Obama's Surge

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All right, you buncha lawyers I'll amend it:

Is that better?

 

I couldn't agree more NOG. That type of info should be internal at best, probably should just be a need to know basis amongst the brass. The enemy, after hearing this news, can easily change their strategy to fade and regroup after a troop withdrawal. What then? Back to square one? I am for squashing them now, not later.

 

LKD:
Umm... *looks at the US Senate* Do you consider the US a success?

 

More so than a little piece of filth like Karzai, yes. The U.S. has its flaws, to be sure, but lets be realistic -- it's nothing like Afghanistan, Pakistan, or even Mexico, if you want to come closer to home. We're talking orders of magnitude here.

 

According to the CPI (Corruption Perception Index, not Consumer Price Index), USA has always rated fairly high, relative to most other countries. Slightly on the lower end of the scale compared to most Democratic countries, but still up there. FOr such a large country, they do well. The largest country with a rating significantly higher than the USA is Germany, but they have less than 1/3 your population. Still, definitely room for improvement.

 

Just to be clear, on the CPI, higher is better, or worse?

As for corruption in the US, I really was joking. The US does a pretty good job of avoiding corruption by making things transparent (the vast majority of congressional activity is a matter of public record) and by distributing power. Many may not realize it, but the bulk of the real power in the US is divided between the hundreds of people that make up the Senate and House, and not even in a "you get this, you get that" way, but rather in a "here's it all, now share" way. This means that no single individual really has all that much power, but the collective organization can still act with shocking power if properly motivated. I don't know details of the formation of other governments, but I'd bet most of the more successful democracies follow a similar pattern. This results in more cases of singular abuses (someone funnels some money into a personal account, gets a job for a crony, etc.) then the organized problems (drug cartels writing laws) you see in some other nations.

 

In the Corruption Perceptions Index 2009 the US rank #19.

The list is bei9ng led by New Zealand on #1, Denmark on #2 and Singapore on #3. Sweden is #4, Switzerland is #5, Germany is #14, Israel is #33, Poland #49, Georgia #66, Russia on #149, the all new democratic Iraq is #176 and last on the list is Somalia on place #180.

What all that means depends on where you see your peers I guess.

 

I saw the speech on youtube last night. I found it fairly good, and while I don't agree with some of the measures Obama seemed quite convincing. I guess he had to walk a line where everyone is unhappy with something, and try to get them to come together. Hey, good luck with that. Still, I think he shouldn't have problems getting votes - I doubt the right will oppose such a move, though they might push for the timetables being removed.

Oh, and Jon Stewart's comments were pretty good, but that's hardly news.

 

On the deadline, I think some are over-reacting to the effect it will have on al Queda, the Talban, and the sympathisers of the same. One thing that Vietnam should have taught us is that you cannot win combat initiatives like this based on a body count (the Vietnamese fatalities far exceeded the US), nor can you wait these people out, because they live there. We don't even have to look at Vietnam here, Afghanistan itself provides a fine example. (How long were the Russians involved?) I don't think they will follow us home. I think they will continue to fight us as long as we are there. (They are not still attacking the Russians...) We need to accomplish as much as possible in as reasonable a timeframe as possible, and get the heck out.

 

Aldeth, I'd generally agree with you, except for that "they won't follow us home" bit. Remember, the war in Afghanastan started because they attacked us. I don't believe for a second that Al Qaeda will simply sit back and live their lives if we leave them alone. They aren't still attacking the Russians because the Russians aren't their primary target (although I do believe Al Qaeda has performed a few terrorist attacks on Russian soil as well).

 

Someone asked what Afghans think. Well, of the Taliban I think there is a survey group that does polls and it generally rates at about 9% support-very unpopular if there were going to be elections held.

This is it seems fair to say there is a war in Afghanistan rather than on Afghanistan (much of the local people see the Taliban as thugs).

Here is a bit of the rub. The local people may not trust the government which is both corrupt and ineffective in providing services that much of those in western society expect. I know Afghan culture is different from ours but I would guess if one asked afghans as a whole if they preferred schools run properly, police that don't use their position of (very local) authority/power to steal from citizenry, and so on they would say yes.

