Oops. Cut and paste problems after my/. preview/edit box became unresponsive. Chop away the 2nd paragraph starting at "If you enter a country" and finishing at "This isn't true".
How many soldiers are ever court martialed? It's a vanishingly small number. Even in some of the most blatant cases of murder, where there is clear cut video evidence of war crimes, military personnel have gone unpunished (e.g. the soldier filmed executing a wounded man in a building in Fallujah; the chopper crew who shot up a family providing aid to a badly wounded man - against the rules of war, including the US military's own ROE).
We can have no faith at all in a military justice system which depends so heavily on the military to police itself - starting with (typically) requiring officers to make the decision to refer incidents about their own men to the military police.
After _WE_ did the _real_ work (the thinking), and developed the resources, and turned it into an ever-producing gravy train, THEN the knuckle-dragging locals start getting very upset about their "soverign rights". But they don't "soverignly" tear the pumping rigs and derricks and everything else down, do they?
Wow, nice case of racism you got there. The sweeping generalisations are a classic touch too.
Regardless, I'm not the one who brought it up as a point of defense.
You said there was no alternative. However, that's clearly incorrect. There is an obvious alternative: stay the fuck out of nation-building, particularly in a country that is far from your understanding, and don't fight to prop up a puppet government in Kabul - in the process killing many civilians and prolonging the violence that will kill many more! (I can't believe that 2.5 decades odd after we watched the Soviets give up on propping up their puppet government and drive back home, that the US is now following in their footsteps).
How would that change the argument though?
How can you have a meaningful discussion about Afghanistan and ignore the fact it was in the middle of a civil war when the US invaded? A civil war that was partly drawn along ethnic lines? Tensions that are still very much evident in the politics and security situation there?
Further, neither of us have a clue about the place. Much like the vast majority of westerners who argue about what is best for some foreign country (and that includes whatever westerners that happen to be based in whatever remote country)...
- The Taliban say they havn't done anything like this, and they condemned it
- It's unclear whether any such attacks have even taken place, indeed it seems possible these were psychosomatic hysteria. Similar things happen in the West all the time (e.g. google for "Bull Ring chemical leak").
That said, girls attending school have been attacked in Afghanistan. However such attacks do not appear to be sanctioned by the Taliban at a high level. (Not dissimilarly, low-level 'mistakes' by PGF soldiers are not sanctioned either).
I said the army was primarily Uzbek+Tajik+Hazara. I don't know how you get from that to "exclude the Hazara", but I'm sorry if I gave that impression.
The point is solely that the army does not reflect the people it is being used against. This point has nothing to do with the equivalence[1] but solely to do with what would and would not be good to do in Afghanistan. I.e. sending in a Tajik+Hazara army and police force to quell the Pashtun insurgency may achieve nothing but to reinforce the divisions.
Ultimately the only people who can sort out Afghanistan are the various "Afghans" - and they need to be free of the distorting effect of western power to do so. That means the western powers will have to withdraw somewhat and adopt a "stay in baracks and interfere as little as possible, if at all" policy.
What's the alternative? That we have our tax money go to pay for soldiers being embroiled in tribal divisions they don't understand, and in the process killing many more Afghanis and soldiers, and sowing the seeds for further conflict? Forever?
1. Note well: I was not drawing an equivalence in actions. Rather I was trying to dispel the notion many commentators here have that the western forces (the US military particularly) lie at the "good, noble, just and right" pole and the Taliban and other insurgents at the "evil" pole. Such thinking is simple-minded at best, and hypocritical double-think at best. (And a good few suffering from that polar-fallacy are far from simple-minded, with a few exceptions).
And the US forces have blown up market places, weddings, etc. "Oh but those were mistakes". Well, there are also many cases of groups of US soldiers just outright committing murder - and there are probably an order of magnitude more incidents unreported than there are reported. "Oh but that isn't our policy" - well neither is it the policy of the Taliban to kill civilians when they carry out attacks!
Here I'll refer back to my earlier comment on disgust when I hear people claim noble intent as defence for the mistakes of their side that lead to the killing of civilians, while labelling the other side as evil for (potentially) similar actions.
I'm sorry, but if your actions repeatedly lead to the killing of civilians then you are responsible for them. Beyond a certain point, intent becomes irrelevant.
The IRA are Christian terrorists because they are terrorists who are Christian and want to kick out rulers of another sect of Christianity.
Just a small note of caution here, but you are clearly not well informed on the idealogical background of the IRA, or the history of Irish republicanism. Basically, you're completely wrong to think the republican side had much, if anything at all, to do with religion.
