As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Options
[WAR] What is it good for?
celandine
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I see on the news that the US is going to be in Afghanistan for perhaps five more years.
Am I the only person in the world who thinks this is a bad thing?
I'm looking around for anti-war organizations -- or at least some news coverage -- and people seem to have forgotten about it. Maybe it's that people who come from privilege, and not from military families, can be somewhat insulated. I basically live in the center-left (read the New York Times, live in a college town) and these people are not outspokenly anti-war. I'm not sure why.
It's colossally expensive, it provides a convenient excuse to impinge upon our civil liberties, and it kills people. A close friend of mine comes from a town where young men join the military in large numbers -- and he's told me some stories that really destroyed me. I do not want to be complicit in the deaths of more idealistic eighteen-year-olds. I know we're supposed to support the troops and not be dirty hippies and all... but something is wrong here. Fourteen years is too long for a war. (The COIN guys want even more. God, if I see one more fresh-faced poly sci kid who wants to work in counterinsurgency...)
Am I completely crazy?
Are there any other crazies I can join?
Am I the only person in the world who thinks this is a bad thing?
I'm looking around for anti-war organizations -- or at least some news coverage -- and people seem to have forgotten about it. Maybe it's that people who come from privilege, and not from military families, can be somewhat insulated. I basically live in the center-left (read the New York Times, live in a college town) and these people are not outspokenly anti-war. I'm not sure why.
It's colossally expensive, it provides a convenient excuse to impinge upon our civil liberties, and it kills people. A close friend of mine comes from a town where young men join the military in large numbers -- and he's told me some stories that really destroyed me. I do not want to be complicit in the deaths of more idealistic eighteen-year-olds. I know we're supposed to support the troops and not be dirty hippies and all... but something is wrong here. Fourteen years is too long for a war. (The COIN guys want even more. God, if I see one more fresh-faced poly sci kid who wants to work in counterinsurgency...)
Am I completely crazy?
Are there any other crazies I can join?
I write about math here:
http://numberblog.wordpress.com/
http://numberblog.wordpress.com/
celandine on
0
Posts
The idea keeping us there now is that it would be really really bad for us to leave it in such a state after messing it up ourselves
Iraq was a Farce.
America was the only country that should have been involved in either.
You are free to disagree.
America has allies. Allies are expected to help or else we get pissed at them.
I don't think they'd mind if we took our disney lands and went home.
I'm sorry it's not 1945 anymore.
I'm sure America would be fine fighting it's big boy war without British Troops there to help.
Or any other nation's troops really.
Except they're almost extended beyond their limit now.
Imagine if they did not have.
The support of 56 other nations.
And the long-lasting continued support of others
It's impossible to know how things would have gone if America was the only combat force involved, but I would imagine the scale of the conflict and the tactics of the war would have been adapted to be less reliant on numbers while still remaining effective.
In addition if you were to take Iraq out of the picture entirely that would have been a whole load of military expenditure that could have gone to Afghanistan when it was needed.
It's all completely hypothetical, but I don't see any reason to believe unerringly that The US Forces would have not been able to do anything about Afghanistan without help.
~30 million people live in Afghanistan. Meaning we've spent over $11,000 per person that lives in Afghanistan.
The nominal GDP of Afghanistan is $14 Billion, which means we could have just employed everyone there for 25 years instead of do this war. I wonder who was doing the cost-benefit analysis.
"We need them to love America!"
"Well, we could bomb them into the stone age, making them resent us and rely even more on selling drugs. Or we could get real employment for every foot soldier, give everyone in the country food and medical care, build hospitals and schools, create a working economy that doesn't rely on force or drugs, and lift them into first world status."
"Naaaaw, I think they'll love democracy more if we do the bombing."
After India got hit pretty hard a couple of months back from terrorists tied back to Afghanistan they announced they were going to start constructing a massive highway system running down the center of the country.
Has that ever worked? Killing an enemy with kindness?
Well we know that terrorism and extremism don't do so well in economically prosperous areas.
