Once it was clear Bush was going to go into Afghanistan, I was of the opinion it would be better to just go it alone and tell everyone else to stay the hell out of our way. Of course, that was before it was clear Bush was never really interested in Afghanistan except as a springboard into Iraq.

We could have won much better in Afghanistan than we ever will now, if we had simply done it right from the start. Bush was off to a good start, then he just bailed. I knew we would bail on Afghanistan again. As soon as we invaded, I commented it was a shame we were going to fuck them all over again. And we will, to some degree, eventually. We always do.

NATO as an institution I still support, though. It's an important component of world stability and politics. It still has relavence, just maybe not so much in Afghanistan. On the global scale though, the alliance is still important. It's a bullwark against other forces such as China and Russia, which will only increase in power and threat.

Yah, I think it should have been a quick special-ops procedure. Go in with a small specialized force, take out the training camps that trained the 9/11 guys and leave. Addresses the problem without creating worse ones.

Would have saved around 6000 American lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. Might have saved enough money to have averted the recession also. Not sure why it was me, and not our leaders who thought of it. Not enough "kick their ass!!" appeal I guess.

The Warsaw Pact is gone.

NATO should have been gone too.

Furthermore, we should get out of Russia's back yard, and start working on peace, not war.

That is what everyone wanted when the walls went down, but we had IDIOTS in charge.

We should build a "peace industrial complex" and save the world! We ought to be heros, not villans in this little game!

This is all sheer HUBRIS...Con hubris! They think they won, and no one won, the war stopped but they did not get it, the paradigm is over. Grow UP.

bsharporflat:

Yah, I think it should have been a quick special-ops procedure. Go in with a small specialized force, take out the training camps that trained the 9/11 guys and leave. Addresses the problem without creating worse ones.

I'm not sure that it's realistic to expect that teams of unsupported special operations forces could have just "taken out the training camps" or that doing so would have eliminated al Qaeda as an operational entity.

I have faith the US special forces could take out a few training camps with rather less than modern military capabilities and a bunch of amateur recruits. Why don't you?

Of course nothing can completely evaporate Al Qaeda and all its followers in all nations around the world. Silly to try. Contain them, keep them underground and reduce their effectiveness is all we could ever hope for.

The problem is those who delusionally think we can "win". What that sort of person does is continually redefine the goal until they find some target they actually think they can destroy. Right now it is the Taliban, a non-threat to the USA if there ever was one.

I think we can find better goals to achieve with our money and the lives of our young people than trying to destroy a religio-political group on the other side of the world that never had any goals other than to rule their own nation. Don't we have a few problem right here in the USA worth addressing? Please?

There was never a chance the US could go into Afghanistan and just pin prick a few select camps here and there and then walk away and have it turn out anything less than piss poorly. Quite the opposite, we needed to go in with more troops than we did and keep them there longer than we did, before bailing into NATO and side railing into Iraq.

There was a solid oppourtunity for Bush to "win" in Afghanistan at the begining of the war. The Afghan people were ready to be saved, they were willing to step up, and we had the world behind us without question. Then we brought in NATO and effectively ignored Afghanistan for the next five years.

Now that we've let the country slid back into the shit hole it was before, yeah, there's a lot slimmer chance we'll come out of this remotely worth a damn. But it wasn't redestined to be that wat, it only came about because Bush was never really interested in "winning" there anyway. If Iraq has been characterized as Bush's Vietnam, than Afghanistan was his Korea, all but forgotten.

And the Taliban has been radicalized even more than al-Qeada. To claim they're no threat is seriously misredaing the situation, and borders on willful blindness.

The Afghan people never wanted the Taliban, they didn't vote them into power. And it was a religio-political group, as you put it, that attacked us on Sept. 11th, 2001. To think no othre similar group could do the same is grossly wrong.

