The Not-So-Great Game
Taliban beheads seven civilians in southern Afghanistan:
Insurgents attacked a large party in a Taliban-controlled area of southern Afghanistan and beheaded 17 people, officials said on Monday.
The head of the local government initially said the victims were civilians at a celebration late Sunday involving music and dancing in the Musa Qala district of Helmand province. The official, Neyamatullah Khan, said the Taliban killed the party-goers for flouting the extreme brand of Islam embraced by the militants.
However, a provincial government official said later that those killed were caught up in a fight between two Taliban commanders over two women, who were among the dead. Daoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the provincial government, said shooting broke out during the fight. He said it was unclear whether the music and dancing triggered the violence and whether the dead were all civilians or possibly included some fighters.
Ahmadi said all of the bodies were decapitated but it was not clear if they had been shot first.
No matter what we do, these are the people who will take control of most of the country after we leave. It’s time to come home.
“They’re savages here, one and all. Leave ‘em to go back to slaughtering babes and playing stick-and-ball with people’s heads, and pissing on their neighbours.”
–Peachy Carnehan
There is a very good reason they have been left alone by every conquering nation since Alexander. Every conquering nation that tried, wondered afterwards: Why the hell did we do that? It’s a shithole of backstabbing scum and has absolutely NO actual worth. If you tore the place apart and sold it for scrap, you wouldn’t get a single dime.
So, tell me again why we just didn’t bomb the crap out of them, as a warning, and let it go at that?
Personally, I’da nuked ‘em. The simple, stupid Arabs are easily cowed by stuff they don’t understand, which includes every single thing. No. Just let’s prod them and poke them until they finally get some Islamic douchebag scientist, trained at the NRC, to make them a bomb so they can use it. After all, they are such a polite and morally scrupulous people. They’d NEVER do that!
Before you start offering your expert opinion on Afghanistan you might want to bone up on some very high level background information. For example, the vast number of Afghans are from ethnic groups other than Arabs (Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazara, Uzbeks, etc.) .and Arabic is not spoken there.
1) Okay great, they don’t speak Arabic there. everything else he said about the barbarians is dead on true. the only thing that will ever clean up that country is overwhelming force or the gospel.
2) If the victims were listening to Nicki Minaj, I’m with the Taliban in this instance.
…So we should wipe out an entire nation because the Taliban are evil? You do know that you’re talking about killing 30 million people, right? All just because they’re “ragheads,” live in the wrong region, or are related to the wrong tribe?
And you’re calling them barbarians?
The problem is that once we leave an Islamist terrorist organization-maybe Al Queda, maybe somebody we haven’t heard of yet-will use that territory as a base of operations. It’s not just their neighbors they’ll be pissing on.
As long as we are there they can’t base international attacks from there. That’s not nothing, though I can understand those who think the price is too high.
If you get a chance, watch the movie Restrepo. That place is hopeless.
aren’t these the same hey-mister-tolly-bon folks with whom obama is “negotiating” for…peace? pieces?
The only thing that will bring peace to that land is just what John J said. No people, no problem.
I wonder what it is about some parts of the world where only death and destruction are considered progressive.
Disarm the men arm the women, problem solved.
The problem is that the enemy we are fighting we are calling “terrorism” when in fact the enemy fighting us is Islam, not “radical Islam” or some other euphemism for the real enemy. There is no faction to whom we can turn over security of the country. We must abandon the illusion that ANYONE in Afghanistan is on our side or ever will be on our side.
Unless we are prepared to totally destroy the Afghan culture and replace it with a culture more acceptable to us we should leave them to their own devices and go home.
Islam seeks to eliminate our culture and replace it with theirs. Unless we are willing to play by the same rules we are wasting our time as well as the lives of our servicemen.
No one has come up with a satisfactory solution to this one yet, as far as I’m concerned. Afghanistan is a harsh, unforgiving country full of feuding tribes, and it’s been a hellhole ever since Alexander tried to invade it 2300+ years ago. Even he gave up and left. Islam has only made the place worse.
The difficulty is that it’s improbable that you can win a war there (no one has, yet) and if you don’t fight them, they’ll come here and do something drastic. While most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis or other Arabs, most had been in Afghanistan, and we’ve had other difficulties with them.
So the choice is this: we fight them there, or we fight them here. We’re going to have to fight them; the debate isn’t over whether we fight, it’s where we fight, and under what circumstances. Though it’s very painful, I prefer to fight them there. Doing it here could turn into something unthinkable, very fast.
Adobe_Walls: “Disarm the men arm the women, problem solved.”
That brings back memories. My unit played a role in standing up the female Officer Candidate School for the Afghan National Army. Those candidates were very brave women, and some of them were ostracized by their families for stepping up to serve. My hat is off to them.
The sad part was the degree to which we had to protect them from their own people. Not to mention the degree to which this was a NATO project foisted on the ANA leadership. They were happy to sign on and show up at ceremonies – get credit for how progressive and forward-looking they were – as long as we footed the bill, did most of the work, and basically kept the thing on life support.
On the Afghans generally: I knew some, mostly Tajiks but also Hazara and a few Pashtun, who were the salt of the earth. They took their lives in their hands to stand with us and try to make a better future for themselves, and they still make me hope for a decent outcome. But the longer this goes, the more atrocities I read of in Taliban-controlled areas, the more green-on-blue shootings, the more I’m tempted to fall back on Dennis Miller’s (unfair) words about Lebanon in the ’80s: It’s that few rotten million who spoil it for the other eleven.
I’m getting tired of repeating the same things over and over, although I might not have commented about it here at VP before. 98% of the opinions offered are, frankly, ignorant with respect to the Afghan war.
If nothing else, please read up a bit on insurgent/guerrilla warfare. Then bone up on the Small Wars Manual. The latter is an incredibly lucid step-by-step “how to” on defeating an asymmetric opponent.
The major point in question is a very simple one. A review of guerrilla wars (including every Communist movement in the 50s & 60s) demonstrates that in very nearly instance of success, the insurgents had a sanctuary. In very nearly every instance of failure, they either lacked a sanctuary or were eventually denied one.
One of the main reasons the NVA eventually conquered South Vietnam was that the allies refused to invade North Vietnam. Even absent that option, it was possible to deny the communists sanctuary in Laos and Cambodia. Hell, the Democrats refused to even admit the enemy was in Laos or Cambodia. It took Nixon to finally grasp that nettle, and he’s still blamed for “expanding” the war there.
If the Taliban had been prevented from retreating into Pakistan at will, they could have been (relatively) easily beaten. That was one of my mistakes, believing that the Bush administration could manage the Pakis effectively enough to control the Taliban. Major fail, there. Obama doubled down on that policy, well before his infamous public deadline pretty much guaranteed failure. We shouldn’t beat up on his too much as he followed the Bush lead on treating Pakistan as a friend. A good friend.
I have the sneaking suspicion that a McCain administration would have refused to publish a public deadline, but still would have made parallel mistakes. In this case, failing to end the Pakistan sanctuary.
But, please, can we stop with all this kvetching? The war was winnable, albeit difficult, and neither party has covered themselves with glory. To get back to Stephen’s original point, we’ve arrived at the point where we’ve pretty much prevented ourselves from winning, so why kill more Americans to delay the inevitable for a few more weeks?