Yes, I know about the Hazara, thanks. I *did not* say they should be excluded. You've managed to ignore the fact that I listed 3 groups, and together they are not in a minority.
Further, you've completely ignored the central point, that the army looks somewhat like the old Northern Alliance and they're being sent down into Pashtun country to help fight with western forces.
This is surely storing up trouble...
Anyway "stay the course" - why not after 8 years! Don't change a winning formula!
But they don't have to do that, so how is this any justification?
Well, nor do the pro-gov forces have to fight either. Note however that the western forces are in Afghanistan by choice, while the anti-gov forces have little choice but to stay there.
No offense but every poll I've seen has a majority of Afghan citizens supporting the US presence.
No offence, but the phrase "Afghan citizens" of itself makes me wonder if you know how fragmented Afghanistan is. Yes, there are recent polls showing Afghans are surprisingly happy (the ABC/BBC/ARD sponsored ACSOR poll). However:
- It aggregates the entire country (I can't find per-region breakouts), we know there are several parts of Afghanistan which have been peaceful, or which have seen much less violence in the last year (largely due to Western forces ceasing air strikes and drawing down other operations!)
- It was unable to sample several areas (10%) due to security concerns. These are the areas *most* likely to be anti-government!
The poll to me smells a bit. The fact I can't find per-region break-downs of the data is somewhat strange. The fact the poll also shows **80%** support for Karzai is also somewhat strange. I'm not quite sure I'd want to put much faith in this poll, but I guess you'd say I don't want to have faith in it.
Oh, note that things got much, much better in Basra once the UK forces decided to hand over to the local Iraqis and withdrew to their base at the airport. Similar thing when control was handed over in areas like al-Anbar and Najaf.
It is the *presence* of the western forces, and particularly their attempts to project themselves, which is the catalyst for most of the violence!
Except that group are killing civilians because you are fighting them. Further, even when you're not fighting them you're conducting patrols that regularly:
- go into Afghani homes uninvited
- turn everything over
- on the odd occasion shoot a member of the compound cause they happen to do something that makes a twitchy soldier nervous
Further, you're working to create a police force and army which are:
- largely composed of Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazara
- in the case of the police force particularly, extremely corrupt
You're then sending these forces down into Pashtun country, to help keep "order" over people who don't trust them.
Here's the alternative: Get the fuck out of the place. At a minimum, stop trying to run the country and withdraw to bases.
If you enter a country whose inhabitants have a very very long track-record of not liking foreigners coming in and ordering them about; if you stay there for nearly a decade with only an ever-growing insurgency (just like against the Russians, and the British and...) to show for it; with ever increasing numbers of civilian casualties due to the chaos; with no real military objectives anymore; then as occupying power over that near-decade you bear a great responsibility for the situation there. This isn't true.
If you enter a country whose inhabitants have a very very long track-record of not liking foreigners coming in and ordering them about; if you stay there for nearly a decade with only an ever-growing insurgency (just like against the Russians, and the British and...) to show for it; with ever increasing numbers of civilian casualties due to the chaos; with no real military objectives anymore; then as occupying power over that near-decade you bear a great responsibility for the situation there.
It does not matter what the USes *intentions* are. What matters is what its responsibilities are, what it *should* be aware of and what the *effect* is.
You can't wave away the continuing deaths of thousands of people every year in a country you've been responsible for quite a long time with "well, we didn't really intend that". That's just the drunk-driver defence: "I didn't mean to get drunk when I drove to that bar, I didn't mean to kill that person when I drove back", which clearly is *NO GOOD*.
"Suicide and IED attacks caused more civilian casualties than any other tactic, killing 1,054 civilians, or 44% of the total civilian casualties in 2009. Although such attacks have primarily targeted government or international military forces, they are often carried out in areas frequented by civilians."
I reiterate my disgust with people who practice the double-think of justifying the inevitable civilian deaths on the one side as "collateral damage" done with noble aims, while simultaneously claiming the other side are evil for killing civilians in their military operations.
As for fallacy #2, yes it would indeed be a fallacy of logic for me to try persuade anyone against CTSs post. That said, CTSs logic-free assertions become quite tiring eventually - he's been trolling forums I read for the best part of a decade. It's hard not to get annoyed by him. Further, it is not a fallacy of logic for me to relate my experience of CTS to others here. (There's a fine line here obviously).
There was a draft, but the boys who became the politicians managed either to avoid it or to get their dad to have them assigned to cushy, safe reserve jobs at home.
