Afghanistan

Well, combat isn't one of those things you can dicker on. Either you're shooting or your not, and if you're going to be shooting, you should have the best possible equipment for the conditions. Anything else is terrible. You can discuss the political implications separately but if you deploy troops in a danger zone it's criminal to not give them everything they need to do their job.
 
LooseCannon said:
You can discuss the political implications separately but if you deploy troops in a danger zone it's criminal to not give them everything they need to do their job.
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Yes, and that is the very problem the German troops are facing.
 
Considering that the Canadian Forces have been consistently underfunded and underequipped to do the job they were deployed to do as part of ISAF, I completely understand. I hope they give the Bundswehr the funding and political will needed to equip those boys and girls with what they need.
 
United States in talks with Taliban: Hamid Karzai

KABUL: The United States and other foreign powers are engaged in preliminary talks with the Taliban about a possible settlement to the near decade-long war in Afghanistan, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Saturday, the first official confirmation of US involvement in negotiations.

Diplomats have already said there have been months of preliminary talks between the two sides, and Karzai, who is a strong advocate of peace talks, has long said Afghans are in contact with insurgent groups.

“Peace talks are going on with the Taliban. The foreign military and especially the United States itself is going ahead with these negotiations,” Karzai told a news conference in the Afghan capital.

The US Embassy in Kabul declined immediate comment.

Karzai was speaking the day after the UN Security Council split the UN sanctions list for Taliban and al Qaeda figures into two, which envoys said could help induce the Taliban into talks on a peace deal in Afghanistan.

Despite hopes that talks with the Taliban could provide the political underpinning for the US staged withdrawal from Afghanistan, the discussions are still not at the stage where they can be a deciding factor.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said earlier this month there could be political talks with the Taliban by the end of this year, if the Nato alliance kept making military advances on the ground, putting pressure on the insurgents.

There are also many Afghans, among them women’s and civil society activists, who fear talks with the insurgents could undo much of the progress they have made since the 2001 ouster of the Taliban government.

The United States is on the verge of announcing a “substantial” drawdown of American troops from Afghanistan, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Friday.

“There’s going to be a drawdown. I am confident that it will be one that’s substantial. I certainly hope so,” the leading Senate Democrat said during an interview with PBS Newshour.

There currently are about 100,000 US troops fighting in Afghanistan, up from about 34,000 when President Barack Obama took office in 2009.
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(Article is from the Karachi-based daily, The Dawn)



My guess is that possible talks will end with a proposal of Taleban domination of the Pashtune territories under the condition that they keep quiet in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and leave the rest of the Afghan population alone. Anything other than that is bound to bring no good with it.

The problem is that nobody who has asked for talks with the Taleban has actually said what they want to talk about. What does "peace with the Taleban" mean? What do people expect from it? How do they expect it to work? And most importantly, what does that mean for all the political and mostly, ethnical enemies of the Taleban? How are you going to explain to a member of a tribe the Taleban have performed genocide on, that from now on peace with them is possible?
 
I am not seeing peace with the Taliban (as a group) working .. I would be  for a way out of the Taliban and being accepted as a normal citizen for the "foot soldiers"/people who happened to live in Taliban territory, but the old leadership clearly needs to go.   

Afghanistan certainly faces huge challenges, re-integrating the Taliban is but one of them and compared to some of the ethnic divisions perhaps one of their "easiest" tasks.
 
Suspected Taliban militants hanged an 8-year-old boy in southern Afghanistan after ordering his father, a local police commander, to surrender, a government spokesman said Saturday.

The child was kidnapped by militants in Greshk district of the southern province of Helmand four days ago and was hanged on Friday, Daud Ahmadi, provincial governor spokesman said. 'The militants had warned his father, who is a local police commander, to surrender with his police vehicle and weapons, otherwise they would kill his son,' Ahmad said. The Taliban have not commented.

After being driven from power in late 2001, Taliban militants have killed dozens of people accused of spying. Last year a 7-year old boy was killed by the Taliban for being a spy for foreign soldiers in the same province. Elsewhere, an operation by Afghan and coalition forces in Helmand left 16 militants dead overnight, officials said. They also confiscated a drug cache of 2,000 kilograms of poppy, six kilograms of heroin, 50 kilograms of hashish and 150 kilograms of morphine, as well as 20 kilograms of ammonium nitrate, which is used as an explosive component.

Sick bastards.
 
Perun said:
It's the political will that's lacking.
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If it's anything like in Norway, I guess there is even a lack of will to acknowledge that the troops participate in an actual war?

As for the recent "talking with the Taleban" discussion: It is clear that Western troops are losing the support they initially had in the Afghan population. They may once have been seen as liberators, but they have failed to bring peace - and now many see them merely as occupants. Thus many countries really want to withdraw their troops. In order to avoid a direct Taleban takeover, I guess there has to be some agreement between the Afghan authorities and the Taleban leaders.