What can we do now? Not much, but bailing would be the worst option. We can make the country more stable than it is. How much is certainly debateable, but the bottom line fact of it is, we started this mess and we have a responsibility to the Afghani people. It'd be shamefull for the US to shirk it's responsibilities there, again, which last time we did gave rise to the very groups we're at war with now.

opus, your arrogance is hard to comprehend. You think you know what is best for a nation of millions of people and you are willing to force your way on them. Funny, how clear it is to you that the people of Afghanistan didn't vote the Taliban into office. Neither did they vote to have the USA show up and start running things, but...hey, there we are. And there we remain. The need for election fraud to prop up the current US installed government would suggest the people of Afghanistan do not want US soldiers there.

The USA is no different than the Taliban in that we are trying to run the place through military might and refuse to leave until we get our way. The Taliban didn't just appear in a vaccuum. They were successful, in part, because many Afghans wanted them to be there. Only the USA is powerful enough to go somewhere and stay somewhere when nobody wants them there.

Perhaps you were unaware that the Taliban was not governing the whole of Afghanistan in 2001? The areas in which they didn't have support were governed by their competitors the so-called "Northern Alliance". Did it ever occur to you that this split in governance might reflect the will of the local people in each area and represents a natural split that ought to be recognized?

Instead you refer globaly to our "responsibility to the Afghani people" without even knowing who they are, what they want and how we could help them achieve it. Instead you are focused on what YOU want and continue to pretend it is what THEY want.

bsharporflat:

I have faith the US special forces could take out a few training camps with rather less than modern military capabilities and a bunch of amateur recruits. Why don't you?

Well, the first question is what good would taking out those camps do? If that's not going to cripple al Qaeda operations, then why bother? Clinton already tried hitting those camps with cruise missiles. Do you think that most of al Qaeda's operational leaders were still located in those camps post-9/11, or that killing a bunch of recruits would accomplish anything, or that terrorists couldn't be tipped off and evacuate (or just run away from) a SOF assault? How big do you think those camps were and how many SOF would you use to take them out (including forces to block escape); from where would you deploy the SOF with no in-country air base; what would you do if they got in a tight spot before they could exfiltrate (say, if local Taliban reinforcements arrived); and how would you ensure simultaneous attacks, since the fighters would likely abandon the camps after the first one was taken down? SOF can do a lot of great things but if you want them to do something big then you need to support them. In 2001 and 2002 the United States supported them by recruiting local militias, taking over Afghan air bases, bringing in regular troops to provide security, establishing logistical support, and providing persistent airborne surveillance and airborne strike capabilities.

bsharporflat:

opus, your arrogance is hard to comprehend. You think you know what is best for a nation of millions of people and you are willing to force your way on them. Funny, how clear it is to you that the people of Afghanistan didn't vote the Taliban into office. Neither did they vote to have the USA show up and start running things, but...hey, there we are. And there we remain. The need for election fraud to prop up the current US installed government would suggest the people of Afghanistan do not want US soldiers there.

Regardless of what you think of the current operations in Afghanistan, the burden is still on you to provide a reasonable alternative. Given the strategic goal of denying al Qaeda the ability to conduct mass-casualty operations against U.S. interests (especially the homeland), then what should the United States have done? "Taking out" a few terrorist training camps using special operations forces (even if that were possible) would not accomplish that goal.

Invading Afghanistan had little direct impact on the ability of Al Qaeda to conduct 9/11. You tell yourself this as an a priori fact but it just isn't true.

Did the 9/11 guys need Afghanistan to learn how to fly planes? Or perhaps only in Afghanistan do they have advanced level training in using box cutters? 9/11 training happened mostly in the USA. The contribution of Afghanistan training and indoctrination could have occurred anywhere in the world.

The fact is, the invasion of Afghanistan was a (politically necessary) act of revenge and retaliation. If anything, Obama is more deluded on its effectiveness than Bush (who considered Afghanistan a distraction to his plans for Iraq).

Al Qaeda is more than happy to have gotten the USA involved in an endless war with the Taliban while they move on to other nations, other hideouts and continue their plans. Osama bin Laden's explicitly stated goal was to goad the USA into an expensive, endless, unwinnable war to bankrupt it and defeat it in that manner.

