people, and some security. I feel that if we don't deal with the Afghanistan situation now and Muslim extremists use it as a haven for planning attacks, something like the World Trade Center attacks or the three day siege at Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai will happen again and again until we're forced to once again confront the terrorists on their home turf.

I have absolutely no love for war or ever sending troops into harm's way, but they have the training and the support to handle the situation /better/ than any civilian that finds himself or herself the victim of a terrorist attack. My best friend since high school is in the US Army Reserves and the prospect of him having to go there scares the shit out of me. I'm confident though that he and everyone else he serves with have been adequately prepared for the worse and he has a great support structure here at home.

Do I /want/ for us to be in Afghanistan? Fuck no. However I must conclude that it's a /need/ for the international community to straighten out the Afghanistan mess if the global community hopes to progress to the level it should be able to.
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Something that I thought of that didn't really fit with the above:

I have a good friend who's parents are Iranian immigrants and he of course speaks Farsi. While talking to him about Afghanistan he compared their dialect of Farsi to a fat retarded southern US hick trying to speak English. They're such an isolated country, and have been for so long, their language has obviously morphed and taken on it's own character. This, to me, illuminates some of the problems in the country's society as a whole as well.

[Sea Skimmer]

Its be really really really stupid to fight for eight years and then withdrawal without having ever even once launched a coordinated offensive on both sides of the boarder. This has never happened in 30 years of fighting in Afghanistan. That is a rather huge factor in why its been able to go on so long.

[Rye]

I think it'd be wrong to leave the women to the wolves.

[Aaron]

I think it'd be wrong to leave the women to the wolves.

It's kind of late for that, things have already regressed quite far back, see the recent "rape law" for an example among others. Unfortunately our attempt to "fix" Afghanistan was fucked from the start. We should have either put them under military governorship ala Japan or handed them a Constitution pre-written without all the Islamic crap they put in theirs.

We'll have to pull out eventually unless we either force them to reform their government and laws or do what Sea Skimmer suggests and seriously clean out the shit heads on either side of the Pakistani border, it'll just continue until we get tired of it and leave otherwise. And the Taliban know that.

[Sriad]

Way back in the days before Bush and 9-11, when I was a militant teen forwarder of radically progressive e-mail, I supported aggressive (read: economic sanctions don't work on people who're already poorer than dirt) action against the Taliban based on their cartoonishly evil treatment of minorities, women, and any philosophy that wasn't fundamentalist Islam.

None of those reasons for involvement have changed. Atheist Rhetorical God knows I'm not a fan of war, but the alternative to continuation is absolute complicity in the creation of an immediately failing nation-state in the most politically sensitive area of the world. If we pull out now, the Karzai government will fail almost instantly and collapse into a seething mass of corrupt looters trying to seize whatever they can, while regional warlords maneuver for control of drug trafficking and local power. ("But isn't that what we have now lol?" Please no straw men this early in the thread.) After the fighting is over, you know who'll be on top? That's right, viciously anti-Western militant Islamic fundamentalists. Iran has problems of its own, but does anybody want a multinational tumor of fundamentalism worming metastitic tentacles into Pakistan and Iraq like some kind of... I don't know, Axis of Evil?

Now that we have a Commander in Chief with two brain cells to rub together, initial confidence in the "hearts and minds" theory of anti-terrorist warfare, and a willingness to commit something like the level of resources needed to establish security we're seeing some progress, even though a lot of it takes the form of realizing "holy shit we've got a long way left to go". Before Afghanistan can function as any kind of nation except a dictatorship there are a lot of hurdles to clear and no one knows what a perfect solution looks, like least of all myself, but that is not an excuse to charge headlong into the stupidest solution.

I'm not a blind ideologist; maybe it will prove impossible to overcome so many obstacles in less than decades of occupation. But I think that has not yet been proven.

[Solauren]

Personally, I think the entire thing has been handled horribly from the start.

At this point, I'd announce a 'we are withdrawing on a fixed date, starting on earlier fixed date. Anyone that wants to come with us can.' withdrawl. Any women and children that want to come, are whisked out of the country immediately.

[ray245]

I think it'd be wrong to leave the women to the wolves.

It's kind of late for that, things have already regressed quite far back, see the recent "rape law" for an example among others. Unfortunately our attempt to "fix" Afghanistan was fucked from the start. We should have either put them under military governorship ala Japan or handed them a Constitution pre-written without all the Islamic crap they put in theirs.

We'll have to pull out eventually unless we either force them to reform their government and laws or do what Sea Skimmer suggests and seriously clean out the shit heads on either side of the Pakistani border, it'll just continue until we get tired of it and leave otherwise. And the Taliban know that.

Then again, I would think that such an idea isn't going to be popular among the voters in the US.

[The Spartan]

Personally, I think the entire thing has been handled horribly from the start.

