Afghanistan - What is the objective?

Discussion in 'World Events' started by StrawDog, Mar 11, 2009.

  1. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Drone attacks aren't killing thousands, they certainly aren't aimed at "civilians". I doubt you have any idea what the average Afghani thinks. There is no legitimate resistance to US forces, since it is beyond reason to think we intend to subjugate or colonize Afghanistan.
     
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  3. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    After the third or fourth wedding has been rocketed, the excuse that you were aiming at the third guy to the left of the groom fails to mollify.
    The answer would be "sure, sort of". After correcting one of your typical paraphrases, of course.
    Your crude and stupid misrepresentations of people's posting waste time and bandwidth.
    The US has fought dozens of people since WWII, a good share of which the US had supported in the recent past - including with arms.
    Those behind the policy are getting access to the Caspian Basin and central Asian mineral riches, and excluding their competition.
    The people gaining the access are pledging other people's treasure and blood.
     
    Last edited: Mar 13, 2009
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  5. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    "wedding", sure. As far as I know that only happened once, in Iraq.
     
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  7. StrawDog disseminated primatemaia Valued Senior Member

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    The credentials are sound.

    Thank you. I have knowledge of your referenced sources. They are approached from a pro US/Western perspective. (not negating them)

    Um. The term was "secretly aided". Covert. Hidden. This type of info does not make it on CNN. However.

    (Phil Gasper - Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame de Namur University, California)
     
  8. nietzschefan Thread Killer Valued Senior Member

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    Because you dumped Vietnam. The same faction you supported, you had to fight 20 years later. The U.S really never wanted to support Ho Chi Minh, they only did it for the purposes alluded to by some other ignorant in this thread "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" Bullshit. President Jefferson, in particular warned about this kind of behavior. When WWII was over they simply supported Ho's enemy the French, Nat Chinese, whomever wasn't a red. When WWII was OVER they screwed him.

    Nationalist Chinese you didn't have to fight, because they were utterly defeated. The U.S stayed with them, to the end(49') pretty much. But they were defeated.
     
  9. DiamondHearts Registered Senior Member

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    2,557
    Number one this which you and all cowboys lack is knowledge of GROUND REALITIES. Afghanis are real people with real families. Once you kill a child or wife of an Afghan, you automatically create not one enemy but dozens. Wining hearts and minds, forget it, it is too late for that.

    Welcome America to your Waterloo, your new Vietnam.
     
  10. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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  11. vhawk Registered Member

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    the short point is that the Taleban support Al Quaeda and if they both take over Afghanistan completely. it becomes an Al Quaeda country and the germ for a universal caliphate.that is clearly an aggressive Islamist goal and if you simply let it develop you endanger many things that we value. of course you could argue that if everyone wants a universal caliphate, let them have it. but i'm not frightfully sure that you would like it. they could easily get hold of nuclear weapons and it does not take much thought to see to what that could lead. of course you may not want to use oil based products and may want to convert to Islam- matter for you
     
  12. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    This is Afghanistan we're talking about. When was the last time they ruled the world?
     
  13. countezero Registered Senior Member

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    Amen.

    It's still a column that is little more than his opinion about the situation.

    It's like you saying you think four inches is a lot of rain and then linking me to a weatherman who says the same thing. It's one subjective opinion bolstering another, and thus, not very convincing.

    So because someone is Western their work is automatically pro-Western? The person you are quoting is Western as well, so what's the difference?

    For the record, Wright and Coll are hardly chest-thumping, pro-American writers. Their books are largely critical. I also pointed you to Ahmed Rashid, who is a Pakistani. He torpedoes your claims, too.

    Right. Like secret detention facilities, rendition, warrant-less wiretaps and all those other secret programs that never make it into the press. And yet your very same post claims to present information about secret aid to the Taliban from this fellow from Notre Dame.

    The fact is the US and Britain did not aid the Taliban, and I've never seen anything of substance that says so. The Taliban's money came from the ISI and Saudi Arabia. The US famously walked away from Afghanistan and had little or nothing to do with it for years. Unless I am mistaken, your passage there actually alleges the US and Britain helped fund the madrassas in Pakistan. That's ludicrous. Those madrassas were encouraged by Zia al Haq and funded by Wahhabis.

    As for the Taliban, Clinton initially attempted to deal with them after they took over because he wanted to deal with someone about the pipeline and other issues and wanted to see the violence in the country drop, which initially it did. Clinton gave up on this, however, after it dawned on him the Taliban couldn't be dealt with. In this, he had help from American feminists like Jay Leno's wife, who pointed out what mindless thugs the Taliban were.