The British and the Soviets got bogged down in Afghanistan and lost their empires. You think it is a coincidence Bin Laden chose that nation from which to launch his attack? Perhaps the USA is just SO great it can "win" there despite the obvious lessons from history. I mean, heck we do have a really great Constitution and a cool flag too. The British and the Russians? What losers, plus they had ugly flags. How can we lose? We are so great. We are so great.

bsharporflat:

Invading Afghanistan had little direct impact on the ability of Al Qaeda to conduct 9/11. You tell yourself this as an a priori fact but it just isn't true.

Did the 9/11 guys need Afghanistan to learn how to fly planes? Or perhaps only in Afghanistan do they have advanced level training in using box cutters? 9/11 training happened mostly in the USA. The contribution of Afghanistan training and indoctrination could have occurred anywhere in the world

You seem to assume a lot about what I think about Afghanistan. Regardless of my views on Afghanistan, I'm challenging you to justify your own weak reasoning.

First of all, the goal of invading Afghanistan was not to impact Al Qaeda's ability to conduct 9/11, since the invasion occurred after 9/11. The goal was to prevent other large-scale attacks, which may or may not have had anything to do with planes and box cutters. Second of all, I'm not sure that I understand your point that the training could have been conducted anywhere, so why invade Afghanistan. Didn't you previously argue that taking out terrorist camps in Afghanistan would have some worthwhile effect?

You seem to neglect the fact that the attacks were orchestrated from Afghanistan and that taking out the low-level operational cells is not sufficient to destroy a large terrorist group's operational capability because you can always recruit new low-level terrorists. To break the operational capability of a large terrorist group you need to attack the elements of the group that are not easily replaceable -- not only the ideological leadership, but perhaps more importantly the mid-level commanders who have experience and expertise in conducting large-scale operations abroad without being detected, managing finances, recruitment and training, etc. As of 9/11 most of those guys were in Afghanistan.

I notice that you keep on shifting your reasoning and ignoring relevant questions just as long as the end result is that invading Afghanistan is a folly. Perhaps it was, particularly in terms of the subsequent nation-building efforts, but the burdern is still on you to suggest a practical alternative that would have broken al Qaeda's operational capability (unless you are arguing that the best option for the United States would have been to absorb more attacks). Now, that alternative doesn't necessarily have to be military (perhaps you can think of a good way to deter or appease Al Qaeda), but it should be based on something more than hand-waving, fantasy, and ill-conceived rhetoric.

My reasoning is only weak to those who cannot understand it, and need cling to their own spoonfed beliefs.

"Didn't you previously argue that taking out terrorist camps in Afghanistan would have some worthwhile effect?"

Not exactly. I said they would have got the job done, which was to placate the infuriated masses of Americans thirsting for blood and revenge (the political necessity I mentioned). Al Qaeda's goal, as very CLEARLY described above, was to draw the USA into an endless war in a location which has repeatedly proven can't be conquered nor pacified. My solution would have soothed the blood lust of the torch and pitchfork crowd in the USA while denying Al Qaeda the success they craved in drawing the US into expensive, painful, long term folly.

"To break the operational capability of a large terrorist group you need to attack the elements of the group that are not easily replaceable -- not only the ideological leadership, but perhaps more importantly the mid-level commanders who have experience and expertise in conducting large-scale operations abroad without being detected, managing finances, recruitment and training, etc."

Who told you that is what is "needed"? Reasoned it out yourself? Read some military manuals? Online articles? Funny thing...it isn't working. For some reason after trying to do just what you suggest for the past 8 years, we are still spending billions trying to do it, still losing American lives with no end in sight. Your solution- keep doing it. Al Qaeda wins again.

Obviously the USA was no longer much of a target after 9/11. How were they going to top that? The targets moved to the UK, Spain etc. My assessment is that any success against further terrorism in the USA was the result of increased domestic vigilence. In airports, on the internet, in local police departments, etc. Foreign wars did not reduce or collect terrorists to those areas but rather inflamed locals to join the cause.

My belief in the effectiveness of airport security, increased border and harbor patrol, domestic surveillance and an informed and wary public is hardly "hand waving" or "fantasy" or "ill-conceived". It works. And it works without inflaming the rest of the world against us. And it works without giving Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups what they crave most- attention. Something you can't seem to stop giving and giving and giving them.