Now your position i can understand but i think that what is a moderate threat no will only grow and we will get weaker in relation.
They can take casualties ten or twenty times more at the present than we, they are allready strong and we are weak.
And there are no real allies to be gained in the future from that camp, zero.

Moderate threat?
50 nukes in fanats hand is not moderate threat,
I hope it been taken care for because when us leaves Afganistan god knows what will happen in Pakistan.
Not to speak about lunatc ideas like mini nuke terror.

Then you either do not understand what I say or I am not competent to express it adequately.

I am not arguing for more firepower in just afghanistan. I am arguing for either to pull out completely and not wasting our troops' lives for nothing but illusions, or to shift the fire from Afghanistan to Pakistan. The road to destroy the enemy in Afghanistan leads over Paklistan. And it was like that from 2002 on - just nobody cared to pay attention to that. The Taliban are a Pakistani creation. They are their brainchild, by American demand during the days of the Soviet invasion.
We do not live in that world.

War is not a form of peace. War is the absence of peace.

That may work with enemies that culturally nevertheless are close to you, like Germany and America. It does not work with an enemy as different and distant in cultural values ansd social structure, like it is the case here. Even during the Soviet war, alliances chnaged quickly in Afghanistan, and many warlords chnaged sides several times - until today. They have a saying in Afghanistan that you may want to remember: "You can rent an Afghan for short time. But you never can buy him."

Win in Afghanistan? Not the way it is bein done in the past 8 years. No chance - from beginning on. Pakistan must be taken out of the equation first. They do not want peace and stability in Afghanistan, and they will never voluntarily accept that - it would weaken their influence to use it as a strategic option against India.

When was there the last "hegemon" woth the name in Afghanistan? Kabul never was strong in Afghanistan - not during the last generation's lifetimes. One has tried to missionise the place towards democracy, and it went wrong, bred corruption and wasted endless ammounts of Western money. We cannot do anything on it. What we can do is starting to beat the hell out of the Pakistani if they do not stop messing up the country. We can mount so much destruction on Pakistan that the price they need to pay for Afghanistan no longer justifies their intentions. We can be superior in firepower and military might - if we want. But it seems we do not want to.

???? What was true for them?

To me it is no moderate threat, but Pakistan is the mopst danegrous nation on Earth, and the most prominent troublemaker there is - before NKorea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia. They exprt terror anbd murder. Thex finance terror in foreign nations. They provide assiatnc e wioth the full might of their intelliegnce service. The proliferate nuclear knowledge. They are unstable. The religious nutheads grab for power. The population is under the spell of this terrible ideology of theirs. They have nukes.

It cannot become any worse. At any time I would prefer to personally carry a glass of nictroglycerin over 100 m of rugged terrain at night.

What pacifists?

Your "solution" was a worldwide dictatorship in the form of a a police state.
That isn't a solution to a problem but rather a building of an even bigger problem.


Sky expressed himself quite adequately, either make a "credible" threat which can never be credible and act on something that cannot be enacted...... or do nothing.
Which quite frankly is ridiculous.

Quite good German comment on the price of withdrawing, and the to be expected human desaster and progroms afterwards. What this article says, and the parallels it draws to Vietnam, I already predicted and described in 2005. Right now, the Taliban alraedy know that they have won, and they have no motivation to accept any deal or compromise with the West or Kabul that Western stupids seem to hope for when recommending direct negotiations.

http://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentar...rue#reqdrucken

If we had only used the full force of our military to begin with, this all would have been over with years ago. When a nation is serious enough to go to war, they should go all in or go home. This drawn out process has served only to portray the US as weak and indecisive to our enemies. Obama's new rules of engagement for our troops is atrocious. Shame on Bush and Obama for thier military mismanagement. :nope:

Maybe I misunderstood you Skybird, but it seems to me you believe the conflict needs to be expanded until it reaches the decisive point. Which is really a Clausewitzian proposition. My argument is that long-term insurgencies require a long term and persistent approach to dealing with them.

This opinion puts me firmly on the side of those who believe the western forces should not be leaving Iraq or Afghanistan, and I agree that to leave will put us in a much worse position.

But I also do not believe that escalation is the right approach either. I see the situation as like a game of diplomacy with the allies being the biggest force in each country, but by no means the total dominating force. This means that skill and patience will be able to exploit the fact that everyone else has divided into factions in order to maintain a balance that is to tolerable to us.

But it also means accepting that the western powers in the region are unlikely to win some mighty event and then end up with a 1950's Germany/Japan style Afghanistan.