    You can cross reference all this with numerous readings or you can go and find the outlier that says more what you want it to say. That's possible. People have written all sorts of bilge about the US being in bed with the Taliban and bin Laden and people like you and your ideological chum Iceaura lap it up and drone on and on about pipelines that were abandoned and mineral wealth that hasn't been exploited. It's tiresome. You want everything to be about big, bad energy companies and how they manipulate international affairs. That's all bunk. Nobody could chose which country was the base for the 9/11 attack and pretending we invaded and remain there for simple economic reasons is cockeyed, anti-American, Marxist drivel being put forward by nobody who is taken seriously outside places like the Huffington Post.

    I'm denying the chain of events here so much as your interpretation of the significance of it. The US backed Vietnam against the Japanese, but it would not back them against the French. This is obvious, and Ho Chin Minh, who was no dummy, probably saw that coming. What I dispute is you claim that this somehow explains his conversion to communism. No one made him seek out the Soviets, he did that on his own -- and it just so happened that the Soviets were giving anyone fighting Imperial powers money and guns. So Minh was always going to get in bed with them, regardless what the US did. The US backed him during the War. The War ended so it stopped backing him. I don't see why this is a foolish policy, and it in no way, shape or form "setup" the Vietnam conflict later, which is what you are suggesting.
     
  14. nietzschefan Thread Killer Valued Senior Member

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    Did the U.S get involved in a war in Vietnam 20 years after arming the same faction they had to fight against? That was my original point. Keep evading it all you want, I give a shit.
     
  15. countezero Registered Senior Member

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    5,590
    I'm not avoiding anything.

    The problem is like a lot of other people on this web site, you seem to have no understanding of causation and correlation. That is, you think just because things line up sequentially, one must have led to the other. That's not always the case. What I have challenged you on here is your this equals that reading of history.

    You made a rather clumsy claim about the US fighting people it arms and then lumped Ho Chi Minh into that catatgory. In doing so, you're ignoring the broader contexts of the infrequent cases when the people we do arm turn on us in favor of saying that whenever we give weapons out, people end up fighting us (for various reasons).

    History isn't that neat and tidy, the friends and enemies paradigm, when examined over a large enough period of time, doesn't work. That is, people can be our friends and then not be our friends. This is natural. If the US was only going to arm people it was SURE would never turn on it down the road, it would only arm places like Britain and Canada, and as a result American foreign policy would suffer.
     
  16. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Your crude and stupid misrepresentations of other people's posting is a waste of time and bandwidth.
    So the US refusal to back Ho even after his defeat of the French, and his turn to the Soviets for support in his nationalistic and anti-colonial war, had nothing to do with each other and nothing to do with the shape of the subsequent Vietnam War?

    Why not? They seem directly and causatively related.
     
  17. countezero Registered Senior Member

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    5,590
    Now who's trolling?

    I mean if you repeat this enough times, clicking your heels like the little internet princess you constantly act like, I'm sure someone -- not me, of course -- will care what you think about my posts.

    Why would the US back Ho against its ally?

    I can't see any reason for them to do that. Not to mention that when Ho turned his attention to France, the US was not particularly interested in Asia, though elsewhere, it was pushing hard for the British and French to give up their colonial ambitions (see Roosevelt's statements and US reaction to Suez). But we were never going to arm Ho against someone sitting on the UN security council. That's just silly.

    So yes, lacking guns and support, he went to the Soviets who were giving them away at the time. Did this lead to the Vietnam War? I don't think so. For starters, there's a lot of time in between the two, and it's not the direct this-for-that being claimed here (we give people guns, they turn on us). Kennan penned his famous telegram, containment became an important issue and Korea happened. This changed the mindset of US policymakers, who wrongly blundered into Vietnam. Regardless, I'm not sure what other policy would have been possible. Do you really expect the US to arm an insurgency against the French?

    I suppose my overall point is that there is a larger context here that must be kept in mind. And unlike you and your ideological ilk, I refuse to generalize and fit all American enemies into the we-made-them-through-stupid-foreign-policy model you guys are so fond of (see the similar claims being made about bin Laden and the Taliban in this thread). That's simply not always the case.
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Being unable to see a reason to do "that" has been of course the great blind spot of US foreign policy.

    Ho was, after all, also an ally - and potentially a valuable one.

    At a minimum, mediation was open as an option.