But in the light of NP's last post: How do you make agreements with people who hang children?
 
Dr. Eddies Wingman said:
As for the recent "talking with the Taleban" discussion: It is clear that Western troops are losing the support they initially had in the Afghan population. They may once have been seen as liberators, but they have failed to bring peace - and now many see them merely as occupants.
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In light of the recent episodes ... the Americans are not exactly making it easier for themselves to win the sympathy of the Afghans. In less than a quarter, The quran burning, the recent massacre by a soldier gone mad, the soldiers caught on film while peeing on dead Taliban soldiers ... I think it is now impossible for the Allies to win the hearts of the Afghans. Each episode gives good propaganda points to the enemy.
 
I don't think it is impossible.

But I do think that it is more difficult. All things being equal, I wonder how many Afghans have been murdered in cold blood by an Allied soldier without the soldier being caught. How many Qurans were disposed of incorrectly before we found out? How many corpses were desecrated? Those are questions we don't know the answer to.

Yes, the Taliban will use this for great propaganda, and it will probably work for their ends. But at the same time, I wonder how bad this might be if it happened under Bush.
 
I've wondered for some time what the whole point of the occupation of Afghanistan really was. Did we have actual "victory conditions" after the fall of the Taliban? They've never been explained to me (a Canadian). Sure, some schools were built, infrustructure renewed, even an "election" held. But was there ever a rubric held up for the NATO militaries, Afghan government, etc. to look at and say "if we do X, Y, and Z, we'll be able to say we win!"

History has shown repeatedly that obscure goals and unclear mandates are what turn wars into clusterfu*ks.
 
Iron Duke said:
History has shown repeatedly that obscure goals and unclear mandates are what turn wars into clusterfu*ks.
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Spot on. Obscure goals, or the lack of insight in how to achieve them (or in whether the goals are realistic), makes it hard to define when the operation shall end. The result is that the operation ends not when a particular goal has been achieved, but when the opinion back home turns sufficiently strongly against the operation.

And if the NATO troops leave Afghanistan now and the country ends up with another civil war - what has really been achieved, except capturing or killing a few Al-Qaida people? If the result is a peace treaty between the Karzai government and the Taliban, I can't really see that the situation for the Afghan people is any better than it was prior to the invasion.
 
If only the objectives had been unclear, then at least the NATO countries would have an excuse for their failure. But the truth is that the objectives were ever so clear, and so tragically naive.

Primarily, the strike was to give a severe blow to Islamist terrorism. Al Qaeda was to have its infrastructure destroyed and its capabilities limited by cutting off its head. Ideally, by removing the safe haven to Al Qaeda terrorists, and killing Osama bin Laden and his immediate subordinates, the organisation would disintegrate. The world was supposed to be a safer place without Al Qaeda around, and a very clear message would have been sent around the globe that would be understood by all: You don't fuck with the USA.

Removing the Taleban was just a means to that end. Initially, the US and other countries secretly welcomed Taleban rule, because it promised to bring stability to a region that had been in chaos for one and a half decades. I think everybody knows by now that the initial success of the Taleban in Afghanistan would not have been possible without American support, especially in the weapons department. Securing Afghanistan was essential for two reasons. First of all, because Afghanistan was starting to become a threat for the surrounding areas. There were millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran, and they were starting to realise that they were being treated as lepers. Second, if there was ever going to be any hope of gaining access to Central Asia and its vast gas and oil reserves, you were going to have to go through Afghanistan - unless you were willing to get into a clinch with either Russia or Iran. With a workable infrastructure in Pakistan, a country that has been friendly to the west for decades, Afghanistan seemed to be the more feasible option.

Unfortunately, the Taleban gamble turned out to be a complete failure once they had actually taken control over most of Afghanistan. Once they actually lost their dependency on American aid they declared them the great enemy, I would assume to legitimise their rule, and started harbouring Anti-western radicals. After 9/11, the US government panicked and decided they had to do something, anything, to show the world they would not be messed with. And that is also my answer to all the 9/11 conspiracy theorists out there: If the US government had engineered the 9/11 attacks and initiated what would be no less than the biggest coverup in history, you'd think they would also have been able to have a working strategy for the wars that followed them.

Instead, the strategy was to support what little resistance to the Taleban there still was, and once the Taleban were ousted, the people of Afghanistan would be removed of their burden and could rebuild their country. Western forces would remain in the country to hunt down Al Qaeda, support the Afghans in fighting off those few Taleb warriors who do not see the benefit of the new ways, and maybe dig a well or two. That was the strategy: Remove the Taleban and everything else will come together somehow. The idea was that Afghanistan would return to becoming a working nation that would be integrated to the international community, whatever that may be, and stop being a threat.
 
Obama has promised a "full investigation". Most likely someone misidentified the hospital and it wasn't intentional. Still, whoever made that call made the wrong call, and should be disciplined.
 
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