UUh... the issue is that the "enemy" are a group of hard-core taliban mujahadeen tourists and afghan true-believers funded by the ISI. Most of the fighters on the ground are mercenary opportunists. The more wedding parties we bomb and collateral damage we cause, the more we strengthen enemy ideologies that lets them recruit more fighters to their cause. We'd be much better off funding a faction from afar, the problem is all of them are so corrupt that the money just gets frittered away.
So our options are 1) engage in a politically counterproductive occupation, 2) go for a lower footprint approach that will flounder due to the lack of robust political institutions and aid absorption capacity. The only native functioning industry seems to be poppy production, which we have made a ruthless attempt to stamp out, which destabilizes things further as all of those people who depended on that $ are more likely tobe radicalized or resist US presence as a business decision. Beter to turn the country over to secular nacrotraffickers than the taliban.
Historically, it's worked.... always.
From Rome to WWII, and every conflict I can think of in-between. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to find any counterexample where it hasn't worked. It's a long term strategy though.
And that's Capitalism in action boy and girls.
To be fair, Germany and Japan were coherent nation-states with self-concepts of how a modern nation-state should work, even if warped by their historical autocracies which after a brief flirtation with democracy turned totalitarian. The Afghans don't have much of a coherent national identity and value parochial interests over "national ones." Resolving that national question took Germany centuries to sort out. And, we leveled the entire country and killed gobs of their people via six to ten years of total war before "killing them with kindness." At that point, they were a little more willing to play ball - they were shell-shocked by all the trauma.
Well, no, as true capitalism shouldn't require massive government intervention to make things work right. It's corporatism, which is different.
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid62612474001?bctid=407524038001
(^Not sure if this video will play for those in the USA).
can't watch, summary?
The United States today doesn't have the stomach to wage war Mongol-style, or any other style which would be required for long-term success. The Mongols did improve Afghani infastructure and even assimilated into their culture over many stable, peaceful decades. They did this after annihilating anyone who posed a threat to them.
What is it about horses that make them so good for conquering Afghanistan?
And I'm sure we can overcome it with Lockheed-Martins new mechanical cavalry unit, the MARK IV HOOVED PENETRATOR 4000
I'll readily admit to the fact that I know little about the dynamics of foreign relations. I know that humanitarian efforts are good, both for international PR and the fact that we're doing a good deed and improving the quality of life for somebody somewhere.
That said, the parts of the above idea and reasoning are absolutely stupid.
Sending everyone $11,000? What assurances are there that that money won't be collected by particular groups and spent on weapons or counterinsurgency activities? What message does that send to other nations that want to get under the skin of the US--do something we don't like and we'll send you a big check?
Creating jobs? We're having difficult making 30 million jobs in the US, let alone in other countries. Building infrastructure? Sounds good, but until you can be sure that the weapons, fighting and drug-use are under control you run into the same problem as that Publisher's Clearing House check.
Sounds a lot more like handwaving and statistics than a reasonable suggestion.
It's a film that a Norwegian journalist managed to get of the daily life in one of the Taliban camps. It's pretty interesting stuff, actually.
The video is better than the article.
It was more the pyramids of skulls than the horses.
+1. Sorry :P
I've argued before that the good long-term solutions in terms of creating a stable Afghanistan that would also be not openly hostile to the US are also not politically tenable; they entail long-term de facto colonization of the region. Maybe three or four decades. Perhaps more.
Realistically, I expect that the US will pull out far too early and let whatever they've thrown over a decade of resources at crumble to dust and destruction, though. I don't see any other solution as politically viable.
Maybe, I'm pretty sure Russia's atrocities managed to keep pace with the Mongols' pyramids. Although I suspect that the Mongols would actually install governors in every population center while the Russians would just crush a village and then abandon it, presuming the locals would keep obeying "The Law" after The Law left town. Still, hard to predict human behavior.
http://numberblog.wordpress.com/
Plus the simple fact that, well, we've been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade. The general public is just kind of resigned to it, not least because in the past presidential election (the last time a lot of people were paying attention to political issues) the idea of pulling out of Afghanistan was anathema to both candidates.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?p=16301749#post16301749
Yes, I am one of the few people who actually posts in the thing. Which does highlight the point that people don't care too much about it.