In a further touch of irony, the few politicians who *didn't* dodge that draft and signed up then had their patriotism questioned by the supporters of the draft dodgers, because they dared speak out against torture or war.
Yawn... you've been posting this stuff since 2003 or earlier. Your capacity to engage with any arguments presented to you is matched perhaps only by planks of wood, or other inanimate objects - just as with your appreciation of history.
It means you can drop large quantities of high-explosives and other munitions on a country, paralleling the total tonnage dropped in WWII on Germany, in the full knowledge there *will* be many civilian deaths - both immediate and over time (e.g. from the bomblets from cluster bombs, and various toxic effects of phosporus, DU, etc) and then say "Ah, but our intentions were noble". This logic is made doubly delicious when at the same time you claim that the insurgency side is "evil" because they set off bombs knowing they will kill civilians, even if they do so against military targets (convoys, bases, etc).
I find it pretty disgusting when people trot out what is surely a most classic case of Orwell's "double-think" in both justifying and condemning "collateral damage" at the same time.
So because one group of people are killing Iraqi^WAfghanistani civilians, then that makes it OK for another group, e.g. the US military, to do so? Even better, if one group kills civilians then that makes it OK for the US military to kill more of them in order to protect and bring peace to them?
That's some of the most ridiculous logic I've yet read from you, in all your years of posting your daft war-apologia comments on K5 and here.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with my comment, it surely is not a troll (it's also on topic). I do hope the mods who did that get punished in M2. Moderation is not supposed to be used to suppress comments one finds disagreeable.
You're going to get modded down desperately for that, but your statement is sadly oh so true, up until at least the "for". Whether it's just greed or a more complex mix of pride, greed, hubris and misguided hate and ambitions is another discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Britain did repay its war/lend-lease debt to the USA. The final payment was made in 2006.
Oops. Cut and paste problems after my /. preview/edit box became unresponsive. Chop away the 2nd paragraph starting at "If you enter a country" and finishing at "This isn't true".
How many soldiers are ever court martialed? It's a vanishingly small number. Even in some of the most blatant cases of murder, where there is clear cut video evidence of war crimes, military personnel have gone unpunished (e.g. the soldier filmed executing a wounded man in a building in Fallujah; the chopper crew who shot up a family providing aid to a badly wounded man - against the rules of war, including the US military's own ROE).
We can have no faith at all in a military justice system which depends so heavily on the military to police itself - starting with (typically) requiring officers to make the decision to refer incidents about their own men to the military police.
After _WE_ did the _real_ work (the thinking), and developed the resources, and turned it into an ever-producing gravy train, THEN the knuckle-dragging locals start getting very upset about their "soverign rights". But they don't "soverignly" tear the pumping rigs and derricks and everything else down, do they?
Wow, nice case of racism you got there. The sweeping generalisations are a classic touch too.
Regardless, I'm not the one who brought it up as a point of defense.
You said there was no alternative. However, that's clearly incorrect. There is an obvious alternative: stay the fuck out of nation-building, particularly in a country that is far from your understanding, and don't fight to prop up a puppet government in Kabul - in the process killing many civilians and prolonging the violence that will kill many more! (I can't believe that 2.5 decades odd after we watched the Soviets give up on propping up their puppet government and drive back home, that the US is now following in their footsteps).
How would that change the argument though?
How can you have a meaningful discussion about Afghanistan and ignore the fact it was in the middle of a civil war when the US invaded? A civil war that was partly drawn along ethnic lines? Tensions that are still very much evident in the politics and security situation there?
Further, neither of us have a clue about the place. Much like the vast majority of westerners who argue about what is best for some foreign country (and that includes whatever westerners that happen to be based in whatever remote country)...
Well, what can I say then. Keep voting for the just and noble US occupation that helps protect the Afghanis from those utterly evil Taliban.
I wish the world were anywhere near as neatly ordered as you see it.
No I didn't but:
- The Taliban say they havn't done anything like this, and they condemned it
- It's unclear whether any such attacks have even taken place, indeed it seems possible these were psychosomatic hysteria. Similar things happen in the West all the time (e.g. google for "Bull Ring chemical leak").
That said, girls attending school have been attacked in Afghanistan. However such attacks do not appear to be sanctioned by the Taliban at a high level. (Not dissimilarly, low-level 'mistakes' by PGF soldiers are not sanctioned either).
I said the army was primarily Uzbek+Tajik+Hazara. I don't know how you get from that to "exclude the Hazara", but I'm sorry if I gave that impression.
