The Thailand expat forum for Travel, Lifestyle and Fun.

Digitalwolf

And if I can get my divorce finalized I will be right there with them. For at least a year. Then on to drink some beers with you guys in Thailand.

Panda

Soldiers volunteer to go out and kill or be killed. Its brutal and primitive, but thats what they have chosen to do and thats what they get paid for.

Civilians, aka people like you, me and our families, however just want to get on with their lives as best they can under the circumstances.

Sacrificing foreign civilian lives to protect US soldiers is morally obscene in the extreme. Nothing short of murder. One Afghan civilian life is just as precious as an American civilian life. The devaluation of foreign civilian lives by some right wing warmongers is downright immoral.
Same goes for terrorists targeting civilians. Both try to justify the killing of civilians as a means to and end. Both are nothing more than murderous war criminals.

Dan

A short piece from LENIN'S TOMB

The latest analysis from what used to be known as the Senlis Council says that 80% of the territory of Afghanistan currently experiences "heavy" insurgent activity. 17% experiences what they call "substantial" insurgent activity. And a mere 3% of the territory, in a region called Sari Pul where the dominant language is Dari Persian and the dominant ethnicity Uzbek, experiences only "light" insurgent activity. The number of insurgents, as estimated by the US, has risen from 7,000 in 2006 to about 25,000 today, which slightly more than the total number of insurgents reported killed.

The figure offered by the US seems likely to be a sizeable underestimate. This 25,000 or so insurgents are supposed to be ranged against almost 65,000 ISAF troops, 45,000 non-ISAF American troops, 9,000 British troops and purportedly 100,000 members of the Afghan National Army (most of whose troops are probably working for the ruling pro-US warlords). The implication is that a combined army of over 200k troops armed to the teeth and with godlike aerial power to back them up can't thwart an insurgency of an eight of the size with comparatively poor weapons and no air force. There must be a substantially larger hardcore of insurgents, and a very large periphery in the supporting population. This is what is so illogical about the continued pretense by US-led forces that their foes are an unpopular rump. They may once have been, but evidently now command the loyalty of broad social layers, perhaps comprising a majority in places such as Helmand. Still, if the figures nonetheless correctly identify a trend, then the insurgency has more than tripled in size since 2006.

Not only are the insurgents growing in number, the sophistication of their attacks is increasing. For example, a recent attack on a military outpost in Nuristan killed eight American soldiers. Another attack on a UK base in the Helmand province killed a British soldier. These are just samples from the dozens of weekly attacks that strike occupation forces. Now, Obama - anxious to justify that Nobel prize, no doubt - is looking at the idea of buying off a section of the insurgency, just as Bush was able to do with a layer of the Iraqi resistance. The alternative is the McChrystal plan of sending up to 60,000 more troops, which is known to divide the Democrats and will force Obama to rely on GOP support if he wants to push it through. The assumption behind the idea of paying insurgents to fight on the American side, though, is that the majority of those fighting the US take up arms because it pays well. Perhaps that's true of some, but the reality is that what has escalated the insurgency from being a relative nonentity into a force that could (so military leaders predict) defeat the combined occupying forces is the mode of rule and repression that the US has developed. The client-state of warlords, the air war, the selective 'war on drugs' are all mainstays of the occupation, and can't easily be dispensed with. Moreover, the success of this strategy in the 'Sunni triangle' depended on the occupiers' ability to coopt the leadership of some of the disarticulated networks of military resistance that characterised the Iraqi insurgency. The leadership of the insurgency is nowhere near as divided in Afghanistan, and the 'neo-Taliban' are waging a smarter war than those fragmented groups that have been fighting in Iraq. The only realistic option for those still committed to this war is escalation. However, that then raises the question of whether America's allies are prepared to throw in more troops and money - an issue over which NATO has divided before.

__________________
Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

Digitalwolf

I wouldn't change a word. Very very well spoken. Green sent.

sabang

^^ Good, cogent article Dan (can't green ya yet though).

