They just didn't salt the bombs properly. But again, people get all up in a tizzy when you start sterilizing cropland.
Fight smart, not fair.Well you have to consider the geography of the region too when it comes to why most of the area becomes prone to tribalism. For one thing, how many wildly different tribes are there? I know *we* like to call them Afghans, but it is nothing of the sort when you actually go there. Completely different history, culture and language between different groups there. On top of this, every so often, a whole new big tribe comes storming into the region. So you want democracy? You first need stable identity first.
Look at all the democracies in the world are all situated in countries where the ethnic makeup is stable. The only way those places change is from domestic cultural drift or controlled entry of people (ie. immigration).
^
There are around 10 major ethnic cultures within Afghanistan, and many more minor ones.
That's one of the major obstacles to getting rid of Tribalism, but not the only one.
We should just leave it. Let them produce their drugs and all their other crap, keep a few bases running there, and when something or someone is in Afghan that we want, send some spec ops in and take it or destroy it.
Only if we're stupid and ignore the problem, including most of it happening in the United States.
Which, ok, is pretty reasonable, given how it is easy to focus on the wrong problems, but the whole nonsense in Afghanistan isn't doing anything to solve it, it's actually a symptom of ignoring the danger to deal with something else in a more costly and less effective fashion.
edited 28th Jun '11 7:40:21 PM by blueharp
@Maddy: Then what kind of govrnment would work in Afghanistan?
And the tribal society is a symptom of the lack of advancement. Other societies used to work like this, and they moved on.
The system would work fine if Afghanistn wa rich: people are much less likey to hate when they can feed themselves.
edited 28th Jun '11 7:43:04 PM by Erock
If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.We didn't create Bin Laden, we didn't train and send the hijackers who killed 3000 Americans in less than an hour, we didn't write the Al Qaeda official declaration of war sent to President Clinton in the 1990s.
That's most of the reasons why we went there. The problem in the United States is we didn't take it seriously or as a credible threat. 9/11 taught us that the hard way. If we run away and think Al Qaeda was something we did, we basically throw ourselves right back where we were in the 1990s: not taking terrorism seriously or credibly and then we'll be taught again the hard way. (Only the next time we get taught the hard way will put 9/11 to shame.)
And I see it the opposite, if we focus on far-away places and fixing them right* , we make the exact same mistakes we already did by ignoring things happening at home, and treating it as something that can be solved by more intervention, the same interventionism that led to the resentment and anger in the first place. Without apparently doing anything more at home than groping senior citizens and children. Oh and spending billions of dollars that could have been put to much better uses, including randomly giving it to Americans who would at least spend it at home rather than build it abroad.
And that's without getting into the conspiracy theories that think it was all a con game.
@ Tom
That's not entirely true, there's a number of factors you're ignoring here. Pulling out of Afghanistan doesn't necessarily mean that you let terrorists breed in the local area. You are merely pulling out militarily.
One of the major problems with US image in the world is that Americans are painted as brutal savages capable of only solving problems by dropping bombs and when it doesn't work, they just drop more bombs. But, the United States has a very good corps of diplomats and as we saw with the leakage of the diplomatic cables, they're everywhere and doing a lot. Just maybe not very publicly.
So while, it sounds good for PR to "send in the marines" and wreck some terrorist shit up, in reality, the material and man cost of doing so far outweighs any benefits.
- The terrorists in 9/11 entered the US directly with visas issued directly to them. They didn't come from Canada. They didn't use fake passports. The US government straight up failed to do a proper background check and let them into the country. That's a failure of domestic security mechanism and no amount of biometric passports, airport dick viewers and other contraptions can stop the fact that the visa office gave them freaking legal visas.
- Osama was killed in a surgical strike using good intelligence. There's some talk that Al Qaeda actually threw him to the dogs, due to some dispute between al-Zawhiri and bin Laden, but I wouldn't know. That's probably so classified that by the time you get to know, people have stopped caring. The main point is that if you want to kill these terrorist networks AND avoid civilian collateral damage, it's better to do it quietly and have victory, then loudly and have defeat.
