Afghanistan

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

So we allow some tribal/political dude to take over, withdraw all "boots-on-the-ground" type troops (who may actually be doing useful nation-building work, building and guarding schools, clinics, utilities, etc) and just have a strike force that roams about striking perceived enemies.

They're not doing any of those things. There are some humanitarian projects going on, mostly by non-combatant coalition allies and financed by Japan, but they're few and far between.

Problems:
(1) we can't even find the enemies now, it would be harder under this plan.

Are you kidding me? Virtually every patrol, from every base, gets attacked by the Taliban. Osama and Al Qaeda, are tough to find because they ain't there... most of the time, anyway.

(3) doing the bombing without the rebuilding would just make us more resented and hated than already. Watch the enemy's recruitment soar.

Bombing is very limited, it's nothing like Iraq. Afghanistan is wide open spaces with houses (compounds) in small clusters around water. Those clusters wouldn't even qualify as a town, barely a village. There are no streets, just a few dirt tracks that can only be navigated reliably with horses or mules.

(4) whichever central government allows foreigners to use their country as a shooting range will be despised by their own people and fairly quickly overthrown, leading to an end to any co-operation with the west.

I doubt the people will do anything but ignore the "central" government. Most of the citizens don't even have a road that leads to Kabul, without following several mountain trails to find a road. They'll just cooperate with whoever's in power in their local, at the moment, just as they've done for thousands of years. A "central" government would need half a million loyal, well trained, soldiers/police, to actually project power over the whole country. That ain't happening, when they can't even find that many literate people.

(5) if the strikes against the enemy do have an impact, they can just move over the border into the tribal areas of Pakistan. Thus we would be contributing to the destabilisation of nuclear-armed Pakistan.

The Taliban are home. You can't tell the players without a program... and there is no program. The only way to identify a Taliban is he's the one shooting at you. He stops shooting and ducks into a compound, he's gone like a ghost. Nobody's going to rat him out, as a matter of fact when the shooting stops, they bring their wounded to our medics. They would claim to be Innocent bystanders... if anyone asks, but we don't.[/quote]

Originally Posted by tw

George Jr did that twice.

He said "WE WON", then HE left, but made everyone else stay there.