The US, under W who never struck me as being a large foe of corruption, let Karzai come to power with little in terms of making sure a government was responsive/accountable. So many of the people in his government decided to be part of a situation that invited problems later.

The Taliban, never totally wiped out saw a chance to try to make a comeback and went for it. They, if the reports are correct, have tried to portray themselves as a source of law and order (crimes punished, officials held accountable, and so on). There is still an argument that they are thugs and (guessing at where much of their money comes from) drug runners but in the PR department they try to portray themselves as both the ones who will be around no matter what and the closest thing to honest government.

Why aren't they loved by anything close to a majority of the Afghan population? Well, they are still thugs who have done cruel things to people and may do so again in the future if given the chance. How can they push people around? They have guns, some organization, and enough followers/sympathizers that they have a clue what is going on in some places.

Information in a complex landscape (hill and mountain ranges) is important. Lots of places to hide, build strongholds, or even ambush from.

Why is the Afghan government so important? It can challenge, given time and the creation of effective and responsible leadership, many of the Taliban's abilities.

Local government may know the locality well enough to rival the Taliban in capabilities. It can also present them with an opponent that will definitively not be going anywhere (foreign troops may eventually go home but it, supposedly, is home). If the Afghan government has armed and capable troops it can even push back if the Taliban tries to bully its way into an area.

In some ways the Taliban can be compared to a bully that waits until nobody else as strong as he is happens to be around before making a move. "Protecting the Population" is an attempt to counter this pattern of activity.

Anyway I try to pick up on the news whenever it is talked about and that is my opinion based on some of the things I've read.

 

Al Qaeda is not the same thing as Afghanistan - the two are not equivalent. While it is true that the 9/11 attacks were planned by al Qaeda that trained in Afghanistan, they have cells throughout the Middle East, and more bases in Africa, Europe, and even North America. The people who actually hijacked the planes didn't fly in from Afghanistan as soon as it was planned out. Many of them had lived in the US for years prior to the attack. Even if you manage to capture or kill every member of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, it will not remove the threat that al Qaeda poses from its other cells.

And I still don't think that the al Qaeda members in Afghanistan are going to follow us home. It is far more likely that even if another terrorist attack is planned in Afghanistan, it will be carried out by terror cells that are already in other countries.

 

IMHO, Afghanistan is a lost cause. Until they decide that they don't want to be ruled by psychos like the Taliban, and decide to stand up and really fight for their freedom, there's little we can do other than make it easy for those who want freedom to come to a country that has it -- and remind them that it'll be difficult. We should stop wasting the lives of our soldiers.

 

LKD, unless we have had a major reform suddenly occur in terms of immigration policy that ideal you expressed isn't a reality. There were a (maybe this has changed) fair number of people who would like to enter the US but were being denied. These are people from both oppressive nations and warzones-sometimes after they have worked with the US and become targets for doing so.

My understanding is that there are large numbers of people who have tried to work with us in Afghanistan and it would potentially be a death sentence for them if the US pulled out. Moreover in the areas were the Taliban has some control working with the US can invite harm. An example I heard about over public radio (hopefully not propaganda or anything) was of a girl who saw an IED being placed and reported it to a village elder who passed word to US troops. Taliban came back later and chopped the girl's hand off as a lesson to other would be tattle-tales.

There is some truth to the notion of not being able to fight a war for others but there is also some truth to the point that the Afghans were broadly supportive and welcoming to the US & Karzai's government years ago and only after seeing unpopular warlords get power and influence within the government and local authorities steal the money they were supposed to disburse have Afghans gotten frustrated with the current Afghan gov.

The Taliban has been taking advantage of opportunities that a lack of accountability on the part of Afghanistan's government opened up.

We/the US were very much party to this government's initial formation. Not to mention it was perhaps only with US support and Afghans being willing to fight and die for their freedom that the Soviets were driven out years ago. And it was the lack of trying to build things back up then (yes, Afghanistan had something along the lines of a functioning state before the Soviet invasion & war against it) that opened the door to warlords fighting and letting frustration with them opening the door for the Taliban.