So if we are to believe our Spinmeisters (not that anyone does) an 'insurgency' of 25,000 or so is beating, or at least holding it's own, against a hi-tech occupying army of 200,000 plus- on top of the local security forces . Sounds highly dubious to me- it is clear that, at minimum, the 'insurgency' (Resistance) enjoys a lot of direct and indirect support from the Afghan people.

When you look at the nature of the Karzai government Nato is propping up, it's not hard to see why. The Vice President is known to be a massive (possibly the largest) heroin smuggler, a powerful warlord and gangster- the Taliban probably look good in comparison. Nato studiously looks the other way, but oh dear the Taliban are financing themselves with heroin- can't have that can we. Hypocrites

The recent elections were a joke, and UN/ Western attempts to put a lid on this have not succeeded. It seems pretty certain that Karzai would not have 'won' were it not for blatant and rampant electoral fraud. So the Karzai government has no legitimacy. It is also known to be corrupt to the core- from the very Top down to the security forces, who the Afghan people often fear more than the Tali. These security forces do not owe their prime allegiance to the Karzai government (or Nato) anyway- rather their local Warlord, who's fickle loyalties can change with the breeze. Certainly, in the pay of the US/Nato dollar, several of these warlords have been using their 'legitimacy' to settle old scores. We hear plenty about mistaken drone strikes in our media- and this is very damaging. But we do not hear much about the murders and rapes, and day to day extortion and theft, being perpetrated by the 'official' Afghan security forces on our payola.

It's all beginning to look very familiar, deja vu & all that. South Vietnam all over again.

The Euro's have been saying this for years now, much to the disdain of the American Right, but they are correct. Why are 'We' in Afghanistan anyway? Both the UK and Oz have lost more troops in Ghan now than they did in Iraq. What are we fighting for, ie who benefits? It's not about punishing the Tali for harbouring AQ anymore- thats been and gone. It's not about introducing 'Freedom and Democracy' () anymore- the Karzai government we are propping up is about as democratic as Stalin, but has nowhere near the same grip on power.

So what excuses are left, except trying to save face, and of course the Pipedream (pardon the pun). Oil, specifically the much vaunted oil pipeline through Afghanistan to reduce the passage of Central Asian oil to the sea- and cock a snook at the Russki's, with their competing oil pipelines. The pipedream is dead- any oil pipeline thru' Ghan is never going to be secure, with it's hostile terrain & warring fiefdoms- anyone of which could sabotage the pipeline at anytime if it doesn't get enough payola from the West, or allegiances shift. Iran offers a far better alternative anyway, but oh dear can't admit that can we?

But even if we cling to this 'Pipedream', who stands to benefit? Frankly, good old Muttley & Sidekick again- the Yanks and the Poms. They own the big oil companies. There is no reason for nations like Germany and Italy to have troops at risk in Afghanistan, none at all- and they know it. To be honest, I think they should pull their troops out- there is nothing in it for them, not even a moral cause- the Karzai government is rotten anyway. Am I being a Traitor?

As for the rest of the Nato forces (Us, UK, Oz, & maybe Poland 'cus they're being bribed), they should be working on an exit plan. There will be no oil pipeline. If there ever was going to be one, the time to have stabilised Afghanistan and make this possible was back in 2002/3- but of course the dufus Neo-cons decided to switch their emphasis to invading Iraq instead, and in the process stuffed up both countries plus left us with an expensive hangover, not to mention two lost or losing wars. Nice one guys.

Are our Politicians ever going to leave their Imperial fantasies behind? If we are going to interfere in another countries affairs, and occupy them militarily, we have to install or prop up a government that has actual legitimacy, and support from the people. Clown Karzai doesn't, no more than was the case in South Vietnam. The writing is on the wall, and ultimately Afghanistan will be yet another 'Mission unaccomplished'. Shame, because there was once a chance- but Bush & co blew it.

__________________
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Panda

Good post.

The New American Century with tag along sidekick UK sharing the spoils didnt come off as planned.

BTW, I greened Dan for ya .