    And later, after Ho had already beaten the French and could have been supported without that factor being involved, the actual dimensions of the question became more obvious.
     
    Last edited: Mar 15, 2009
  19. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    The same reasons the US has backed various other movements against the colonial interests of its allies, presumably. It was quite routine, up through WWII, for the United States to do things like that. American backing in WWII was made explicitly conditional on the allies not using it as an opportunity to advance their colonial interests, and went so far as to extract promises of postwar independence for India from Britain. The dimunition of European colonialism was viewed by the United States as a positive side effect of the war, to be encouraged. See also the Suez Crisis, in which the US undermined the UK, France and Israel in an overture to Egypt and the Arab states.

    All of which is pretty much what you'd expect from a nation founded on a revolution against European colonial rule. Policy in Vietnam was something of a turning point in this regard, and owed more to paranoia about Communism than any affection for France's colonial ambitions. And by "fear of Communism," I mean more the imperative of holding NATO together (which required French support, and so concessions to them) than actual concerns over the governance of Vietnam. Of course this was well before the Sino-Soviet split, when international Communism looked a lot more intimidating, both in Europe and Asia.

    In the end, even if you take a highly cynical view of American foreign policy (which is to say, equate it with European colonialism), the fact still remains that western imperial powers have always never looked kindly on one another's imperial ambitions, even (and perhaps especially) those of their allies.
     
  20. StrawDog disseminated primatemaia Valued Senior Member

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    Speculation based on Western propaganda. There is way more evidence that the US is creating a universal caliphate. 1000 Military bases in 150 countries. WTF?
     
  21. vhawk Registered Member

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    no country baring Rome and England ever ruled the world. Afghanistan is a big place and a good base from which t spread the much dreamed of universal caliphate. some of the Taleban, according to a chum of mine who was out there(for the BBC) when they were fighting the Russians, are actually quite reasonable chaps but they were taken over by and subsumed into Al Quaeda whose agenda it is to create a universal caliphate(and wreak Bin Liner's revenge on the US). if they controlled Afghanistan they would have a great base, they could recruit from Pakistan and the muslim Russian states. remember Genghis khan did s a lot with a few Mongols on ponies and it could be said that for a time he ruled the world. just remember if the Sunis and the Shiites were to put aside their differences and truly unite they would be massively rich and powerful and seriously threaten western hegemony and all from a solid base in Afghanistan
    then would follow Iran Iraq and Saudi Arabia and goodbye western oil supplies, that's the plan and from there itis a short step to a universal caliphate- just think man, a billion Muslims would go WOW now we are bossjust like we always dreamed we could be- see you at mosque
     
  22. vhawk Registered Member

    Messages:
    101
    no country baring Rome and England ever ruled the world. Afghanistan is a big place and a good base from which t spread the much dreamed of universal caliphate. some of the Taleban, according to a chum of mine who was out there(for the BBC) when they were fighting the Russians, are actually quite reasonable chaps but they were taken over by and subsumed into Al Quaeda whose agenda it is to create a universal caliphate(and wreak Bin Liner's revenge on the US). if they controlled Afghanistan they would have a great base, they could recruit from Pakistan and the muslim Russian states. remember Genghis khan did s a lot with a few Mongols on ponies and it could be said that for a time he ruled the world. just remember if the Sunis and the Shiites were to put aside their differences and truly unite they would be massively rich and powerful and seriously threaten western hegemony and all from a solid base in Afghanistan
    then would follow Iran Iraq and Saudi Arabia and goodbye western oil supplies, that's the plan and from there itis a short step to a universal caliphate- just think man, a billion Muslims would go WOW now we are bossjust like we always dreamed we could be- see you at mosque
     
  23. StrawDog disseminated primatemaia Valued Senior Member

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    It was an observation only. There IS a bias.

    I agree that these authors also have sound credentials.

    If you read the piece, the fellow mentioned that these black ops have been systematically covered up.

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    Like so many things in history that are eventually revealed.

    No that is not a fact. Given the known and factual history of US and British support of the Mujahideen it is highly likely that the ops continued.

    Then you should be able to satisfactorily explain why the US is happy to part with billions of dollars and slaughter countless innocents in this farcical war?

    Face it. Its called geo-stategy my friend. An its drivers are imperialist.

    Where there is smoke, there is fire. I am not a conspiracist. I look at information from a wide variety of sources and process this to reach reasonable conclusions.

    Why are you in Afghanistan?

    The Huff is for thinking folk. Your opinion is just that.

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