When talking about allies in the region and the impossibility of having them..i don't know. We already have allies in the region. But allies have their own foreign policy agendas. It is natural.

Pakistan is an ally, but it has its own agenda. From Pakistan's position, the west (despite my opinion on the matter) is sooner or later going to pack up its bags and go home. For Pakistan, Afghanistan is always going to be its northern neighbour, with strong tribal links to major Pakistani communities too. How can Pakistan NOT look at Afghanistan with its own eyes?

This is not to say that I think Pakistan isn't troubling - it is! But for MH whose mostly incomprehensible writings included mentioning 50 nukes in the hands of fanats(sic), i believe this is a reference to the Pakistani atomic arsenal. Those bombs are not in the hands of fanatics - they are the property of the Pakistani government, who are not themselves fanatics. If you wish to say that, at some point in the future, those bombs could end up in the hands of fanatics, it is my opinion that truly one should stick to dealing with the problems we really have and not start trying to troubleshoot with main force every imaginable problem that occurs to us.

In the event that Pakistan is overthrown and the outgoing state is unable to deal with the bombs, then things will have to happen, but i think the west has a lot of military capability in reserve for dealing with this sort of major threat.

But Skybird believes the conflict should deal with the fact that Pakistan is playing both sides in Afghanistan, and letting Afghanistan fester has caused it to grow. Well, that's of course related to the military adventurism in Iraq. Whatever. We can't wind the clock back.

Moving into Pakistan - what does this mean? You want to invade Pakistan too? The Pakistani military will collapse in less than a month. Lots of blood of course, since those nukes will have to be eliminated in the process.

Then what? Then we'll have to try and pacify Afghanistan AND Pakistan.

Just describing full scale war in Pakistan as an option here, it would cost too much, in every sense. It won't be done. But increasing diplomatic pressure and focus of operations into cross border issues can be done. And is done at the present time. Pakistan of course is a complex society and they have to balance this out with the reactions of their own populace.

Really i believe the issue is patience, but i think we don't have that sort of patience in the west. Finally, expanding the war in order to end it, is not a tried and trusted principle.

Wow, skybird, you really have issues...

Xabba,

If I just would have issues, than we all would be much better off. However, if I have "issues", as you call it, I wonder what it is that NATO and Western politicians have.

I believe it makes no sense to fight a war if you refuse to point your weapons at the enemy. Clausewitz has no room there - what I want is no complicated strategic stuff, but plain and simple reason. That makes my idea not an expansion to a decisive point, but a "taking aim at the enemy". The strongest enemy we fight against in Afghanistan, is neither the Taliban alone, nor tribal armies, but the Pakistani interference. It is a proxy-war.

Not so much us, but the Afghan civilians, their women, and those who "collaborated" weith the Western powers - because they were so naive to believe their irresponsible promises. When America finally fled from Vietnam and the Vietcong took over, they took massive revenge upon those in the South that were suspicious to have helped or even just have arranged themselves with the Americans. In Afghanistan, it will become much worse.

However. Obama had three choices, and of these three he picked the worst one:

He could have decided to maximise the military effort and start engaging Pakistan not only in Afghanistan, but on it's own soil. Targetted assassinations from the air, a massive, unforgiving campaign of drone attacks, missiles attacks, assassinations from the ground, maybe some commando raids, maybe even sniper infiltrations, who knows. This approach would be about systemtically eliminating the pro-Taliban elite in the leadership of the intelligence services, where Taliban-supporters are the majority, and in the military, where meanwhile they also no longer are just a strong faction anymore, but represent a majprity indeed. Plus their relevant academic intelligentia, the leadershipß of the religious anyway. - This option is highly desriable, but most unrealistic - we lack the courage and determination to implement this.
Second, he could have declared immediate withdrawel. If the war is denied to be fought the way that annihilation of the enemy is possible, then it is impossible to overcome this enemy. Then the war has no point anymore. And then it is irrespoonsible and morally unscrupellous to let our troops risk their lifes for nothing any longer. This is why I prefer this option, knowing that the first option above never will be accepted in the West. Their security forces are not ready, but they never will be ready, becasue you deal with personnel that is lacking discipli8ne, does not obey orders, forms up from socially lowest classes and indioviduals that often got chases away even from their own villages and tribes, and that feel no loyalty and sense od duty. Western trainers repeatedly have reprted on that they beinjg dxrivenm crazy by these socalled "security forces", and that training them is like trying to make a cat speaking in words. Dropping out of Afghanistan will leave the civil population in a dram that will unfold, no doubt. But what is the difference of that happeniong now - or in one year, or in ten years? The difference is the life of our own troops who are denied the chance to fight for winning. Afghanistan very much compares to Vietnam. Every firefight gets won. Superior firepower. No battle lost. But saving the enemy's logistic (Chinese support, aka Pakistani support). Fighting the war by views of politicians, not militaries. Leaving the former allies behing when leaving the country, with tens of thousands of collaborators at the mercy of the Vietcong/the Taliban.