Jet Gorgon

Ah, if war was only so simple where the enemies came out face to face and shot each other instead of hiding in civilians' homes and neighbourhoods. What was that book where all war was simulated and if your area was bombed in the fight programme, you had to line up for extermination?
Face it folks, wars are never going to be like the ones where armies lined up to shoot each other.
And no, I think warriors deserve backup.

__________________
Jettie, DAR

Panda

Jet, what you been endorsing is the killing of civilians to protect soldiers.
I believe "collateral damage" is the nice, inoffensive term commonly used to describe this murder.

Dan

Here's something which was published in Afghanistan: Interview with Malalai Joya -- The occupation is `a war on the Afghan people' | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal There's a short interview with Malalai Joya followed by a message to Australian anti-war campaigners from her. It's interesting to hear a voice from Afghanistan, something which, with the exception of occasional squeaks from Washington-sanctioned rulers and suitably mental Taliban, is all too rare. Mostly, discussions about Afghanistan are conducted by the imperial powers with almost no reference - beyond the most abstract - to the country's inhabitants. It's amazing how little this has changed in the last hundred years:

Malalai Joya has been described as “the bravest woman in Afghanistan”. A long-term opponent of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) presence in her country, Malalai Joya first rose to prominence through a heartfelt and controversial speech in 2003 that was an indictment of the powerful positions gifted to Afghan warlords by the US-led coalition. She was elected to the Afghan parliament in 2005 and continued her campaign against war criminals and fundamentalists there until being suspended in 2007 for criticising fellow MPs. Activists Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein are amongst those who have called for her reinstatement. In spite of four attempts on her life and having to live under constant protection, Joya continues her campaign against the government of Hamid Karzai, its fundamentalist allies and its Western backers.

You were thrown out of parliament for attacking the war criminals and religious extremists that make up a large proportion of the current Afghan MPs. How were so many of these people elected and why do more MPs not speak out against them?

The 2005 elections were held with the participation of the most infamous warlords and drug lords in the county. It was a rigged election under the shadow of the guns, threats and money of these criminals and therefore many of what I call the dirty elements entered the parliament. They are hated among the people, but because they had power and arms they threatened the people to vote for them. There is a saying that it is not so much who votes that is important but who counts the votes, and all the ballot boxes in Afghanistan were in the criminals' hands. Crucially, the corrupt extremist candidates were also strongly supported by the US and other countries like Iran and Pakistan and therefore their chances of success were quite high.

So when you ask why more MPs do not speak out against these extremists, it is because the majority of the parliamentarians are fundamentalists and also because some MPs will simply collaborate with such criminals for their own benefit. There are a handful of parliamentarians who are against the extremists but they are afraid of being killed and therefore they do not dare to speak out.

During the initial invasion, the NATO strategy was to deal with the Northern Alliance in order to oust the Taliban. You have since attacked this as being detrimental to the development of genuine democracy in Afghanistan. Do you think it is possible for any government in Afghanistan to oppose both the warlords and the Taliban and still maintain stability?

Of course I believe this strategy has been detrimental to democracy because the Northern Alliance are just another set of terrorists like the Taliban and they share the same mindset. Both are fundamentalists with a heavy criminal past. They are harshly anti-freedom, anti-democratic and anti-women. The Northern Alliance has a long list of crimes to its name, like raping, looting, killing and bombing during their regime in the 1990s. They have been even worse than Taliban in wounding our people.

A stable government without the Taliban is possible only if we have a democratic, secular and independent government that is not beholden to the US or any other foreign power. Unfortunately, since the democratic forces have been trampled and are very weak in Afghanistan, they cannot offer a strong alternative. Stability will only be achieved if our democratic forces join hands with like-minded people around the world to raise a powerful voice and uproot every brand of fundamentalism, whether Northern Alliance or Taliban, and pave the road towards a democratic and prosperous Afghanistan.

The new NATO commander in Afghanistan, General McCousins, has said that coalition strategy will now shift its emphasis from attacking insurgents to protecting civilians. How do you think public opinion in Afghanistan will respond to this move?