The point is solely that the army does not reflect the people it is being used against. This point has nothing to do with the equivalence[1] but solely to do with what would and would not be good to do in Afghanistan. I.e. sending in a Tajik+Hazara army and police force to quell the Pashtun insurgency may achieve nothing but to reinforce the divisions.
Ultimately the only people who can sort out Afghanistan are the various "Afghans" - and they need to be free of the distorting effect of western power to do so. That means the western powers will have to withdraw somewhat and adopt a "stay in baracks and interfere as little as possible, if at all" policy.
What's the alternative? That we have our tax money go to pay for soldiers being embroiled in tribal divisions they don't understand, and in the process killing many more Afghanis and soldiers, and sowing the seeds for further conflict? Forever?
1. Note well: I was not drawing an equivalence in actions. Rather I was trying to dispel the notion many commentators here have that the western forces (the US military particularly) lie at the "good, noble, just and right" pole and the Taliban and other insurgents at the "evil" pole. Such thinking is simple-minded at best, and hypocritical double-think at best. (And a good few suffering from that polar-fallacy are far from simple-minded, with a few exceptions).
And the US forces have blown up market places, weddings, etc. "Oh but those were mistakes". Well, there are also many cases of groups of US soldiers just outright committing murder - and there are probably an order of magnitude more incidents unreported than there are reported. "Oh but that isn't our policy" - well neither is it the policy of the Taliban to kill civilians when they carry out attacks!
Here I'll refer back to my earlier comment on disgust when I hear people claim noble intent as defence for the mistakes of their side that lead to the killing of civilians, while labelling the other side as evil for (potentially) similar actions.
I'm sorry, but if your actions repeatedly lead to the killing of civilians then you are responsible for them. Beyond a certain point, intent becomes irrelevant.
The IRA are Christian terrorists because they are terrorists who are Christian and want to kick out rulers of another sect of Christianity.
Just a small note of caution here, but you are clearly not well informed on the idealogical background of the IRA, or the history of Irish republicanism. Basically, you're completely wrong to think the republican side had much, if anything at all, to do with religion.
Except it isn't bullshit, it's what UN report on protection of civilians says. See my comment and quote in the other thread.
Further, I am not ignoring one side at all. I abhor and condemn violence regardless of side. Similarly for double-think and hypocrisy.
Yes, I know about the Hazara, thanks. I *did not* say they should be excluded. You've managed to ignore the fact that I listed 3 groups, and together they are not in a minority.
Further, you've completely ignored the central point, that the army looks somewhat like the old Northern Alliance and they're being sent down into Pashtun country to help fight with western forces.
This is surely storing up trouble...
Anyway "stay the course" - why not after 8 years! Don't change a winning formula!
And the counter-point to claims in previous from ABC.
This blog post on the ACSOR polls is interesting, though of course you will be suspicious of the source.
But they don't have to do that, so how is this any justification?
Well, nor do the pro-gov forces have to fight either. Note however that the western forces are in Afghanistan by choice, while the anti-gov forces have little choice but to stay there.
No offense but every poll I've seen has a majority of Afghan citizens supporting the US presence.
No offence, but the phrase "Afghan citizens" of itself makes me wonder if you know how fragmented Afghanistan is. Yes, there are recent polls showing Afghans are surprisingly happy (the ABC/BBC/ARD sponsored ACSOR poll). However:
- It aggregates the entire country (I can't find per-region breakouts), we know there are several parts of Afghanistan which have been peaceful, or which have seen much less violence in the last year (largely due to Western forces ceasing air strikes and drawing down other operations!)
- It was unable to sample several areas (10%) due to security concerns. These are the areas *most* likely to be anti-government!
Have a read of the ABC note on sampling methodology and its overview of the result - this overview hints somewhat at diverging views in different parts of Afghanistan.
The poll to me smells a bit. The fact I can't find per-region break-downs of the data is somewhat strange. The fact the poll also shows **80%** support for Karzai is also somewhat strange. I'm not quite sure I'd want to put much faith in this poll, but I guess you'd say I don't want to have faith in it.
Oh, note that things got much, much better in Basra once the UK forces decided to hand over to the local Iraqis and withdrew to their base at the airport. Similar thing when control was handed over in areas like al-Anbar and Najaf.
It is the *presence* of the western forces, and particularly their attempts to project themselves, which is the catalyst for most of the violence!
Except that group are killing civilians because you are fighting them. Further, even when you're not fighting them you're conducting patrols that regularly:
- go into Afghani homes uninvited
- turn everything over
- on the odd occasion shoot a member of the compound cause they happen to do something that makes a twitchy soldier nervous
Further, you're working to create a police force and army which are:
- largely composed of Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazara
- in the case of the police force particularly, extremely corrupt
You're then sending these forces down into Pashtun country, to help keep "order" over people who don't trust them.