Obama has chosen the worst option: he declared a fixed future date when withdrwing will begin. By that he has send the message that he already has surrendered. This has a consequence of the Taliban and Pakistan that they have won and now just need to sit it out. There is no need for them to make any concessions. There is no need to accept diplomatic compromise. There is no incentive by which they can be made to accept some concessions. Why should they? They know that it is only a question of time before it all will be theirs. Obama wan ted to save his face. But he does that at a terrible price for the Afghans. Which seems to be okay, since it will not be him or America paying it.

However, in both the second and third option, the strategic price America needs to accept is a thousand times more severe than after the defeat in Vietnam, which was only a loss of face, not much more.

The allies are not the moist influential force in the diplomatic game. Pakistan is, followed by Iran, possibly. Western diplomacy is impotent in Afghanistan. It also has no real influence anymore on Pakistan, like it had to at least some degree while Musharaf was in command. Also - why the heck do you put any trust in diplomatic arrangements made with Pakistan, when they have betrayed, lied and cheated all the time in the past years? And are you really that naive to think that any deal you make with the Tlaiban will be honoured by them once your troops are gone, when they do not like it anymore?

Allies are factions that share a sufficient ammount of goals and interests. That is what makes you contradicting yourself, because what America wants is something totally different than what Pakistan wants. For Pakistan, Afghanistan is a strategic second playfield and strategic option in their match against India - and that is an obsessions that will always prevent them from giving up their ways on Afghanistan voluntarily. So how comes you label Pakistan an ally? It never was. It lied and betrayed from beginning on. It has totally different interests. It tried to damage the US. It never did more than just the absolute minum necessary to prevent harsher political sanctions. It took our money and smiled while using it to kill our nsoldiers and Afghan civilians. Pakistan and the Tlaiban - are one team, stageacting only to make us believe they were two. But that is nonsense.

Once nuclear weapons are constructed and in place, you have run out of military options below the use of nukes. This is what fearsome Western politicians just do not want to understand. They think they can adress the issue once it has materialised. But that is not true. It must be adressed in order to prevent it from materialising - that is the only way to handle it. Pakistan is said to have stored its nukes in a non-constructed way, warheads and carrier systems are kept in different sites. They must understand in full consequence, their establishement and their religious hate guys as well, that if they start to bring the two together, this will mean the immediate end not only of all of Pakistan, but all places that are holy to their damn freaking ideology. And this must be made clear to other Muslim states as well, thnat if any Muslim nation starts to raise nuclear weapons in a threat to the West, ALL the Islamic world will be held responsible for it and will pay by seeing all what is holy to it going up in flames and turning into dust. I fear that intimidation is the only langauge that will be understood here. I also say that with regard to Iran. If Iran is allowed nukes, then Arab states also will start to get nukes, and Turkey.

Under no circumstance we ever should let this happen, nom matetr the cost to prevent that. One Pakistan already is more than enough - and this one country already holds the potential to bring cataclysm over much of ther world. We shall not allow to let this repeat. Pakistan, under the umbrella of its nukes having become a supporter and exporter of terrorism and nuclear proliferation, should have been destroyed BEFORE it got nuclear weapons. Now that it is, we should find ways to find out where their warheads are, and strip them off them by the means needed to get this objective acchieved. Pakistan to me is the most danmgerous issue on Earth, and a total nightmare scenario. If we ever extinct ourselves in a nuclear war, then I am sure that Pakistan will play the most dominant role in that - at least as long as Iran still has no ready bomb.

I want to invade Pakistan as much as I want to invade Iran - I want that not at all. I outlined above what I think about, as long as conventional means are concerned. What happens in Pakistani streets, must not be our interest, they can yell and turn hysteric as much as they want. But when the start to ready their nuclear weapons, or when Iran gets reaslly close to owning ready nuclear weapons, then I am willing to authorise even the use of nukes on c onnected target facilities. That does not mean to bomb cities in orer to kill as many civilians a spossible, but that means to annihilate those parts of their weapons programs that are vital for developing, constructing and maintaining nuclear weapons.

