Afghanistan - What is the objective?

Some particularly troublesome citizens, yes. If they could do it themselves, they would.

 

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Then why do you keep talking as if it is?

Also, as far as the sacrosanctity of Pakistan's borders, you should probably do some background reading on something called the Durand Line. It's one of these British-drawn "lines in the sand" that goes right through an age-old people, and so becomes a lasting source of insecurity. Neither of the states that it divides have accepted it as a legitimate, final border. In fact one of them regularly sends military patrols across it.

Pakistan's borders with India are similarly problematic. Pakistan's ideas of where its borders are located seem somewhat fluid and expansive, for borders that everyone else is supposed to regard as inviolable. It would be a different story if Pakistan were an island or something...

I don't see anything about 80% in there.

 

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You talk about India and Pakistan as if the same situation applies to USA and Pakistan. Countries on the other side of the world are not the same as neighbours.

 

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We're all neighbors now.

 

:shake: Oh crap I meant :cheers: Oh shit, isnt there a hug smiley?

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Simply because I believe that solutions are not found via indiscriminate shows of strength. Ie. Shock and Awe or Operation Cast Lead. If honesty and integrity prevails there are avenues for problem solving without resorting to arms.

That sounds interesting.

Colonial residue is generally problematic.

Agreed. Exact numbers are hard to pinpoint, but "large numbers" of civilians are unacceptable.

 

^lol Arsalan

StrawDog: "Colonial residue is generally problematic."

Especially when assumptions are made that all people & societies require nationalist branding (as you're aware, we don't).

 

Who said anything about indiscriminate? It's not as if the US is carpet-bombing Islamabad or something.

And what about the various times when the application of hard power has led to a solution? It's one thing to believe that solutions should not be pursued via warfare, but quite another to "believe" that it is impossible to do so in the first place.

Seems to be putting the cart ahead of the horse, to me. Arms were "resorted to" years ago.

And what about the myriad cases when parties are - honestly, integrally - committed to incompatible positions? How can such parties be peacefully reconciled? What is there to discuss in such a situation?

Indeed, and this is a problem not only for the United States. Pakistan harbors many mutually-incompatible ideas about its borders, and this causes them all kinds of issues. One minute they're complaining about drone strikes violating their territorial integrity, and the next they're sending military patrols and establishing posts across the exact same border. The Pashtun tribes that actually live along the border (and so are subject to drone strikes) do not recognize it at all, and have scuttled recent Pakistani proposals to build a fence demarkating it.

Even allowing for drone strikes launched from Afghanistan, the United States is actually more committed to the Durand Line as the final, legitimate border than either Pakistan or Afghanistan themselves are. Indeed, the degree of respect that nations pay to that border seems to increase the farther one gets from it.

Also unacceptable is touting numbers that are not only unsupported, but by your own admission unsupportable. If you want to delve into the question of the proportionality of these actions, we can do that, but it would have to be on the basis of real facts, and consider the gains that are achieved as well as the costs incurred.

 

Like the lack of casualties before the invasion.

 

Which ever way you want to paint it, unmanned drones target inaccurately and cannot distinguish between an enemy combatant and his civilian family. One would hope in the 21st Century this could be understood and thus lives saved.

That is obviously debatable. Give me an example?

Yes. Perhaps I am too idealistic.

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I understand the difficulties this can, and do represent. I do not have particular solutions, just a penchant for dialogue before destruction.

Yes.

I suppose it would be difficult for a tribal family that have relatives on either side of a line drawn in the sand by colonial (or other) powers to respect or even acknowledge this line in day to day life.

Well said quad. However, the facts are available that there have been MANY unnecessary civilian casualties, and the facts are available that it is causing great animosity towards the US. Realistically one would have to decide whether the gains these strikes produce are worth the damage they are creating. That is an ongoing point of discussion.

 

"...MANY..."? How many is that?

And as I've said on many occasions, the Muslim insurgents/terrorists kill far more Afghani Muslim civilians than all the US strikes combined. So why aren't you complaining about those Muslim insurgents/terrorists instead of the US?

Apparently they've determined that it is worth it ....because the strikes continue, don't they. Otherwise the strikes would have stopped. And I might add that our new president seems insistent on even more such attacks in the future! (So far that's the only thing I like about him!)

Baron Max

 

It's not that the drones can't distinguish between them, but that the people commanding the drones are willing to risk killing the family to get the target.

And if we're going to complain about how discriminatory attacks are, the Taliban has a lot more to answer for than the US.

How do you know that the combatants being killed wouldn't have gone on to cause more deaths than the drone strike on him results in? Not that I'm saying I'm convinced one way or the other, but we really have no way of assessing this question. We'd need access to all kinds of up-to-date, top-secret intelligence to even hope to reach an answer. Without knowing exactly who these guys are, and what they're up to, we have little idea what they would have gone on to do, and so no measure of the value of preventing those actions.

World War II. Force was used, and a solution was reached. Foregoing such an approach in favor of dialogue with the Axis would probably not have produced such an outcome.

It's not "idealism" to speak of preventing a war that has already been underway for years. "Unrealistic" might be one way to put it...

And if the destruction is already taking place?

Indeed. But this also leaves them with no credibility to criticize others for crossing said line.