The Afghan public has lost its trust and interest in such false words. In the first days of the invasion US President George W. Bush also said that the war would not harm civilians and many high-ranking Afghan and foreign officials have been repeating this over the last eight years. But on the ground we can see that civilians are being killed and injured by foreign troops. Civilians killed by the foreign troops are entering the thousands, whereas killings by the Taliban are not even in the hundreds. That is why people believe the US war is against them and not the Taliban, which is stronger than before while the people's sufferings have increased with every passing day. Our people are fed up, and such small changes in war tactics will not win the “hearts and minds” of our people.

(There's a wiki page on Malalai Joya at Malalai Joya - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia It's worth having a look - she's got some balls.)

Milkman

Here is an article regarding the rules of engagement.

People talk of sending more troops. But with the rules of engagement like this?


Link & Entire: Fallen Marine's father wants change - Military- msnbc.com

MrG

You don't win without winning hearts and minds. You don't do that by killing them. We did it in Nam and then wondered why the people helped the Viet Cong. So we created "free fire zones" where killing anything that moved...women...children... didn't matter, then wondered why they kept hating us. The arrogance of empire and a rightous cause.

Panda

A touching story that shows the tragedy and suffering of a family losing a loved one in war.

However, it is not only American families who suffer terrible grief and anger when their loved ones are killed. And it is particularly hurtful when those loved ones are not soldiers but innocent civilians, -- often women and little kids killed by a foreign military.

For every innocent Afghan civilian killed by the US military, a deep resentment, hatred and anger against the foreign invaders is created among the surviving family members. Some of whom will go on to become armed fighters with hearts full of hate for USA and bent on revenge.

Apart from the moral, ethical aspect of willfully killing civilians to protect soldiers, the practice simply doesn't make good tactical military sense in the long term. Kill a dozen civilians to get at a handful of insurgents and tomorrow you have created twice as many new insurgents and many more insurgent sympathizers.
The US strategy of killing civilians to protect US soldiers or to get at the enemy insurgents merely serves to exponentially increase the number of those insurgent enemies tomorrow. As Mr G has indicated, the USA has learned nothing from their previous experience in Vietnam.

Afghan civilians are not just numbers to be sacrificed for Americas military ends. They are human beings the same as you and I. The have the same feelings of grief and anger when a foreign military kills their loved ones that you or I would have. I think I speak for most men of all races and culture when I say that if a foreign army murdered my wife and daughter I would gladly sacrifice my own life to take out as many of those foreign invaders as possible.

Yea, Afghan people are humans too. They suffer and get angry when their loved ones are killed. It is not only American people who have these feelings.

Humbert

Almost every 'on the ground' expert that I have listened to in the last several days has said that the Afgan people generally support the coalition's presence and their real frustration and anger is against their own hapless and corrupt government. The popular support for the Taliban is at 4-8% according to polls.

Dan

I'd take that with a truckload of salt. How many 'experts' raised questions about WMDs? Even after the event, there was barely a squeak. It's not that surprising that media institutions which merge seamlessly with those state institutions organising the occupation of Afghanistan should claim that everyone really does love the occupiers and that it's all someone else's fault. And as the Karzai government is intimately connected to the occupiers, I'm not sure that it really make any sense to separate the two.

MrG

This from Sept. 8th.

" ...this past weekend, the President reviewed a strategic assessment prepared by General Stanley McChrystal widely portrayed as a prelude to a request for an escalation. Should the president approve such a request, he'd be saying, in effect, that to protect democracy in America and to build it in Afghanistan, we must trample it.

