[stanleyk]

It's really time to leave Afghanistan. Hopefully it will be very soon.

[stanleyk]

So Les you are saying it's OK to do what others are doing? I thought we held ourselves to a higher standard.

[les3547]

So Les you are saying it's OK to do what others are doing?

You might want to reread what I said, which is nothing like what you've suggested.

[jolepp]

About the big picture (exit plan):

...
This is why I'm not ruling out the prospects of an Afghanistan agreement with the Taliban to wind down this ruinous decade-long conflict faster than most of us would think possible, judging by the headlines.

There have, in fact, been a spate of recent diplomatic moves towards a deal that are largely lost from sight amid the latest uprising over the "inadvertent" incineration (Washington's version) of Qur'ans by U.S. forces at the Bagram military base.

For the first time ever in this war all the central parties — the U.S., the Taliban, as well as the Afghan and Pakistan governments — are actually talking directly to each other.
...

Brian Stewart: Might peace break out in Afghanistan? - World - CBC News (29FEB2012)

WASHINGTON — The outrage from the back-to-back episodes of the Koran burning and the killing on Sunday of at least 16 Afghan civilians imperils what the Obama administration once saw as an orderly plan for 2012: to speed the training of Afghan forces so that they can take the lead in combat missions, all while drawing the Taliban into negotiations to end more than a decade of constant war.
...

NYT: In Assessing the Damage, Fears of an Emboldened Taliban

[ihasa]

That's been part of every war in history, most of it is ignored or covered up. War desensitizes soldiers to killing, and makes half (sometimes whole) psychotics out of some. War is organized insanity, and there's no way some of it doesn't rub off on its participants.

The military has a job to do; if there's a risk of some soldiers going over the edge and going renegade, and I think we can all agree that the sort of situation they are in increases the chance of it, there should be measures to minimise the chance of events that will cause a backlash against the military's objectives. For example - respect local customs (don't burn qurans, or at least, do it secretly!) and do not let individual soldiers wander away from the camp weaponed-up in the middle of the night. It's obviously dangerous for the serviceman apart from anything else.

I'm not defending the soldier's actions, or even whether the US should still be in Afghanistan. I am critical of characterizing the entire effort there by the actions of a few, along with ignoring the worse and constant atrocities perpetrated by Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and then singling out the relative few screw ups by US and UN troops. If Al Qaeda and the Taliban get back in charge there, how much more suffering do you think the locals will endure? Beheadings, torture, massacres, acid thrown on faces, floggings . . . Before we got there here are a few of the incidents that characterized daily life:

Well congratulations, the US military is just making the return of the Taliban more and more likely, and their recent escapades have probably been an Al Qaeda recruiter's wet dream. When the US points at the Taliban and Al Qaeda and says to the locals 'these are the bad guys', it has absolutely no authority any more when it's own soldiers behave atrociously.

American counterinsurgency experts said on Sunday that the shootings could well have a devastating impact on the painstaking efforts by American Green Berets and other troops over the past year to win the trust of Afghan villagers.

“It takes months and months to build the trust of the local populations, and then something like this happens and it’s gone, literally overnight,” said Seth G. Jones, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation who worked in Panjwai, where the attack took place, in 2009 and 2010 as an adviser to the military’s Special Operations Command.

But the second concern is even harder to assess: that the Taliban will conclude that events like this will, in the end, only increase the pressure on the United States to get out quickly. So far, the efforts to bring the Taliban to the table in Qatar, where Ambassador Marc Grossman and other American diplomats are seeking to arrange talks, have gone painfully slowly.

The first steps — a confidence-building prisoner exchange that would require moving some detainees from the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Qatar — have taken months. It is episodes like this, one American official said, “that create an instant windfall for the Taliban,” at just the moment that the United States is trying to persuade them that their cause is all but lost.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/world/asia/obamas-plans-in-afghanistan-com...nt-events.html

[kswier]

I think what Les is saying is that war creates a culture that enables behaviour like this. When you take a bunch of young people, teach them to be soldiers, give them guns, and place them in a hostile environment, some are going to crack. It does not make it right, it does not make it less of a catastrophe, but it will happen.

The real question is whether we can find and fix mechanisms in the military that lead to behaviour like this, to decrease the chance of a repeat incident. Perhaps the answer is shorter work days for soldiers, cycling them out of combat areas more often, etc. (I don't know the answer to this, as I have never served in the military).

