Pentagon Papers II

Sorry. I sat through this movie the first time.

 

can't we explode a dirty nuke in the mountain area, claim it was al queda and just leave?

 

If Pakistan is getting a hard-on thinking about the wonders of a theocratic nutter empire, we should firmly remind them that we can speed up the process and send them straight to Allah if that is what they so desire.

 

I'm not necessarily saying I disagree with you. I'm not nearly smart enough to have any idea how to handle this.

But I do know if we leave right now it will be viewed by the world as monumental defeat for the U.S., probably surpassing Vietnam as the single most humiliating moment in American foreign policy history. And it will be viewed as a huge victory to muslim extremists all over the world. It'll be taken as proof that we can't beat them.

According to that NYT piece, the Taliban is now the strongest it has ever been since 2001, how long do you think it will take them to re-take Afghanistan if our troops are no longer there to stop it?

And, if you think Afghanistan was haven for terrorists before, wait til you see what it becomes now. The greatest military power the world has ever known just wasted a decade, hundreds of billions of dollars, and thousands of young lives trying to remove them and, in the end, failed? NOBODY'S ever gonna want to go in there again (especially considering that the same damn sort of thing happened when the British and Soviet empires invaded the same territory).

In short, EVERY one of our war goals when we initially invaded Afghanistan will ultimately end up being unfulfilled: we never caught Bin Laden, the Taliban will end up re-taking Afghanistan, and the region will become every bit or more of a safe haven terrorists than it was before the war.

 

If you're a glass half-full kind of guy, letting the Taliban retake Afghanistan could be a positive.

We could withdraw, let the Taliban retake Afghanistan, let it fill up with terrorists then start reducing our nuclear stockpile one missile at a time by bombing the country forward into the Stone Age.

This is an issue that has no correct answer. But withdrawing is probably the worst of a lot of shitty options.

 

There were even people in the Bush administration that were saying that we were going to be in Afghanistan for 25 years. Unlike Iraq, they weren't promising a quick victory. And in this case, I can believe them.

What we should be doing is reminding Karzai that without us, he'd be getting his ass kicked by the Taliban because his beard isn't long enough and that if we tell him to jump, he jumps. We also be doing more to win the hearts and minds of the populace so that they won't switch over to the Taliban or Al Qaeda the first minute that things look bad. This will take many, many more years.

Or, we could just walk out and leave a few nukes.

 

How would we even define what victory would be? Who would we even negotiate with to reach a settlement?

In the mean time more American lives are lost.

 

There is no one to negotiate with.

You can't negotiate with people who only want to kill you.

 

You'll need to decide on the shape of the table first.

 

To me that is even a bigger reason to leave now but continue clandestine fight via drones/ CIA/ Special forces.

 

I believe all of those problems can be filed under "sunk cost" at this point.

 

Oh for Christ sake. Who gives a shit? If its a situation that isn't advantageous for us to be in, pull out.

I'm tired of our policies being based on this dick-swinging, face-saving, "What will the world think about America!!" hysterical bullshit. First of all, I don't think "the world" gives a flying fuck about our prestige or perceived loss of it.

We could pull out of Afghanistan tomorrow and it wouldn't change the fact we have the most powerful military on the planet. I love how some of the biggest hawks for war become the biggest pussies when it comes to how our country is perceived. It totally betrays the lack of confidence they have in this nation to begin with that it takes a war to show what we're all about.

Gorbachev said it best a few years ago. The addiction to winning clouds our judgment on everything.

Many among us, especially on the GOP side, have this scoreboard mentality when it comes to foreign policy, which is stupid, unrealistic and unsustainable because wars and countries are never won and lost in a vacuum, especially in a place like Afghanistan, which has confounded western intervention (Britain several times, Soviet Union, etc.) for its entire history.