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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Nice. Of course, they can't control the internet without conquering switzerland and finland. I have retitled the thread what I think this bill effectively does.

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Originally posted by Fremdfirma:
Good fekkin LUCK, heh heh heh.

There's like three places in the world you do NOT wanna invade, Sweden cause everyone ELSE will come to their aid, Finland because they will absolutely, undeniably kick your ass, and Afghanistan because it's muchlike trying to jog across quicksand.

After being foolish enough to commit one of those blunders, we'd be insane to compound the stupidity by committing another.

Google: Winter War and go look what happened to the Russians, seriously.

-F

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Maybe it's time I watched it again?

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Originally posted by Kwicko:

Afghanistan is worse. It's the place where empires go to die. And the funny thing is, every time an empire invades Afghanistan, they're fully convinced that THIS TIME it's going to be different. The British had rifles and artillery, and well-trained officers, and it only cost them an entire army to find out that Afghanistan isn't a place one can take and keep. The Russians had armor and helicopter gunships, and it only cost them their entire empire to find out that it's not a place one can hold. Then we decided we'd give it a try, because we have air superiority and drones. What we DON'T have is a strategy, or an end goal, or an exit plan. You can punish Afghanistan, you can hit her people and hurt them, but you can't take over and control them. But you can pour the whole of your empire down the drain trying...

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I think also for the military, if you are trained to fight, you want to bloody well FIGHT! someone somewhere, almost anywhere. Sure the Swiss have soldiers and they're *trained*, but that's not the same as having someone shooting at you.

So maybe just "fighting" is the whole point?

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
Thing is, if our goal was to punish the Taliban for harboring Bin Laden, fine. Hit 'em, hit 'em fast and hard, and call it done. Lesson learned: Don't fuck with us again, or next time it's nukes for you. That sounds unnecessarily harsh, and is, but you can bet your ass the message would fucking well get across.

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
Instead we're in there trying to "bring democracy" to an area that freely chose the Taliban last time anyone gave them anything like an actual choice, because the majority of that nation is Pashtun and believes like the Taliban believe. So what's our best-case scenario? That we topple the Taliban so a new Taliban can be elected? No, if we're there "to bring them democracy", that's just a shitty translation of us being there to install our own puppet regime, like so many have tried before. Karzai won't live to see the end of this decade, I'd bet. But we'll still be there, bogged down and going nowhere, and now not able to simply declare "Mission Accomplished" and get the fuck out, having punished everyone and everything in the country already.

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Afghanistan is worse. It's the place where empires go to die. And the funny thing is, every time an empire invades Afghanistan, they're fully convinced that THIS TIME it's going to be different. The British had rifles and artillery, and well-trained officers, and it only cost them an entire army to find out that Afghanistan isn't a place one can take and keep. The Russians had armor and helicopter gunships, and it only cost them their entire empire to find out that it's not a place one can hold. Then we decided we'd give it a try, because we have air superiority and drones. What we DON'T have is a strategy, or an end goal, or an exit plan. You can punish Afghanistan, you can hit her people and hurt them, but you can't take over and control them. But you can pour the whole of your empire down the drain trying...

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Originally posted by Niki2:

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Afghanistan is worse. It's the place where empires go to die. And the funny thing is, every time an empire invades Afghanistan, they're fully convinced that THIS TIME it's going to be different. The British had rifles and artillery, and well-trained officers, and it only cost them an entire army to find out that Afghanistan isn't a place one can take and keep. The Russians had armor and helicopter gunships, and it only cost them their entire empire to find out that it's not a place one can hold. Then we decided we'd give it a try, because we have air superiority and drones. What we DON'T have is a strategy, or an end goal, or an exit plan. You can punish Afghanistan, you can hit her people and hurt them, but you can't take over and control them. But you can pour the whole of your empire down the drain trying...

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Yup, it is one of the things of which they are proudest...a people who have little to take pride in, and "little" in essentially everything. I lived there for 3-1/2 years; I adore the people, but the lives they lead were incredibly harsh. It's been a shock ever since 9/11 to hear it in the news constantly, considering when we came home and told people we'd lived there, they'd furrow their brows and say "uhhh, is that in Africa somewhere?"

If America ever learned to REBUILD what she so cheerfully goes in and destroys, she'd earn the respect and loyalty of the people she conquers, but we tend to walk away and wash our hands after a war, which sickens me.

The Afghans don't love the Taliban, I know there's a lot of misinformation out there so you don't have to believe me, but I'll say it anyway--and it's NOT opinion, I still have Afghan friends. The Taliban fought the Russians, who were incredibly oppressive--hey, remember, we helped supply them and called them "freedom fighters". Once in power, they became only slightly less the terror than the Russians had been (if you knew all the things the Russians did..).

It's not a country built for democracy, that's absolutely right. In a desert, where people are isolated in such dramatic fasion and life is only clung to by a thread, regional, tribal leaders are in power. There were few roads connecting villages--still are few from what I hear--you can't make roads that last in a desert, the sands ("shamals" that literally take the paint off cars), the snow, everything conspires to destroy them.

The temperatures easily get to 140 in summer; six foot snows in Winter; they burn donkey dung for fires, as trees were used up long ago by the kuchis--nomadic camel bands. I could tell you things that would curl your hair--no American can truly even begin to understand unless they lived there--not just passed through, but LIVED there, just as is true of any society hugely different from our own.

It was that way when we were there, '58-'61, when there still was a shah. He was a very forward-thinking man, tho' a despot, but he understood that he only had a light hand on the country as a whole, the local leaders handled everyday life. He got the chadri removed--I know because my mom was involved in it--and was getting women education, jobs...all of which went down the drain with the Russian occupation and now is even worse with the Taliban.

You can't take a country 2000 years forward in a few decades, nobody seems to grasp that. I heard "bomb them back to the stone ages", but they were barely OUT of the stone ages. If I really told you how it was back then, and probably not much different outside Kabul and other major cities today, you might not believe it.

In the kuchi tribes, who cross the desert on the trade routes that have existed before the time of Christ, when a woman has her baby she drops behind, finds a rock, and catches up when/if she can. Same with the elderly, they drop behind and die in the desert when they can't keep up. Insh'allah. Allah's will.

The poverty is unbelievable by any standards we know--far more than you can imagine. The childhood death rate is such that the saying was if a child can live to the age of ten, nothing can kill him but a knife or a bullet.

The penalty for stealing was to chop off the right hand. The right hand is used for eating out of the communal bowl; the left for pissing. Cutting off the right hand means starving to death.

We saw so much...the foreign women became immured to it; our first week there, mom was at a bridge game (bridge and cocktail parties were the "life" of the foreign wives). A woman ran in saying "knife fight!" and all the women raced out to see. An American woman stupidly went to a cocktail party in a strapless evening gown, taking the local transport (a "ghadi", horse-drawn carriage with one seat facing forward, the other facing back). She was found with a knife in her back.

You have no concept of Afghanistan...it makes Iraq look like the garden of Eden. They actually love Americans over there, or they did...they fight us because when you have little to live for, the afterlife is all; when Christian strangers come into your valley to fight Muslims and there's no employment, the young men join the fight on the Muslim's side. But given HALF a chance, the Afghans will side with the Americans; they're a very proud, strong people who will die for you if they get to know you.

It's very, very complex and, just as we waltzed into Iraq without the slightest idea what we were getting into, so we waltzed into Afghanistan...and will leave it even more of a rubble when we go.

________________________
Together we are greater than the sum of our parts

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Call it GAME OVER, declare victory, and just fucking GET OUT. Why waste hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of lives chasing after vengeance that can never be made better by spilling more blood?

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