At this point, I'd announce a 'we are withdrawing on a fixed date, starting on earlier fixed date. Anyone that wants to come with us can.' withdrawl. Any women and children that want to come, are whisked out of the country immediately.

Yeah. I don't think that's going to go as smoothly as you seem to think. In fact, I'm guessing there will be numerous women either being forced to leave their children behind and/or being murdered and massive riots from armed men whose basic message is, "You're not talking our property."

Edit:

Then again, I would think that such an idea isn't going to be popular among the voters in the US.

It's not. At least, not yet.

[Aaron]

Then again, I would think that such an idea isn't going to be popular among the voters in the US.

Which idea, military governorship, offensive, pre-written constitution?

[Knife]

I'm not seeing how we can win there. After eight years, we don't have enough will left to flood the country with enough troops to flush out the Taliban and stabilize the government and ditch all of the corruption and even if we did that, we'd be in the middle of all the groups not very happy with us. Add on top of that the notion that not all dirt poor Muslims in the world are really a little American trying to get out and go to a Walmart we build for them.

That, and after eight years, I'm not sure what the mission is anymore. Kill AQ and OB? Destroy the Taliban, make Afganastan into American lite? We've already seriously scattered AQ though I'd like to have OB's head on a pike outside the Whitehouse. Taliban was destroyed but is now re surging and I don't think we could ever make Afganastan into America lite.

So, I guess, my position is that if they want to do one more coordinated push and offensive like Skimmer suggests, fine. I'm for that, but you are never going to kill all the poor desert goat farmers so your never going to get rid of all the potential AQ and Taliban forces. If you want to cull the heard one last time and perhaps make a push to pick up some high rank AQ dudes including the head cheese, I'm fine with that but we have accept at some point that we can't capture some mythical army that really doesn't exist nor can we build a modern state in Afganastan.

[Vympel]

Indeed- how is this war supposed to be won? Just by killing lots and lots of Afghan insurgents? Because that's a shitty plan.

[ray245]

I'm not seeing how we can win there. After eight years, we don't have enough will left to flood the country with enough troops to flush out the Taliban and stabilize the government and ditch all of the corruption and even if we did that, we'd be in the middle of all the groups not very happy with us. Add on top of that the notion that not all dirt poor Muslims in the world are really a little American trying to get out and go to a Walmart we build for them.

That, and after eight years, I'm not sure what the mission is anymore. Kill AQ and OB? Destroy the Taliban, make Afganastan into American lite? We've already seriously scattered AQ though I'd like to have OB's head on a pike outside the Whitehouse. Taliban was destroyed but is now re surging and I don't think we could ever make Afganastan into America lite.

So, I guess, my position is that if they want to do one more coordinated push and offensive like Skimmer suggests, fine. I'm for that, but you are never going to kill all the poor desert goat farmers so your never going to get rid of all the potential AQ and Taliban forces. If you want to cull the heard one last time and perhaps make a push to pick up some high rank AQ dudes including the head cheese, I'm fine with that but we have accept at some point that we can't capture some mythical army that really doesn't exist nor can we build a modern state in Afganastan.

From what I understand, people in Afghanistan are still willing to support the US troops down there.

[Sriad]

Indeed- how is this war supposed to be won? Just by killing lots and lots of Afghan insurgents? Because that's a shitty plan.

Anything like "winning" is going to be fiendishly complex, but unless I've badly misjudged Obama and current top brass are smart enough to realize it. Also, if we pull out and see Afghanistan collapse with anything like the speed I expect, the Democratic Party might as well just open their wrists now and save us the cost of the next two or three elections. I think Obama realizes this too.

[Vendetta]

Anything like "winning" is going to be fiendishly complex, but unless I've badly misjudged Obama and current top brass are smart enough to realize it.

Now would be a good time to define "winning" in Afghanistan. What, exactly, would constitute winning?

Before you can achieve an objective, you need to know what it is.

[Sriad]

Anything like "winning" is going to be fiendishly complex, but unless I've badly misjudged Obama and current top brass are smart enough to realize it.

Now would be a good time to define "winning" in Afghanistan. What, exactly, would constitute winning?

Before you can achieve an objective, you need to know what it is.

Man, I'm so too tired right now.

Not surrendering the challenge, just saying you won't get an answer for a couple hours.

[Sea Skimmer]

Indeed- how is this war supposed to be won? Just by killing lots and lots of Afghan insurgents? Because that's a shitty plan.

You say that as if the fucking war and killing ends if the US leaves. It does not, instead the Afghan government collapses, everyone who even slightly aided the US is tortured and murdered and then pressure on the Pakistani government increases eighty fold as the militias now have a country sized base area again and not just some remote mountains. Wars are about killing plain and simple; you kill the other side until he no longer finds it worthwhile to die. If you can do other things to lower the threshold then so much the better but you cannot get around that reality. We killed the Japanese into a surrender, and had a higher level of fanaticism then the Taliban, most of whom are highly uninterested in dieing, certainly a much more disciplined and consistent one.