Also people have to stand up for what they believe in but even then help may be needed, keep in mind that without the french the Revolutionaries may well have lost the war against the British for the N. American colonies' independence.

 

As I understand it the Soviets invaded to save what was left of the functioning state in Afganistan as it was a Soviet supported socialist more or less dictatorship. Think of it as a reversed Vietnam where a communist government was fighting non-communist rebels.

I am not saying the Soviets did good, I am just saying that their incursion was an attempt to save their puppet regime which was the last "real government" Afganistan has had. This information was pieced together by various books and documentaries and I might have misunderstood everything but this is how I understand things.

 

First off, the war hasn't been on Afghanistan for a long time. It's just in Afghanistan. Secondly, the last intel I heard (which was a while ago and probably outdated already since it was leaked and all...) was that Osama bin Laden was either in Afghanistan or Pakistan near the Afghani border. Now I don't harbor any belief that killing/capturing bin Laden would end Al Qaeda, but it would certainly be a heavy blow to them.

 

NOG - my point is, that while we may not be fighting the Afghani people, we are fighting in Afghanistan, and that you cannot defeat al Qaeda by winning in Afghanistan. The info you have heard about OBL is similar to what I have heard. Current intelligence is that he is almost certainly on the Pakistan side of the border, as US troops cannot enter Pakistan, and Pakistan government and military has thus far been either reluctant, ineffective, or both in rooting out insurgents near the border.

I agree with you that the capture or death of OBL would be a blow to al Qaeda, but according to the current strategy outlined by Obama last week, that is not a major goal right now. In fact, I don't recall him even mentioning OBL. The primary goal is to train additional Afghani security forces loyal to the elected government to defend their country. If capturing/killing OBL was a high priority goal, it went unstated.

Getting back to Obama's speech, one thing that jumped out at me was how far expectations seem to have been lowered. Gone are the days of the gradiose plans of the Bush administration. Instead, we appear to now be looking at a plan of what can be realistically accomplished in a limited span of time. Running a police state at the expense of the US (both actual monetary costs and in the cost of US troops) is a policy that cannot be continued indefinitely.

 

joacqin

Worthwhile point. However, the Soviet presence in Afghanistan was short when compared to the whole of the 20th century. Afghanistan was its own nation for much of the period with a monarchy that appeared to go back and forth (sometimes depending on assassinations) on how far it would modernize and, sometimes, democratize to give the population as a whole a political voice.

The Soviet leaning communist government that the Soviets supported did not actually exist until a Communist Afghan group seized power by force in the late 1970s.

Thus communism as the ruling political force/ideology was actually atypical for Afghanistan except for a brief period.

Aldeth, it may be hard to tell on the ground when the military is involved but I believe we (the US & NATO) are trying to do something other than build a police state. What I referred to with warlords still having power and influence was that the proper functions of government were not being carried out, if that had been different we may have a different situation now.

 

I think local warlords are how government functions are typically carried out in large portions of the country. There's not much wrong with local autonomy, and Thomas Jefferson would have approved of such a situation. I think the real problem for us is that there isn't much in the way of urban, central control over most of the country. There's no way that we can politically control what goes on there, which is what "the
nation builders" want. I think the real mission is to destroy as much of Al Qaeda and the Taliban army as we can, (which is actually very small) to give the central government a chance to stand on its own. But I believe destroying the Taliban army is a worthwhile cause in the larger scheme of things, because as PPlr points out, it's not only in our interest, but of the locals as well. I'm sure Ragusa would have an interesting take on all this, if he can escape Dragon Age for just a few moments.

 

I tend to agree, but without any metrics by which to measure success (let's face it, but the end of the GWB administration, he wasn't even talking about Afghanistan), it was hard to tell otherwise. It appeared that the military action was largely directionless, or at least without a predetermined goal, which made it look like we were running a police state. I agree that wasn't the intent.