On September 4, I went on al-Jazeera English to debate the future of U.S. foreign policy versus Abe Greenwald. When I insisted that we don't have indications that the Pashtuns are flipping their support to the Afghan national government, Abe asserted that polling shows that American forces and the Afghan national government get higher marks than the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Based on the most recent polling I can find on Afghanistan public opinion, he is roughly correct. His assertion is also irrelevant.
I am assuming that Greenwald refers to a 1/12/09 ABC News/BBC/ARD poll, versus the more-recent IRI polling (if he wasn't, then he should have been, as it asks more relevant questions about Afghan desires on U.S. troop levels). According to that poll, the Taliban presence is supported by only eight percent of those surveyed. The Afghan government gets 49 percent job approval. The United States gets a 47 percent favorable rating. So yes, according to this poll, attitudes among all Afghans toward the United States compare favorably with the Afghan government and the Taliban. Again, this warm feeling is irrelevant.
The problem for Abe's argument is that the 47 percent approval rating for the U.S. is accompanied by a 52 percent disapproval rating among Afghans. That unfavorable rating has spiked 20 points since the end of 2007. The pace with which the unfavorable rating grows is accelerating. The number of Afghans who say attacks on the U.S. and allies can be justified doubled since 2006. Only 32 percent say the U.S. has performed well in Afghanistan. Only 37 percent say that the local population supports Western forces. And -- here's the most important question regarding the decision before President Obama -- when asked about coalition troop levels, only 18 percent of Afghans wanted troop levels increased. Twenty-nine percent wanted the same number of troops, and 44 percent wanted troops decreased.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/derrick-crowe/war-gone-wild-in-afghanis_b_278472.html

Dan

I'd be interested to know how these surveys are carried out. How much do they reflect rural opinion? Are pollsters driving around Helmand in their 4x4s? Maybe they are, but it seems a bit unlikely and if they're skewed toward the urban population, I'd imagine that they'd be skewed toward foreign intervention (drones aren't killing too many wedding parties in down-town Kabul, after all.)

Humbert

Independent journalists. Rather their opinion than armchair conjecture.

Jet Gorgon

I do not endorse it. I do support backup for the troops tho. And, unfortunately, civilians do die in wars.

True, and the US & NATO are helping with building, supplies, funding in A-stan. It's just difficult to know who the enemy is over there; not like they wear special AQ uniforms.

Panda

With 32 million people, even a statistically low % of people who want the USA out of Afghanistan can amount to literally millions. And of that group it can relate to possibly hundreds of thousands of actual people prepared to fight for their beliefs.

The thing is that the anti-American, anti-government group are the hard liners, many who are prepared to fight to the death, while vast majority middle group just want to get on with their lives. As support for the US occupation dwindles among the majority middle group, support for the hard line anti-American fighters grows.

USA is fighting a loosing battle for support in Afghanistan. Right now its a stalemate in military terms, but in terms of hearts and minds they are loosing the war.

Right now the US public now longer has heart for the war, and economically its draining the country. So there is little hope of USA increasing the military effort there. The NATO allies are also tiring of a seemingly unwinnable war and their numbers are dwindling. The previous US tactic of going in with a heavy hand has backfired and resulted in increased support for the insurgents. The only option for USA now is to try and regain some Afghan support -- aka winning hearts and minds. And killing Afghan civilians to protect US soldiers is not the way to do that as General McCristal has figured out. However, if there's one thing that makes the US public loose their taste for war faster than anything else its the site of an increased number of body bags coming home.

Probable outcome is that in the lead up to the next US presidential election, still 3 years away yet, the Yanks will try to slide out of the Afghan war arena and leave it up to Pakistan and Afghanistan to clean up their mess.

MrG

Yes, they do very nice things for some people in the community, hell, whole communities, who are lucky enough to be chosen. I see the reports on the nightly TV news. The Good Guys doing Good Deeds, which I think is great and I don't put it down at all, but it doesn't make a war worth it. I don't think the average Afghani...average human being...would weigh military occupiers killing civilians --friends, relatives, neigbors -- against a new compressor or well or school house, and not take a side. I would. And I know what side I'd be on.

Came across this article in The Nation by Robert Scheer, an old liberal if ever there was one. I'm not sure how we leave Afghanistan, but this fact and the logic that follows has got to figure into the calculation.

Whole article at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091019/scheer