Whether or not you agree with why the war was started. We need to finish it. And if this is the best way, I'm for it.

Our enemies have not been holding back, and that's the reason we are not winning.

And we always will and that's why it's bad. Usa cannot fight an all out war against pathetic countries like Afghanistan. The political consequences would be too high. Not to mention the fact that you don't even know who's who in a place like that. The civilian casualties would be too high. They'll probably be too high as it is as well as an American increase in casualties. This is the war that broke the USSR. I hope it's not the war that Broke the USA as well. We should just get out. Spend the money at home and if we're really so afraid of cavemen then we should stop training them. I swear we never learn a damn thing from history.

To piggy back on Geofram's comments: the United States has traditionally entered a war with overwhelming force, which would practically guarantee success in and of itself - though obviously it didn't always guarantee success (e.g. Vietnam).

In both Afghanistan and Iraq we entered with underwhelming force...big mistake. We need to do what we can to fix that mistake as soon as possible, including sending more troops.

Political threads? Anyhow, I just fail to see how it could ever the possible to finance these military expenditures. Of course the Chinese are happy to pocket the interest, but when will the government default?

Middle east? last time i checked Afghanistan was Central Asia. I guess America could do a little better if they had some idea of geography.

How does one create a friendly government in a foreign country? Well i guess the lessons of American intervention in Central and South America, and ohh Haitii haven't taugth you anything, but i'll give you a clue, it doesn't matter how many troops you send if you can't gain local support.

The Islamic (well technically Secular) Republic of Turkey is pushing all kinds of human rights reform, (against the wishes of some hardliners in Turkey) just to join the EU. Whereas the US is funding(arming) Saudis and Israelis in the middle east which encourages rebellion/attacks. (those Saudis who don't want their king to rule can't really remove him as long as the US sell him weapons and give him militrary aid - of course Bin Laden used the US from Saudi Militrary bases against other muslim countries to generate support)

Basically US foreign policy includes a use of force which (like russia when they invaded Georgia last year) is fundamentally misguided. It is however standard of most foreign policies of any nation which has had unparralleled militrary power. (Russia had sufficient militrary power in georgia that nobody could stop them before their mission was accomplished)

So whether more troops can help win hearts and minds of Afghani's? I doubt it, I'd send more teachers, more doctors, and break the task into managable sizes. Take a safe area and put up border checks, train teachers, put in infrastructure, and make them the envy of the rest of the country, then move on to the next most peaceful area.

Afghanistan has approx 28 million inhabitants
Iraq has approx 31 million

It kind of goes without saying that there has to be a political solution.
Military means might uphold some kind of civil order, but only at a staggerind financial cost.

The big problem is that Afghanistan is so poorly governed, that's why the Taliban took hold there in the first place. It's up to the Afghanistan government to stamp out corruption and get the people of Afghanistan behind it and there'll be no Taliban to fight. Hopefully Karzai's government can do that in the couple of years America is giving it, but it hasn't got off to a good start with its election fraud and rampant corruption.

If it takes the Taliban for Afghanistan to have a stable government it'll eventually fall back to the Taliban, no matter how many thousands of troops are sent

This is what I know: Nothing was going to get better if we DIDN'T send troops, so that makes it the lesser of all the evils.

Well, the US financial deficit will have to be corrected one day. It can only really be done by reducing military spending.

Every dollar spent today, means that another dollar must be taken out of the future military budget. Hopefully the dollars spent today are spent wisely.

Also I think war with Iran is becoming more and more of a real possibility, before I thought their political process would stop things before they went too far, and that it might even actually be genuinely for peaceful purposes, now with the election turmoil, new facility at Qom (http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2009/12/figuring-out-fordow.php), plans for new facilities, etc, I think it's almost certainly not for peaceful purposes and some sort of military action while still unlikely is becoming more and more likely.

@Perry; it can also be largely done with inflation, and it looks like that's what's going to happen

@kestasjk: What do you mean about "be largely done with inflation"? Isnt that just to prolong the inevitable ? (but do enlighten me pls!)

They'll buckle if Russia sanctions them. But the bastards waffled even after we removed the plans for a missile defence system. What makes them and China so eager to support rogue states anyway? I mean I know what they SAY... but seriously, if they don't want me to think that they are literally malicious, then they need to step up their game and do their part to fix this fucked up world.