[erik_t]

I've been having this conversation a lot recently.

At this point, I see nothing to be gained by staying in, other than prolonging the existence of some measure of national pride. The best-case scenario I can imagine is a perpetually-bought-off metastable Afghani Diem who doesn't even have control of anything outside bubbles around Kabul and Kandahar. It's not obvious to me that the people in the countryside have any interest in central government, nor how we could bring it to them even if they wanted it. And if we did, it's not obvious how it could be made anything but profoundly fragile.

Like Knife, I'm willing to listen to plans like Skimmer's, but only in the context of allied forces trending towards leaving. I'm certainly sympathetic to the "you break it, you bought it" argument, but... we tried to buy it, and as near as I can tell, we can't. That's damned unfortunate, but looking forward, what alternatives do we have?

[Gil Hamilton]

I thought the definition of war was "The use of military force in order to achieve political objectives", not merely "fill the ground with people you don't like until they give up". What are the political objectives in Afghanistan and will they actually be solved by merely killing lots and lots of Taliban? Certainly, the Taliban deserve it and I can't argue with the justness blowing them away, singly or in droves, but I'm not convinced that its accomplishing anything because it only addresses a little of what's wrong with Afghanistan.

Killing Taliban has little to do with dealing with the warlords that run much of Afghanistan, many of whom we've only gotten to play nice by outright paying them off and ignoring their little fiefdoms. It won't fix the fact that opium for heroin is still one of the biggest crops that Afghanistan has, and the problems that the opium trade causes. Without dealing with these things, Afghanistan is never going to be stable and the Taliban are just going to keep regenerating.

[Edi]

The main problem is that Afghanistan was neglected and left to fester early on when Bush and Cheney and others got their hard-on for fucking up in Iraq, which translates directly to the current situation where all the energy and resources were directed to the Iraqi clusterfuck and now nobody wants to do what would be necessary to fix things in Afghanistan. That's assuming it's even possible anymore.

It might be possible if given enough resources, but the political will to provide those, I don't see it manifesting.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I think unless the US is willing to commit a lot more efforts into say urbanizing the country, nothing much can be done. Everything done so far feels cosmetic, and not solving some of the fundamental problems, such as the fact that the country is very ungovernable in its current state. The country itself is, in some ways, similar to Pakistan where the latter has many areas where tribes ruled by fiat and often independent of the central government. However, Afghanistan has a weak central government that now has its authority damaged by the recent election, as if things aren't bad enough.

[erik_t]

The main problem is that Afghanistan was neglected and left to fester early on when Bush and Cheney and others got their hard-on for fucking up in Iraq, which translates directly to the current situation where all the energy and resources were directed to the Iraqi clusterfuck and now nobody wants to do what would be necessary to fix things in Afghanistan. That's assuming it's even possible anymore.

It might be possible if given enough resources, but the political will to provide those, I don't see it manifesting.

Not to defend Cheney/Bush, but I think it's a huge huge stretch to say that the main problem was ignoring the place in favor of Iraq.

[Themightytom]

The main problem is that Afghanistan was neglected and left to fester early on when Bush and Cheney and others got their hard-on for fucking up in Iraq, which translates directly to the current situation where all the energy and resources were directed to the Iraqi clusterfuck and now nobody wants to do what would be necessary to fix things in Afghanistan. That's assuming it's even possible anymore.

It might be possible if given enough resources, but the political will to provide those, I don't see it manifesting.

Not to defend Cheney/Bush, but I think it's a huge huge stretch to say that the main problem was ignoring the place in favor of Iraq.

Well ideologically we would have had a stronger campaign, both to the people in Afghanistan and to the world at large. We might have a larger degree of support from others if we were legitimately weeding out terrorism and addressing a sneak attack that killed thousands. We also dumped considerable resources into Iraq that couldd have been well used in Afghanistan.

[Mr Bean]

Stay till we get Bin Laden, then pull out saying the jobs done. The only way we can win a good PR victory is to drop or capture(much better alive) Bin Laden then start pulling out and switch to aid only. If Afghanistan goes back to being a third world shit hole, sorry but oh well. I'd rather have a friendly Pakistan than a dozen America Junior Afghanistan.

[erik_t]

Not to defend Cheney/Bush, but I think it's a huge huge stretch to say that the main problem was ignoring the place in favor of Iraq.

Well ideologically we would have had a stronger campaign, both to the people in Afghanistan and to the world at large. We might have a larger degree of support from others if we were legitimately weeding out terrorism and addressing a sneak attack that killed thousands. We also dumped considerable resources into Iraq that couldd have been well used in Afghanistan.

All of these things are true, but how does (eg) worldwide political support for our efforts compare to the basic problem of bringing central government to a large rugged wilderness of a country that has never really had it and does not appear to want it?