Ahahahahahaha. I don't know where you learn about the world, but the government would be very pleased to know their marketing dollars are being well spent.
Not a war anymore? The years 2001, 2002, 2003 had a combined total of 138 coalition soldiers dead. The last two months of June and July had 108, and 88 coalition soldiers dead respectively, being the 1st and 2nd deadliest month for coalition troops since the invasion.
The invasion involved almost no actual fighting. The enemy fled to the hills and waited. They have since grown massively in strength and competence, and coalition deaths have increased by a large amount almost every year.
http://icasualties.org/oef/
It is very much a war, one that is increasingly looking to be extremely un-winnable, just as the Soviets discovered in their Afghan foray.
edit: numbers and shit
Historically, it really hasn't been done.... ever.
Rome? Rome was one of the most violent governments of its day. Loosely confederated tribesmen would raid Roman holdings in the hopes of coming away with a few livestock or other goodies and Rome would invariably launch a punitive raid. They would march through the countryside as quickly as possible and destroy as much as possible as a show of force.
WW2 is arguably the direct result of punitive actions imposed on the German government. The only reason the post-war 'economic miracle' worked was because the US had utterly decimated Germany and Japan. They occupied both for years in order to stamp out cultist ideologies and war criminals. Combined, the USA has over 80,000 troops still stationed in Germany and Japan (they really like bases).
The most 'kill them with kindness' example is probably Saladin's recapture of Jerusalem where during the siege - after the defenders threatened to kill all their Muslim hostages and destroy Muslim holy sites - he relented and allowed them to leave the city without being slaughtered (regardless, many of the foot soldiers ended up enslaved). This prompted the Third Crusade, which eventually led to Muslim ownership of the city with Christians being allowed to visit without harassment.
...Oh but that turned out well, with further calls to crusade (usually people stop counting at the Fourth, which went well off course and hit Constantinople instead of the holy land), but for hundreds of years the Catholics kept attempting to reclaim the holy land (until religious unrest due to corruption and malfeasance led to ideas of reform that created that whole "Protestantism" thing).
...which is actually creating much more anti-Indian sentiment in Afghanistan, particularly the Pashtun south, and stoking fears in Pakistan of Indian influence to the north. The highway isn't linked to the terrorist attacks either, various Indian road building projects have been going on for years in Afghan.
Or to put it another way, do you think that US oil companies going into middle eastern countries providing vital technological expertise to extract and maximise national oil revenues are seen by Arab popular opinion as a) good, or b) bad?
WWII was killing an enemy with kindness? I rather thought it was killing an enemy with millions on millions of soldiers, tanks, naval power, strategic bombing and a couple of nuclear weapons.
Says someone who has never been to war. This is horseshit. Without a specific circa mid-20th century totalitarian regime programme of dehumanizing the enemy, soldiers generally have demonstrated astonishing levels of respect for each other considering the point is to kill the other guy.
Is it a good way of doing it? No, it might even be the worst way (assuming that capitulation doesn't count as resistance). But much of the time it is the necessary way. As the Greeks, Romans, Afghans, Europeans, Americans, Poles, Jews, Israelis, Palestinians, and Afghans again have learned, when the other guy brings a gun to your knife-fight, you are fucked. Much though Gandhi was a great dude, passive resistance, manipulation of ideas, political action and the like only work in specific circumstances against a limited enemy. If you are facing an enemy who is unscrupulous in the use of violence and whose pure aim is power, pacifism doesn't cut it.
Anyone who believes otherwise has blinded themself to the oldest lesson in history.
I was able to watch it here in cali, you may need to install quick time. Basically its a reporter who followed a group of Taliban for a period of time video taping them. I don't really understand why someone would think this would make me more sympathetic to them though. I mean, duh, they are humans, not snarling reptile monsters, but the video shows the views they have (legitimate or not) that the US and the west is a mortal enemy who they can never negotiate with, so i don't see why their being human and having human feelings and ideas make a difference.
It might be more true if you consider the population back home during a foreign war. We've done a pretty good job of it among the general citizenry in this country for the last 60 years or so at least.