Annnnd soap box - off.

@Perry: I may be wrong but inflation lessens the value of the government's debt, meaning the amount they owe is worth less. The debt still has to be repaid but it's gets easier and easier to repay as it's worth less and less, and the dollar does seem to be becoming worth less and less very quickly these days

@Thucydides: Russia has been delaying on delivering Iran's reactor, and the UN security council as a whole is definitely becoming more and more suspicious about Iran's motives. I hope you're right that they won't go it alone, but their recent plan to build multiple small facilities just seems to say they're ready to start a crash-course weapons program that'll let them get a bomb in as little time as possible

The newly discovered facility at Qom would take 90 years to enrich enough low-enriched uranium for a typical nuclear reactor, but it'd take only 1-4 years to enrich enough high-enriched uranium for a bomb. 1-4 years isn't a lot of time, and if they're building 10 other such facilities it doesn't look good

(Citation here: http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2009/12/figuring-out-fordow.php )

@kestasjk
"The big problem is that Afghanistan is so poorly governed, that's why the Taliban took hold there in the first place."

Not true. The Taliban took hold there because of Russian aggression and American supplied arms and training. This whole going in there to improve things is a joke. American foreign policy has never been about moral obligation.

Thucydides, Russia and China are supporting 'rogue' states because if they don't, our government will supplant them with US-friendly dictators. Especially in the case of Iran - every oil-rich country in the middle east is occupied by the United States or a US-friendly totalitarian regime - *except* for Iran. As the oil dries up, control of what's left becomes more and more important. If you were Russia or China or India, would you want your most powerful rival in complete control of most of what's left? I know I wouldn't.

As for Afghanistan, our government has had boots on the ground for over eight years now and the situation is deteriorating. If they can't get it right after eight years and hundreds of billions of dollars, why does anyone think they can get it right now?

The Taliban is actually winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. The US-backed regime is the most corrupt government on the planet right now - did you know it costs the average Afghan a year's wages in bribes to government officials to get permission to own a car? If I were in the shoes of the average Afghan tribesman, I'd be supporting the Taliban, too.

RE: China buying debt: China has actually been making a lot of noise lately about the situation. Check out this recent press conference between Obama and Hu Jintao:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/43426.html

@SunZi: I think you're mistaking the Taliban with the Mujahideen, and no-one is saying the US foreign policy is about moral obligation or that they went there to "improve things [for the Afghan people]"

> If they can't get it right after eight years and hundreds of billions of dollars, why does
> anyone think they can get it right now?
They probably want to emulate the relatively good results they had with the Iraq "surge". It was a similar deteriorating situation there, and there was a lot of cynicism from most (including me) about sending more troops in, but it does seem to have improved things and given the Iraqi government time to establish itself

[quote]They probably want to emulate the relatively good results they had with the Iraq "surge".[/quote]

The problem there is that Iraq and Afghanistan are two completely different countries in just about every way. Iraq is urban. Afghanistan is rural. Iraq had experience with modern centralized government. Afghanistan has always been tribal. Iraq had/has a relatively educated populace. I'd be surprised if the Afghan literacy rate is over 20%. Iraq is flat. Afghanistan is mountainous. Iraqis watch TV and know what the rest of the world is like. Afghans seldom leave their village, let alone their province or country. Iraq is easily and inexpensively (KBR scams aside) supplied from Kuwait and the Persian Gulf. Afghanistan is extremely difficult and expensive to supply.

Occupying Afghanistan and shoving foreign political institutions down their throat is just never going to work. The Soviets tried. They were literally Afghanistan's next door neighbor, and had a lot of experience with that kind of thing. They couldn't make it work. With all the baggage of an 8-year occupation, the rampant corruption of the Karzai regime, and an American public that is growing weary and unwilling to carry the burdens of empire any longer, I can't imagine Obama doing any better.

Maniac's turn on the soap box.

One of the major problems with Afghanistan is the drug trade. "The facts are stunning: in 2001, after a Taliban ban on poppy cultivation, Afghanistan only produced 11 percent of the world’s opium. Today it produces 93 percent of the global crop"

Local dirt poor farmers can't be blamed for farming a drug that pays much more than wheat, and the whole culture of a narco-economy sustains the corruption in politics.

