Defining defeat downwards in Afghanistan

Jason from AZ

The NATO forces never fought this war in a manner to win. The "win hearts and mind" strategy and rules of engagement are a joke that needlessly put US and British soldiers at risk. And fighting to prop up a corrupt regime in a Muslim country that frankly hates our guts is not something our brave soldiers should be risking their lives for.

And frankly, even if we stayed a 100 years, the Afgan army would never be trained well enough to fend off the Taliban. The key to success would be to defeat the Taliban when they run back to their caves in NW Pakistan, but of course we're too polite to do that and "offend" one of our so-called allies.

Mark Allinson

“The Islamists’ calculation from the start was that the west was ripe for the taking because it was decadent and was no longer prepared to defend itself.”

So true, Melanie.

I realised that this was our fate twenty years ago, when universities here in Australia, like those in the U.K., Canada and the U.S., began to drop courses on the study of the great writers of our Western literary tradition, to be replaced by the works of minority groups, “suppressed” or “victimised” by colonialism. And when our great works were included for study, the approach was to torture them via “deconstruction” to expose their hidden racism and sexism, and so denigrate our great artists, and the culture that formed them.

This was the beginning of Western cultural surrender and defeatism, at the hands of the self-despising Left, who have had almost total control of education in the West for the past forty years. They taught our students that the West was the most destructive of all cultures, enslaving and destroying the innocent everywhere it reached. Colonialism offered no benefits to the colonised, only degradation. Children were taught to see the founders and settlers of colonies such as Australia as evil criminals rather than heroes – prototypes of the Nazi death squads, and implying that such a vicious culture had no right to exist. This, of course, enabled those levelling such charges to bask in the supreme ego-glow of total moral supremacy: “how morally superior am I, that I denounce my entire culture as criminal!”

But when the educational system of a culture promotes the view of itself as intrinsically evil, it is not long before the students start to act the part. The cultural demoralization of our students is one of the major causes of the misery and conflict we see today in young people. This result was always the intention of the Frankfurt school of global Marxism - in the words of Willi Munzenberg, “to organise the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilisation stink.” It is indeed working very well, and is now virtually complete.

And a demoralised, self-despising, depressed, drug-addled, overweight youth population is very vulnerable to complete cultural collapse, and the imposition of a stronger, more self-confident culture, which is what we are witnessing today. Can such a grievously crippled culture ever recover enough self-respect to survive? Most of our current educators, intellectuals, and leaders are working very hard to ensure that it doesn’t, with the very best of high moral intentions, of course. Wanting to end Western involvement in Afghanistan is merely another sign of our surrender. But I do wonder if our morally impeccable intellectuals are actually ready for the full implications of their high-minded surrender. Compulsory attendance at daily prayers might rankle with some of them.

Dixon

The only thing we need in Afghanistan are munitions, delivered by drones and aircraft. We need to make it clear that it is the responsibility of the Afghans to ensure that none of the negative outcomes outlined by Mel, above, occur and that if they fail to ensure that, they will suffer as a result of bringing upon themselves our continued intervention, by air, to eliminate any suspected hostile personnel, formations or bases in the country. We (which is to say, inclusively of the US)havent needed troops to be in Pakistan in order to prosecute such an aerial war and it has apparently been proving far more effective than that accomplished by foot-soldiers in Afghanistan.
Our soldiers in Afghanistan are having their lives squandered daily in a ridiculous attempt to wage what is in effect social-work with unloaded weapons whilst being shot at and bombed. Yes, unloaded weapons: since last month US forces (and can we doubt British also) have been ordered never to go on patrol with a round chambered or a weapon ready to fire. This isnt war, its a ritual in which soldiers are in effect human sacrifices for the sake of some manner of political gesture.

Lets face it, our society no longer has the backbone to conduct a real war. We are too scared of hurting the enemy under the scrutiny of 24/7 media coverage.

But the drone offensive in Pakistan has shown that our enemies can be dealt with to a degree of ruthlessness provided none of our people are present in person, drawing with them the attention of the media. Aerial robots have been acting free from the constraints of embedded reporters and consequently far more effectively than foot-soldiers on the ground. This is the pattern that should be followed, with the additional delivery where necessary of very large payloads of ordnance by piloted aircraft based in the region, or indeed, in the UK.

Resistence to global Jihad is a 21st Century war which cannot be fought with 19th Century tactics, as at present deployed in Afghanistan.

gary ashton

incredible, do these people have any idea?
how can the death of those that fight in armies for a cause be justified when the idiots pulling the strings make some arbitrary decision that it's to hard. imagine if churchill had reached the same conclusion. england may as well endorse terrorism and say yes, if you plant bombs and destroy civilization we will bend over for you.
it's disgusting.

Veracity

Could you not have included some responsibility for this to Nick Clegg , Melanie? It is clear Lib Dem policy and another sad case of no Tory policy or leader and the Lib Dem tail wagging the Tory dog.Will the real Prime Minister please stand up? Betrayal? Yes, of all Tory voters successfullly disenfranchised by the Tory leader. You have to ask if this were pre planned . You often refer to Cameron still behaving like the leader of the Opposition, well not much Opposition , more leader of the Collaboration, but true nevertheless.Is there any hope that someone will show this blog to our Puppet Prime Minister? Or even his ventriloquist?

AY

Well, there is nothing wrong in leaving monkey's cage after the attempt has failed to train the monkey for GCSE.