And begs the question of why you are so committed to the sanctity of it in the first place, if the people you are speaking on behalf of don't respect it.

Again, we have no real way of determining whether the civilian casualties were "unnecessary" (or rather, "disproportionate") because we have no real way to gauge what the benefits of striking these targets are. This is the kind of thing that usually is only possible to figure out in hindsight, once the intelligence is declassified and other information comes to light, if then.

But, again, there's a simple solution if people in Pakistan don't like attacks from Afghanistan. They can stop basing an insurgency against the Afghan government on their territory, and so stop launching attacks on Afghanistan. It was only after they started doing this that the drone strikes began, remember. This is all a consequence of long-standing Pakistani policy of treating Afghanistan as a subordinate vassal state, and interfering to ensure that they do not become friendly with India, or otherwise meaningfully independent. Of course, this consistent history of national disrespect has left Afghanistan resentful towards Pakistan, and eager to jump into bed with India to get Pakistan off of their back.

 

ONE civilian casualty is TOO MANY.

The instability and division created by the US invasion is regrettable.

You`d like him more if he was a white boy eh?

"They" know only war. They are the same warmongers as Bush was using. That is nothing to be proud of.

 

Interesting. So the USA can cause Muslims to kill other Muslims? Wow, what a weapon of war, huh?

Hey, I wonder what else we can make the Muslims do to each other??

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Baron Max

 

The more accurate formulation would be that the drone operators are willing to kill the families for a chance at getting the target.

Well, they do have kind of a head start, being in their own regions and homes and all.

If you have no way of assessing the outcome of killing a bunch of innocent people, the usual approach would be to not kill them.

We were attacked. Your argument holds more for the Taliban, in this situation, than for the US.

And the "solution" was problematical - great expansion of the Soviet empire and rapid development of nuclear weaponry, Communist revolution and consequent tragedy in China, expansion of fascist government to South America and various tyrannies in Africa, ascension of imperial ambition at home.

 

If you like. All I was trying to convey was that the civilian casualties are not the result of a technological inability to distinguish targets from civilians.

How does one get a "head start" on being indiscriminate? I'm not talking about the number of people that have been killed, but about what lengths each party goes to to avoid killing civilians in its attacks. And while there is plenty of room for criticism of the US on this matter, the Taliban does not even accept the premise that civilians are illegitimate targets in the first place (at least when they're the ones doing the targetting).

And, indeed, I haven't killed anyone. However, that nobody here has the means to assess these issues does not imply that those making the decisions do not have such means. It simply means that we have no grounds on which to seriously evaluate said decisions.

We could probably make some limited headway in evaluating whether the actual decision makers really do possess sufficient means of assessment, and whether their assessments are sound, although I have yet to see anyone try. And, again, we'd still lack sufficient grounds to reach a strong conclusion. To get a real answer to these questions requires current, top-secret intelligence, during wartime.

My argument was not intended to hold for any particular party. I was asked for an example of force producing a solution, and I provided one. I haven't argued that force is the best or only option here, simply that it is not necessarily counterproductive, in general.

Indeed, pretty much any major geopolitical event (coerced or negotiated or otherwise) is going to have myriad unforeseen consequences, many of them unhappy. But the application of force did indeed solve the proximate issues that it was designed to address, in World War II.

 

Yes, regrettably.

Except of course that the US are "foreign" invaders, and could hypothetically depart and cause no further bloodshed.

All this falls into the area of justifications for war. We don`t know. All we DO know for sure, is that the civilian casualty rate has gone thought the roof since the US invasion.

Fair enough in this instance. "Peace for our time" was not to be.

Wars can be "escalated" by spurious and misplaced interventions. That is not an unrealistic statement and has much bearing on the situation.

Very difficult to answer quad.

Unless the "others" are foreigners with absolutely no birthright.

The inhabitants of this area, who have been living there for generations, have undeniable rights. The people you are referring to are not "disrespecting" it for ant nefarious reason. It is their way of life. Foreign invaders, on the other hand are blatantly disrespecting of the borders. The outrage felt by Pakistanis is patently clear. This outrage is blatantly disregarded in favor of strategy.

Yes, unfortunately you are correct in this. Hindsight is a bitch. The UK is planning a Parliamentary investigation (July) into all aspects of the Iraqi invasion including individual complicity, once the British troops leave Iraq.

Fair enough quad. There are choices to be made, and in all fairness, one could look at it in this simplistic manner. The tribal loyalties and joint outrage at the invaders has lit a fuse that seems ready to ignite in utterly unpredictable ways. At the moment Russia is voicing great concern over recent events and thus the instability of Nuclear Pakistan.

 

Perhaps you can make them feel the love?

 

The head start is on answering for their actions.

I've been watching them operate for a while now. I have no confidence in their evaluations by mysterious criteria they refuse to divulge, after years of results they refuse to acknowledge.

We can peruse the consequences of their past decisions in any number of venues, from Lebanon to the Philippines. From such evaluations, we obtain no reason to place confidence in anything they do for secret reasons and refuse to account for afterwards.

 

Only they can accomplish that, but it looks like a long and winding road before that will ever happen.

Feuding seems to be a Islamic sport supreme, and the "get back" is all important.

In Islam, it seems that it isn't acceptable, to let any thing not be avenged.