That'S the result of having let things slide for too long - for putting unjustified trust into diplomatic "pressure" (hahahaha...), and thinking in terms of mutual trust, respect and friendship. Skip that part of the show - I do not find it any entertaining.

Oh my, don't make me laughing. Pacify - Afghanistan, Pakistan? Well, everybody has his dreams...

[quote]Just describing full scale war in Pakistan as an option here, it would cost too much, in every sense. It won't be done. But increasing diplomatic pressure and focus of operations into cross border issues can be done. [/qauote]

No. A loud, clear, total sounding No. It can not be done. It was tried for 8 years. See where it got us - nowhere. Their and our interests differ too much. We are too dumb, too unrealistic, to cowardish. Total, complete, all-embracing FAILURE. How many more decade do you want to waste until finally realsing that your approach has not woreked, does not work, will never work, and never had a chance to work? Becaseu you wer4e lacking the incentives to lure them into your wanted direction? Because you had nothing you could trade for their willingess to comply?

Oh, it is. Save the enemy from oain and hurting his vital interests, and he will carry on and defeat you. Break his neck, cut his throat, rip his heart out of his chest and deplete him of air, water, food and sleep, and you sooner or later get rewarded a dead body. Victory cannot become more victory than that.

Whether or not that is nice business, is something different. But we mujst not be liked for doing so. That are being feared for doing it again - that already would be sufficient.

I fear my understanding of war is a little bit more archaic than the civilised, kind, sensitively fighting, socially concerned modern citizen's one.

In the end, all this word-wrestling comes down to just this: either you fight, or you don't. Simply this. Everything else makes war longer, and more miserable, and invites defeat.

Just in: Super Perforator

West is becoming one big France lol

Yet plain and simple reason cannot be applied to such a complex situation in any workable manner which is why those "simple" proposals are pure lunacy.

You make even less sense than skybird:doh:

Realy........Hm....wonder why lol

You can dsagree with skybird but to say he makes no sense -well,,,,,whateve,,,,he makes perfect sense even you are lol,

At least i am happy that you don't have any power to authorize anything ... personally i hope it remains that way. Strong words are always easy to speak for those who can expect not to be on the receiving end.

Pakistan is in a very difficult position between public opinion and foreign commitments. One should also not make the mistake to mix up its government with its secret service ISI. The latter is said to be a state in itself and it is not really known to which extent it is controlled and by whom.

What makes you think that this isn't going on already? Probably it isn't too smart to talk or publish too much about this. The recent closure of the supply lines by Pakistan indicates an expansion of the operation area.

Can we...? On the authorization thing, with me you would and could expect to have no stupid wears like Vietnam, Afghnaistan, Iraq. But those fewer wars I would authorize, would be shorter, more devastating and being fought with much more determination and willingness to win them and focussing of power, no matter what, at all cost. The way the US and the West has approached wars in the past 30 years, probably has caused much more victims and suffering, than my approach would. Many unneeded, but opportunistically wanted wars with one hand bound on the back and many victims over a longer period of time, or fewer wars of higher brutality and shorter length, by that being terrible while lastinglk but being over sooner and probably causing fewer victims that way - what you prefer? No wars at all is best, of course - and totally unrealistic. We are humans, no angels. there is always some foul, smelling potatoes hidden in the heap.

Their egg-dancing course of the past years says all.

Occasionally persuing a small band of Tliban on Pakistani soil, is one thing. Strating to target Pakistrani assets and especially key personnel would be something very different. The latter would stir a public and governmental outcry that wer owuld have taken note of. The closure of the supply line was a reaction to attacking Taliban on Pakistani soil. Purpose was not so much to dry out Allied troops in Afghansitan,m bvut to amass a high fleet of tankers to make a nice, tasty target for Taliban retlaiation. And that is what happened. Which again tells you something on whose side Pakistan is on.

It is insane to run the war in a way that one is depending on good will of the enemy, Pakistan. Totally isnane and against all military and other logic.



Four pages. And still nobody saw the need of directing argument pro or against the original essay. It's easier to shoot the messanger than to deal with the content of the message, I assume.

It really is a different universe Sky inhabits.
For anyone else the fact that there have been hundreds of raids on the Taliban in Pakistan with no real noticable reaction might be a clue, yet one raid which went wrong and killed the border police by hitting a border post resulted in the crossing being shut which is on the border and run by the border police from a border post.
Though I am sure if you look closely between the lines and read the secret invisible writing its all spelt out clearly in the protocols of the elders of mecca and has nothing to do with the mistake that was made

What arguement? there are three writers collaborating on an article which cites several contradictory views from other parties to what it thinks may or may not be part of the problem???????