The other broader question is whether we should still be involved in this war. I read an New York Times article a couple of months ago that was talking about the Afghanistan peoples' view of the United States. The conclusion was that many of them did not know why we were there, and any of them had never even heard of 9-11. We failed the propaganda war (or never engaged in it, unsure about the details), thus I do not see the United States "winning" in the near future.

[ihasa]

The real question is whether we can find and fix mechanisms in the military that lead to behaviour like this, to decrease the chance of a repeat incident. Perhaps the answer is shorter work days for soldiers, cycling them out of combat areas more often, etc. (I don't know the answer to this, as I have never served in the military).

Agreed, but it's too late now! Incidents like this happen over and over and apparently the culture doesn't change. The fact that despite the critical situation in Afghanistan this guy was able to wander off on his own, all weaponed up, at night, suggests to me that the military is simply negligent. Bad apple, maybe, but they need to wake up to the damage a 'bad apple' can do to their mission. I wonder if they even understand what their mission is.

[MRRiley]

Not to excuse the shooter, who should face a swift Courts Martial followed by a swift execution, but it is rather ironic that the Taliban should complain about someone killing civilians... they've been doing it for decades.

[GeneV]

It does matter who invaded whom, and the comparison to Hitler's Germany is a bit off--as most such comparisons are. This was not a country organized and mechanized for the purpose of invading others. It was and still is an ancient, primitive and lawless place which has a history of bringing down its invaders who try to turn it into an organized country. We were right to go in and take out Bin Laden and other leaders who were openly working there, but we were fools to think we would be the gods who finally settle this place down. There are a number of other countries out there in the same condition, and I wouldn't want to occupy those countries, either.

I do think the comparison with Vietnam is appropriate in that after about a decade in an economically backward country that did not invite us and whose population is suffering through subsistence enduring endless war damage inflicted by all sides, everyone will be frustrated. Things like this will continue to happen. It is human. I wouldn't want to live in the Afghan culture, but I'm not blaming it. It has been that way for centuries, and we should have known that when we took it upon ourselves to build a country for them. A place like that changes all who spend extended time there.

[séamuis]

I do think the comparison with Vietnam is appropriate in that after about a decade in an economically backward country that did not invite us and whose population is suffering through subsistence enduring endless war damage inflicted by all sides, everyone will be frustrated. Things like this will continue to happen.

makes one wonder why we didn't learn this from Vietnam? we have the experience and the knowledge gained. saying 'we shouldn't have been there' is to simple and the fact is we were pretty much 'doomed' to end up entangled in that conflict, but I'm just in utter disbelief, as I have been for some years now, that we apparently learned nothing from our failure to achieve in Vietnam, exactly what we are trying to achieve in Afghanistan. external nation building doesn't work. the nation has to be changed and rebuilt from the inside. when will we learn?

[jogiba]

Sunday's attack may harden a growing consensus in Washington that, despite a troop surge, a war bill exceeding $500 billion and nearly 2,000 U.S. lives lost, prospects are dimming for what the United States can accomplish in Afghanistan before it pulls most troops out by the end of 2014.

World News - Taliban vow revenge for Afghans killed by US soldier

[les3547]

It does matter who invaded whom, and the comparison to Hitler's Germany is a bit off--as most such comparisons are. This was not a country organized and mechanized for the purpose of invading others. It was and still is an ancient, primitive and lawless place which has a history of bringing down its invaders who try to turn it into an organized country. We were right to go in and take out Bin Laden and other leaders who were openly working there, but we were fools to think we would be the gods who finally settle this place down. There are a number of other countries out there in the same condition, and I wouldn't want to occupy those countries, either.

I do think the comparison with Vietnam is appropriate in that after about a decade in an economically backward country that did not invite us and whose population is suffering through subsistence enduring endless war damage inflicted by all sides, everyone will be frustrated. Things like this will continue to happen. It is human. I wouldn't want to live in the Afghan culture, but I'm not blaming it. It has been that way for centuries, and we should have known that when we took it upon ourselves to build a country for them. A place like that changes all who spend extended time there.