A big part of me thinks we (UK and her allies) should interfer at all, another part of me thinks that if we are interferring we should do it effectively. The global community could pay farmers a guaranteed income to produce wheat or other produce. They could insist that for each acre of land they control they must produce x tonnes of food. If they don't meet their quota, it may be because some of the land has been used for drug production. If that is the case, their land is confiscated and given to other farmers who will produce food.

In the short term, poppy prices will rise because of less supply, and the income derived from the poppy will still fund the taliban and others, but in the longer term, fewer and fewer people will rely upon the poppy or their livelihood and therefore have less allegience to the warloads.

An efficient narco-economy and a fledging democracy just can not co-exist. I'm not saying that crippling the narco-economy will mean democracy prospers, but I do think that allowing the narco-economy to flourish kills any hope of democracy tking root.

Maniac leave the soap-box to cheers and applause.

*A big part of me thinks we (UK and her allies) SHOULDN'T interfer at all

Afghanistan broke the USSR's military capability, but every communist country is bound to fall apart eventually.

America was a democracy. We have the political and military strength to carry on the war. We need to declare war and start pouring resources into Afghanistan.

Better then letting the Taliban overrun a country, where they break TVs and treat women as (someone else in the Forum, his name slips my mind) 9th class citizens.

Afghanistan won't break America. I'll admit I'm not optimistic about our long term success there (although a real win in Afghanistan would mean the US did something people from Alexander the Great to the Soviets couldn't do and that's pretty sweet), but the US will never fall apart the way the USSR did and it will never stop being a very important country in the world. It's not as if overnight or even in a generation we'd turn into Belgium. Globalization will inevitably lead to a sort of international leveling, and that's not inherently bad.

Afghanistan is where Vietnam might be repeated, not Iraq. Iraq has an economy and a middle class and a relatively developed civil society. The violence we saw in previous years can be expected anywhere that the government has been destroyed and people have to fend for themselves. Like Mad Max. In the long run I don't worry too much about Iraq being able to carry on. Afghanistan, on the other hand, is a feudal wasteland that's never had a real government and the people seem to not really want one. Our attacks on terrorists and Taliban seem like they could turn into the Vietnam era "body-count" strategy of killing as many goddamn commies as we could and counting on that to break the movement's back. That's a dangerous strategy and a failure of a strategy. As much as a I hope this new way of dealing with Afghanistan will work, I have severe doubts that it won't. The US won't dissolve over it and the US won't be knocked down from a very powerful position or possibly even its preeminent position because of a failure in Afghanistan, but just like Vietnam it would be devastating none the less. I really don't know what the right strategy would be or even if there is one.

"We need to declare war and start pouring resources into Afghanistan."

Against whom would we declare war, The_Master_Warrior? Surely not the very Afghan government we created and surely not the camel jockey thugs in Al Quededadaua and the Taliban who are not a state. Who then? Who? And what's the need even, since we are involved in a war already?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/12/01/afghanistan.soviet.lessons/index.html

Voice from the past (one of the commanders of the Soviet occupation)

That ex-Soviet general is delusional.

"I'll admit I'm not optimistic about our long term success there (although a real win in Afghanistan would mean the US did something people from Alexander the Great to the Soviets couldn't do "

I thought Alexander was the last Successful invader of Afghanistan? I guess you could say the Taliban did but they didn't really invade. They immigrated there and just took over.

The whole thing is a joke anyway. This is all damage control. We built up Iraq to fight Iran and then we had to take it down. We built up the Taliban to fight the Russians and now we have to take it down. Who are we creating now?

I have a sense that in forty years time I will be saying how mistakes made in 20xx in Afghanistan caused the current crisis.

I think more troops are necessary if there is to be a success, but that isn't everything. I don't know what is, but lets start by legalising the trade of opiates, because then the profits from the drug trade would drop and the need for protection when trading drops.


As regards the government debt, Kestas is correct, inflation does effectively pay it off, but at the same time, inflation acts as a tax on everyone.

"I think more troops are necessary if there is to be a success, but that isn't everything. I don't know what is, but lets start by legalising the trade of opiates, because then the profits from the drug trade would drop and the need for protection when trading drops."

This is very true and I fully agree. Not to mention there are many other social benifits to this like bankrupting Cartels, gangs etc. but that is for another thread I guess.