- Putting soldiers out there is highly costly and we've not really considered much of anything. Most people think about "send troops"/"don't send troops" but the war in Afghanistan isn't simple whatsoever. Let me give an example, during a routine patrol in Kandahar province, a LAV III vehicle had to boot it to reinforce soldiers under attack, so he busted through some farmer's stone wall to get to the location. We failed to pay him back for the property damage over some hiccup on who is supposed to pay the cost. So how grateful do you think that farmer is going to be when his only experience of NATO forces is that we busted his wall and let out all his sheep?
edited 28th Jun '11 7:57:13 PM by breadloaf
Ideally, I'd bring every last soldier home and leave the world flapping in the breeze to destroy itself. Problem is, there's too many threats in the world against us for us to go back to being isolationist.
It's basically the Golden Rule, they want to threaten us so we deal with them our own way military action or otherwise. If the world suddenly wants to leave the US alone in every possible aspect and not try to threaten, poke, prod or kill us I see no reason why we must keep intervening or interfering in other affairs.
Sadly the world doesn't work that way.
So you are essentially entirely self-centred in terms of your own nation?
If so then that is good to know, I do not share your point of view and regard it as morally repugnant and based about as much in reality as Merlin the happy pig, but good to know nevertheless.
edited 29th Jun '11 6:32:19 AM by JosefBugman
Gotta admit, I agree with surgically taking down obvious threats to the nation.
Note I said surgically, not by using an invasion force. I'm more the assassination, snatch and grab, and drone strike type of guy.
If someone has nothing to offer, neither do we, simple as that. We have enough troubles of our own.
edited 29th Jun '11 7:22:52 AM by Barkey
Finland's national defence is entirely based on the idea that since we can't stop Russia from taking our land if they really wanna do it, we'll just make it cost so much that they'll never consider it.
Pretty much exactly how one would go about defending a country like Afghanistan. Basically, train most of the men in the country and make sure that there will be existing infrastructure for underground networks of resistance as well as people who are able to start it over again and again when there's a strike against the insurgency.
While I don't think that would really work against Russia, it sure would stop, say, the US from taking over Finland and keeping it for more than a decade.
(Except that there are a billion reasons why the US might succeed, but my point was that a democracy could not hold us if we'd put up the kind of resistance that our armed forces are trained for. Personally, I'd resist nonviolently, hopefully getting better results than them.)
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.Incidentally, I just happened to be reading a book named Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition, which is a big case study of Germany from the 1870s up to the 1940s, Japan during roughly the same period, the British Empire going from Victorian days up to the decolonization period, and the United States throughout the whole Cold War.
One of the basic mechanisms of overextension, which applies equally to all of the aforementioned nations (i.e. both democratic and not) is as follows:
Pre-emptive strikes —> being seen as the aggressor —> increase in the hostility towards yourself —> the people who advocated pre-emptive strikes now have more possible targets for pre-emptive strikes —> repeat ad infinitum
I would be very interested to know how the USA of today can conduct pre-emptive strikes and avoid this trap.
Back on topic, it is true that if a number of past presidents, going all the way back to Jimmy Carter, took terrorism seriously then al-Qaeda might be defeated by now. However, when you have a continuous line of bad decisions going from Carter to Reagan to Bush to Clinton to W. Bush to Obama - this means it is a bipartisan problem which both parties are equally guilty of - then of course al-Qaeda will be able to do what it needs to do to become a many-headed hydra. Once it achieved multi-headed hydra status, conventional methods cease to be very effective against it. The world is very lucky that bin-Laden was such a marketing-driven egomaniac micromanager, or conventional methods would become totally ineffective.
^ Well see that's exactly the problem.
We're in Afghanistan today because of our actions years ago, which is because of other actions we've done and so on. Nothing justifies the terrorist attack on 9/11 but most people understand why it happened. Now these wars we've fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are probably going to lead to violence in the future. Iraq more so than Afghanistan, but there's probably not a population outside of USA that didn't think the United States was the clear aggressor in that conflict.
The United States had gone from a fairly passive power (ignoring regional conflicts around North America) before the second World War to the one starting wars in the 21st century.

Afghanistan had a "bad" year; almost a half of the crop was lost to a fungus.
If I recal correctly, the same fungus struck again this year, but that's something you're gonna have to look up if you wanna make sure I got it right, 'cause I'm too tired to bother doing it right now. (I might find a link for it tomorrow, though.)
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.