For the record, my point about who invaded whom wasn't a comparison to Hitler's Germany, it was simply generic logic about justified invasions after being attacked. Were we attacked in WWII? Were we attacked in 2001? The US was attacked with the explicit cooperation of Afghanistan . . . we were justified in attacking them back to defend ourselves from further destruction, which was certainly being planned. What we were doing there, however, was mucked up by the subsequent invasion on Iraq. How do you stand ethically confident in country you've attacked (Afghanistan) for being aggressors (or supporting it) when you are being aggressive yourself in Iraq? Where the world was with us for the Afghanistan invasion, it turned against us over Iraq. If we'd stuck to the Afghanistan project instead of warmongering in Iraq, we might have achieved something by now, especially with greater support and cooperation from the rest of the world. Instead we weakened our focus and trashed our reputation/credibility with the Iraq invasion, and those effects have hurt our efforts in Afghanistan.

And I don't think I could disagree more that Afghanistan is comparable to Viet Nam. Viet Nam did not attack us, they weren't plotting to attack us. We again warmongered even if some did feel like we had the "moral" justification to stop communist aggression, but in truth the US was still in its communist paranoia phase, and so it was communist ideology that we thought needed to be destroyed..

Yet my original point was that the terrible acts of this serviceman (as well as the Koran burning) are not incidents to judge our current mission in Afghanistan. Obama inherited a huge mess not of his making, and I don't think he can just pull out. Second, acts of insanity are normal in war . . . war stresses everyone's psychology. Add to that the hypocrisy of the Taliban inciting retaliation, when all they want is to be back in power where they will make life a thousand times more murderous, cruel, and oppressive . . . and I conclude we shouldn't react emotionally (at least in action) over single incidents in the face of the greater problems needing to be solved.

[GeneV]

The country of Afghanistan did not attack us. Nor is there any real proof its the government was involved in the plotting of the attacks. Nor were the plotters and hijackers even Afghan citizens. A stateless organization with small groups in many countries (including our allies) attacked us. In fact, most the actual attackers were citizens of our Arab allies and many were trained in Pakistan. The plotter moved from a cave in a lawless area of Afghanistan to a compound near the capital of that "ally" in the area.

We were justified in taking out Al Qaeda in a lawless Afghanistan, but that is not where we ended the conflict. Like Vietnam, we jumped into a civil war on the side of a corrupt faction whose ideology we found less offensive, but which had been ousted. We then foisted a friendly but corrupt government onto this already unstable country. We told them we favored the war lords over an Islamic government. In truth, there are no winners in that country, and we simply have no business picking which among the bad alternatives will be forced on the people. As long as our troops are there on this mission, we will have more incidents.

[les3547]

The country of Afghanistan did not attack us. That country did not declare war upon us, as did Germany and Japan. Nor is there any real proof its the government was involved in the plotting of the attacks. A stateless organization with small groups in many countries (including our allies) attacked us. In fact, most the actual attackers were citizens of our Arab allies and many were trained in Pakistan.

How do you excuse the Taliban from it's support (enthusiastically it seemed) of the work of Al Qaeda? So is what you suggest that we wipe out whatever Al Qaeda we might find at the time, but leave intact a power system that will support Al Qaeda once we get rid of a few? It's one thing to leave Afghanistan alone to support Al Qaeda if they didn't attack us, and quite another to have a training ground, with full support of the government, where attacks have occurred, and will continue.

[GeneV]

How do you excuse the Taliban from it's support (enthusiastically it seemed) of the work of Al Qaeda? So is what you suggest that we wipe out whatever Al Qaeda we might find at the time, but leave intact a power system that will support Al Qaeda once we get rid of a few? It's one thing to leave Afghanistan alone to support Al Qaeda if they didn't attack us, and quite another to have a training ground, with full support of the government, where attacks have occurred, and will continue.

First, I don't excuse or approve of anything about the Taliban. That does not mean I want us to run that country. Second, the evidence of the Taliban's "enthusiastic" support for Al Qaeda is very sketchy. The most important training grounds and most enthusiastic support came from Pakistan. The Taliban offered the U.S. a guarantee of no attacks coming from its soil, and offered Bin Laden up for extradition upon convincing proof that he plotted 9/11. That offer was refused. Al Qaeda had become a military presence in Afghanistan--a presence which NATO was right to eliminate--and had turned from opposing the Taliban to supporting it. Getting rid of Al Qaeda knocked the legs from the Taliban. However, when we hung around to build a government there, we were stepping into a minefield (literally).