I'm curious as to what people think about the war in Afghanistan?

Should we ramp it up or get out?

Outside of the cities do the people really give a shit who is in charge of the country?

If the people don't give a shit should we?

Has anyone really ever been in charge?

What terrorist attacks against the US can be planned in Afghanistan that can't be planned in Pakistan, do they need Afghanistan to do that?

Is Pakistan where the real issue is?

I think we should hand off the security of the country to the Afghan people as soon as possible, and get the heck out of there. Continue to monitor them, and always have the option to roll in, if someone like Osama Bin Laden pops back up. Somehow we have to get the Afghan people to realize that the extremists are bad for them, in the long run.

And Pakistan should be scrutinized as well. The border between those 2 countries is porous at best. People wanting to do bad things, in either place, can easily slip into the other to avoid being caught. The nuclear weapons Pakistan has makes the situation even more precarious. Those falling into the wrong hands spells a big problem for the rest of the world.

Love how those who blasted Bush for not listening to his Generals in regards to how to wage war are now playing the same card themselves.

We give the General the 40k troops he's asked for...period.

There is no cure for Afghanistan, as all "cures" for Afghanistan involve destroying our alleged ally Pakistan. We would need to keep a strong military presence there for hundreds of years. Or force everyone into "re-education camps" to turn them into some other sort of people.

Should we leave (as every other invading nation has), they will revert back to tribalism. Pakistan has a vested interest in keeping Afghanistn weak and incapable of leadership. This goes back to the Durand Line which was a "treaty" that allegedly gave about 1/2 of Afghanistan to India. Every AF government has renounced it as a forgery. And any strong central AF government would try to take back the land which would mean that Pakistan would lose about 2/3 of their territory if the AF borders went back to the pre-durand-line borders (among other things AF would reach the ocean, and PK would lose the huge port that the Chinese are building for them). The Taliban were trained, funded and promoted by ISI to destabilize AF and to keep it from having any sort of strong government.

As an example of how vigorously PK is willing to go to keep every square inch of land, one need look only to the Kashmir region.

As for the issue with bin Laden, the government could not have "turned him over" even if they wanted to. The tribal chiefs/warlords had too much power and could twart any sort of law enforcement. When someone belly aches about "states rights" you should remember Afghanistan and Somalia, because that's the natural end-state of a nation too weak to enforce laws.

So why does Afghanistan matter for us? What is the advantage of us being there? What is the consequence of us not being there?

I saw something funny on a Colbert report recently. I think it was Genghis Khan that he was pointing out, with a map, had conquered this huge amount of territory and sitting there unconquered was Afghanistan.

Well, that's not entirely accurate, but the whole region has been generally considered ungovernable for thousands of years. The Persians and various Indian states nominally "controlled" it, in one case building a fairly significant road from southern India to the Middle East through it (this road is actually still there) and GK did in fact "conquer" it but not in the sense of actually subjugating it.

And we were there for an oil pipeline -- Bush/Cheney had plans to invade Afghanistan for this purpose well before 9/11, depending on some documents possibly before they were even elected. Who knows if we've given up on that though.

You're thinking of the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Afghanistan_Pipeline). Much of the reason for this pipeline to exist is to deprive Russia of gas revenues (Turkmenistani gas is exported on Russian pipelines). Also an equivalent pipeline shipping natural gas from Iran to Pakistan and India keeps getting blocked by the US as that would allow Iran to get some money that Cheney's buddies can't have.

As repeatedly demonstrated in the Caucasian mountains, any yahoo with an RPG can shut off a gas pipeline. No pipeline across Afghanistan would operate even as much as 25% of the time because there would be no security force capable of guarding it from random acts of violence. Any warlord could easily demand money and shut down the pipeline if their demands were not met.

Afghanistan wasn't on the list of places for the necons to invade before 911. About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” -- meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office -- “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!” Source (http://www.democracynow.org/2007/3/2/gen_wesley_clark_weighs_presidential_bid)

So. That list in alphabetical order:
Iran: Enemy of US and Israel. World's largest reserves of light crude oil.
Iraq: Enemy of Israel. World's second largest reserves of light crude oil. Attack required by Left Behind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Behind_(series)).
Lebanon: Enemy of Israel.
Libya: Enemy of the US and Israel.
Somalia: Attack required by Left Behind.
Sudan: Attack required by Left Behind.
Syria: Enemy of Israel.

For those who have never read it, Left Behind is a very popular evangelical snuff porn series.

Afghanistan's cropland is very poor. Consequently, they used to produce something like 80% of the world's opium. Recently, that's more like > 90% of the world's opium. That much increase in supply (the Taliban originally tried to eliminate it and came close to doing so in 2001) means that the wholesale price of Heroin coming into Los Angeles is down around 45-50 cents per dose. Growing opium yields about 10x the income for farmers that growing wheat or apricots can do. Plus, UG99 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ug99#Ug99) is ravaging the wheat fields in that part of the world (a stem rust, it drops crop yields about 80-100%, and the wheat production of Iran, the 'stans and India constitute about 25% of the world's wheat production). In addition, coercing farmers into growing opium turns entire communities into "outlaws" as their interests are no longer aligned with the interests of any national government. The vast corruption of the recent election (which as I understand it was far more widespread and egregious than even Mugabe's so-called reelection) further drove the Afghan people from any sort of interest in supporting the national government in Kabul.

As with many of our other conflicts during the last 100 years, if we are not willing to do what needs to be done to settle that region, and the enemy hiding across the border in Pakistan, we should leave.

Get out.

Either shit or get off the pot.

We either need to commit the troops to get the job done, or GTFO of town and let them get back to killing each other and focus on keeping it inside their borders and not our own.

That's going to be a hard sell when bin Ladin is still at large.

This is a pretty interesting read. It can be applied here.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-warren/ithe-week-in-magazinesi-o_b_301376.html

We've fucked it up royally, now we have a responsibility to hike up deployment levels and stay until the job has finished. Creating the situation and pulling out because we've had enough would be dishonourable - and catastrophic.

What exactly is the mission? It was to hunt down Osama, and now its shifted to protecting the afghan people from the Taliban? Wan't to be occupiers for ever? When exactly can you claim you have won?

Your right though the General on the ground would like 500K troops there, time for other countries of the UN to stretch their finiancials and morale of its people...and put in like quanities of money and people.

We've fucked it up royally, now we have a responsibility to hike up deployment levels and stay until the job has finished. Creating the situation and pulling out because we've had enough would be dishonourable - and catastrophic.

Define finish.

Fuck the honor part, there isn't an ounce of honor in war. Afghanistan is like Vietnam in the sense that we can control the cities but never the countryside, and the people out in the villages simply look at us as invaders.

Watch the video below, take note of a few things. The troops are looking for heroin production, the fire they are taking is coming from nearby houses (likely it is the local farmers) regardless of the superior outgoing fire the locals keep up the fight even after an airstrike.

I will bet the locals see their income being attacked, they defend and the airstrike destroying their houses just pisses them off even more. Did I mention that they probably also have no idea where Kabul is.



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