Afghanistan

[Griff]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

I agree with much of what you said. A Western style democracy is doomed to failure in Afghanistan. I think we need to stop the ramp up of troops and move back to a Special Forces style of intervention.

It's looking that way. We should build our intelligence network and then use special ops to snuff out Al Q types as they pop up on radar.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Following Mike Yon's blog, they don't have to wait. Taliban are everywhere and pop up everytime troops leave their compounds.

[TheMercenary]

I hate to admit it, but unlike Iraq this does sound more like Vietnam redux.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Following Mike Yon's blog, they don't have to wait. Taliban are everywhere and pop up everytime troops leave their compounds.

Taliban ain't Al Q. They oppress their own people and let Al Q operate but they are not one entity. As far as I know anyway...

[xoxoxoBruce]

That's true, but finding and hitting Al Q is tough, when you're fighting Taliban full time. We can't be there and not fight Taliban.

[ZenGum]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

I agree with much of what you said. A Western style democracy is doomed to failure in Afghanistan. I think we need to stop the ramp up of troops and move back to a Special Forces style of intervention.

Yeah, but for how long? and then what?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

Yeah, but for how long? and then what?

I would say that the operation from an SF stand point should be open ended, without an end point. But the process of sending larger and larger numbers of troops is futile IMHO, unless we go into Pakistan in a large scale, which I doubt that we could do for numerous reasons.

[TheMercenary]

Timely and speaks to the discussion.

News Analysis
Crux of Afghan Debate: Will More Troops Curb Terror?

WASHINGTON — Does the United States need a large and growing ground force in Afghanistan to prevent another major terrorist attack on American soil?

In deploying 68,000 American troops there by year’s end, President Obama has called Afghanistan “a war of necessity” to prevent the Taliban from recreating for Al Qaeda the sanctuary that it had in the 1990s.

But nearly eight years after the American invasion drove Qaeda leaders from Afghanistan, the political support for military action that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has faded. A war that started as a swift counterattack against those responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans, a growing number of critics say, is in danger of becoming a quagmire with a muddled mission.

In interviews, most counterterrorism experts said they believed that the troops were needed to drive Taliban fighters from territory they had steadily reclaimed. But critics on the right and the left say that if the real goal is to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States, there may be alternatives to a large ground force in Afghanistan. They say Al Qaeda can be held at bay using intensive intelligence, Predator drones, cruise missiles, raids by Special Operations commandos and even payments to warlords to deny haven to Al Qaeda.

After all, they point out, the Central Intelligence Agency has killed more than a dozen top Qaeda leaders in the lawless Pakistani tribal areas, disrupting the terrorists’ ability to plot and carry out attacks against the United States and Europe.

Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University, said the alternatives would have at least as much chance of preventing attacks on the United States as a large-scale counterinsurgency effort, which he said would last 5 to 10 years, require hundreds of billions of dollars, sacrifice hundreds of American lives and have a “slim likelihood of success.”

continues:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/wo...terror.html?hp

[glatt]

Do we have a goal in Afghanistan? Is it just to keep killing Al Q there so they won't hit us here? Is it to eliminate the Taliban? Is it to set up a stable government so we can get out? What is our goal? Do we even have one?

[classicman]

Interesting questions, glatt. Perhaps the administration could explain.

[tw]

Originally Posted by glatt

Do we have a goal in Afghanistan? Is it just to keep killing Al Q there so they won't hit us here? Is it to eliminate the Taliban? Is it to set up a stable government so we can get out? What is our goal? Do we even have one?

The goal remains defined by 11 September. bin Laden and his allies. A goal that was subverted back in 2002 when our military leaders had zero knowledge of basic military concepts.

Same people who also do no planning for the peace in Desert Storm (gave Schwarzkopf no conditions for Saddam's surrender), and who abandoned the 3rd ID with no after action orders when Baghdad fell. Same people who also surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban due to a complete lack of any military knowledge.

The objective remains the same question that so many here refused to ask because of political rhetoric. "When do we go after bin Laden?"

Unfortunately wackos said, "America does not do nation building." As a result we must refight the entire Afghanistan war from scratch - this time without local popular support. Expected when political agendas replace and ignore logical thought and the lessons from history.

Number one objective - bin Ladan and his allies. But now the country has good reason to believe all Americans are dumb and two faced as George Jr. It makes the bottom line objective that much more difficult and complex.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by classicman

Interesting questions, glatt. Perhaps the administration could explain.

I am not sure that they completely understand the issue.

[DanaC]

Well they did inherit an incomprehensible fuck-up of magnificent proportions. I'm not entirely sure the administration who took you (us) into Afghanistan knew what their actual war aims were.

[regular.joe]

Afghanistan was the right move at that time. Period. It was an unconventional fight, one that we prosecuted exceptionally well. Since then, to oversimplify, too many commanders are using what is normally thought of as basic military concepts, and have no real concept of how to prosecute an unconventional fight. Our commanders do basic military concepts exceptionally well TW. We mass and project the proper military power and BLUF, break things and kill people. Non basic military concepts are not well accepted and practiced on the scale that we now need it to be. I think this is a major consideration in why Afghanistan has developed the way that it has.

Kill Bin Laden? Or how bout let's not make him a martyr, how about develop the networks of influence that deny him the human terrain that he influences and recruits from.

I'm not saying that is our strategy right now, I'm just throwing that out as an idea of the unconventional, non-basic type of war that we find ourselves.

Make no mistake, we are at war. Wether we are in Afghanistan or Iraq, or not. Wether we choose to see it or not. wether we choose to fight or not. War was declared in 2001, well, even before that. As for me, I'd rather fight then lay my head down on the chopping block. I disagree with the people in my country and elsewhere who are pacifists and think that "everything" is warmongering.

[DanaC]

I can see that there was true justification for going into Afghanistan. But the aims of the administration at the time flounder, for me, on the fact that they chose to also to invade Iraq. Iraq hadn't declared war on America, had no connection whatsoever with the 9/11 attacks, had no weapons of mass destruction, posed no threat to America, had no Al Quaeda connections.

I am not a 'pacifist'. I don't believe 'everything' is warmongering. I lost all trust in the war-aims in Afghanistan when Iraq was dragged into the fray. The level of dishonesty and the rush to military action there cast huge doubt in my mind as to what the administration was hoping to achieve in Afghanistan.


I think you're absolutely right about the need for a different kind of war. The 'non-basic military concepts' you mentioned. And this is another problem I have with the situation in Afghanistan. Traditional war styles have historically failed in Afghanistan. I do not believe either the American administration, or their allies (my own government included) were clear enough in what they wanted from the action, and how to achieve that action. That's not to say that the soldiers didn;t do a good job. But I think the aims could have been more clearly defined: what was the projected end of the operation? How was that to be achieved? Part one may have been planned and executed well (I'll take your word for that, you're the expert, I am not). But what was the overall aim? Was it to end the threat of Al-Quaeda? To crush the Taleban? To bring democracy? To find and kill Bin Laden? All of the above? Each of those aims would require a different approach. Some are/were served by the approach taken. Others were not. And none of them, I believe, were served or furthered by engaging in a war on multiple fronts unnecessarily.

None of this is an attack on the military. It is a criticism of the political war-aims, not the military war-aims.