Here's the alternative: Get the fuck out of the place. At a minimum, stop trying to run the country and withdraw to bases.
Except it isn't.
If you enter a country whose inhabitants have a very very long track-record of not liking foreigners coming in and ordering them about; if you stay there for nearly a decade with only an ever-growing insurgency (just like against the Russians, and the British and...) to show for it; with ever increasing numbers of civilian casualties due to the chaos; with no real military objectives anymore; then as occupying power over that near-decade you bear a great responsibility for the situation there.
This isn't true.
If you enter a country whose inhabitants have a very very long track-record of not liking foreigners coming in and ordering them about; if you stay there for nearly a decade with only an ever-growing insurgency (just like against the Russians, and the British and...) to show for it; with ever increasing numbers of civilian casualties due to the chaos; with no real military objectives anymore; then as occupying power over that near-decade you bear a great responsibility for the situation there.
It does not matter what the USes *intentions* are. What matters is what its responsibilities are, what it *should* be aware of and what the *effect* is.
You can't wave away the continuing deaths of thousands of people every year in a country you've been responsible for quite a long time with "well, we didn't really intend that". That's just the drunk-driver defence: "I didn't mean to get drunk when I drove to that bar, I didn't mean to kill that person when I drove back", which clearly is *NO GOOD*.
See my other comment on this thread re fallacy #1. Also see the UNAMA report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009. To quote:
"Suicide and IED attacks caused more civilian casualties than any other tactic, killing
1,054 civilians, or 44% of the total civilian casualties in 2009. Although such attacks
have primarily targeted government or international military forces, they are often
carried out in areas frequented by civilians."
I reiterate my disgust with people who practice the double-think of justifying the inevitable civilian deaths on the one side as "collateral damage" done with noble aims, while simultaneously claiming the other side are evil for killing civilians in their military operations.
Note 25% of the remaining deaths were due to pro-gov forces "PGF" (i.e. the occupying forces). The NYT also has a good article on the report. Note that there have been a number of high-profile raids on Afhani compounds this year that have resulted in dead civilians, including one case where special forces apparently dug bullets out of bodies with knives in order to try cover up.
As for fallacy #2, yes it would indeed be a fallacy of logic for me to try persuade anyone against CTSs post. That said, CTSs logic-free assertions become quite tiring eventually - he's been trolling forums I read for the best part of a decade. It's hard not to get annoyed by him. Further, it is not a fallacy of logic for me to relate my experience of CTS to others here. (There's a fine line here obviously).
There was a draft, but the boys who became the politicians managed either to avoid it or to get their dad to have them assigned to cushy, safe reserve jobs at home.
In a further touch of irony, the few politicians who *didn't* dodge that draft and signed up then had their patriotism questioned by the supporters of the draft dodgers, because they dared speak out against torture or war.
Yawn... you've been posting this stuff since 2003 or earlier. Your capacity to engage with any arguments presented to you is matched perhaps only by planks of wood, or other inanimate objects - just as with your appreciation of history.
I love this logic.
It means you can drop large quantities of high-explosives and other munitions on a country, paralleling the total tonnage dropped in WWII on Germany, in the full knowledge there *will* be many civilian deaths - both immediate and over time (e.g. from the bomblets from cluster bombs, and various toxic effects of phosporus, DU, etc) and then say "Ah, but our intentions were noble". This logic is made doubly delicious when at the same time you claim that the insurgency side is "evil" because they set off bombs knowing they will kill civilians, even if they do so against military targets (convoys, bases, etc).
I find it pretty disgusting when people trot out what is surely a most classic case of Orwell's "double-think" in both justifying and condemning "collateral damage" at the same time.
So because one group of people are killing Iraqi^WAfghanistani civilians, then that makes it OK for another group, e.g. the US military, to do so? Even better, if one group kills civilians then that makes it OK for the US military to kill more of them in order to protect and bring peace to them?
That's some of the most ridiculous logic I've yet read from you, in all your years of posting your daft war-apologia comments on K5 and here.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with my comment, it surely is not a troll (it's also on topic). I do hope the mods who did that get punished in M2. Moderation is not supposed to be used to suppress comments one finds disagreeable.
You're going to get modded down desperately for that, but your statement is sadly oh so true, up until at least the "for". Whether it's just greed or a more complex mix of pride, greed, hubris and misguided hate and ambitions is another discussion.