Derek BLADES

The fact that a lot of British soldiers have already died in Afghanistan is not a good reason for seeing a lot more killed.

Cameron is wise to follow Obama on this one. The American President has taken a rational, long-term view of the situation in Afghanistan and has rightly concluded that Western troops cannot stay there long enough to convert the country into a model western-type democracy. That would take many years and is probably unattainable. Hitherto, the Afghans have always expelled foreign invaders and look like doing it again.

The end result will be an Afghanistan under Taliban rule either alone or in coalition with the opium war lords. Not a very desirable outcome from a Western point of view, but we should be grateful that the United States has a President who can grasp the realities of the modern world. When you are in a hole don’t keep digging.

L. Urka DIrka

First Bomb the ISI office to pieces and kill every ISI operative and every one of their associates. And of course eradicate their so called former staff. Then it is OK to withdraw after having completed the job.

Chiang Mai Chris

Mark Allison - great comment. It's the stinking left that have got us into this mess, the cultural self-haters. I met a guy the other night in the pub proclaiming his moral superiority by being a socialist and shouting everyone down. But what he didn't realise is that he's just a utopianist living in cloud cookoo land.

Hayward

What most of you who rave on here about the weakness of the west because of the left and its pernicious influence is that you forget Reagan and Blowback.
The Reagan administration fought two proxy wars in the 1980s, in Nicaragua and Afghanistan.
I will just addres that in Afghnistan for it was in Afghanistan that the US strategy of covertly funding terrorists grew, and a whole new generation of Muslim fundamentalists was groomed into fighting a Jihad.

The war in Afghanistan was to create the a Viet Nam for the USSR

In 1985, Reagan greeted a group group of Afghan men, all from the mujahideen in the OVal Office. Later they appeared on television on the White House Lawn introduced by Reagan “These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers”

This set the stage for a decade of brutal conflict in Afghanistan, where Muslim fundamentalists were the US weapon of choice.

The United States has long had an ambivalent relationship with political Islam. Prepared to fund it on occasions it was nonetheless only tolerated when it suited the US’s wider regional interests.

After the 1979 revolution in Iran, it was considered a threat to US interests and was relentlessly opposed. Saddam Hussein was recruited as a US ally, to fight a proxy war against the Iranians. Saddam’s troops, trained and armed (including with chemical weapons) by the United States, invaded Iran in 1980.

While the Iran-Iraq war helped solidify the perception that Shi’i Muslims were revolutionary and Sunni Muslims moderate, it was ironically a fundamentalist form of political Islam that the United States encouraged as a means of fighting the USSR in Afghanistan.

In its proxy war with the USSR the United States financially aided by the House of Saud provided Afghan Islamist mujahideen with money, training and logistical support using the "good offices" of the Pakistan ISI as its main channel. In return for its help in the Afghan war effort, Pakistan was granted massive amounts of US aid throughout the 1980s despite its appalling human rights record, and again in 2001, with the US invasion of Afghanistan.

A massive propaganda and fund-raising machine targeted the worldwide Muslim population backed by the House of Saud and its support of their own peculiar brand of Islam Wahhabism. This enabled the mobilisation of recruits through a range of Islamic institutions. The ideas of Jihad were developed at these training centers, ideas that were hitherto marginal within the Islamic tradition.

It has been estimated that over 80,000 men were trained militarily within Pakistan from 1982 to 1992, and that a total of $3 billion in covert US funds were funneled to the mujahideen, through banks such as BCCI

Following policy developed in South East Asia in the 1970s and Latin America in the mid 1980s, the US also funded the war through drugs. By the end of the war in 1990, Afghanistan and Pakistan had become the world’s largest producers of opium and heroin, a trade controlled with the utmost brutality in the fight for regional supremacy.

Thus, it was the Afghan war that gave right wing Islamists the organization, numbers, skills, reach, and confidence to mobilize and organize in an unprecedented way.

John Edwards

Another blast of common sense from Derek Blades. After eight years it must be apparent to anyone that this latest military occupation of Afganistan by foreign armies will end in the same way as the others

Sam ARMSTRONG

"it was the Afghan war that gave right wing Islamists the organization, numbers, skills, reach, and confidence to mobilize and organize in an unprecedented way."

Maybe, but we didn't arm them as well as we arm ourselves, and they don't have the skill that our troops have. Therefore, we should be able to destroy them without any problem.

Except that the left, in its wisdom, has taken the guts required by Westerners to stay on top of this problem. Continuous dumbing down by the media and education system, and a stupid culture that encourages people to 'get in touch with our feelings' and wants us feel as though our culture is worthless - all from the left - has meant that although we have the best weapons and the best army, we no longer have the nerve to slaughter our enemy.

Ronald Reagan didn't need to worry about whether he was arming the wrong people or whatever. He ran the world's superpower, with the best weapons and the best allies and the best troops. He ran the world. He was puppet master. GOOD. We were so safe back then.

What on earth could have changed the game so dramatically in just a quarter century? Ronald and Margaret used to love winding their enemies up and then going in and getting them.

Remember Maggie on the Belgrano? "I knew I was right to sink her and I would do the same again".

The only way you could blame Ronnie Reagan for this is that he, and Thatcher and the other Western leaders in the 1980s, did nothing to stop the encroachment of loony liberal values. Pop music, TV, literature... 80s culture was one big dumb down and has led to weak Westerners in the early part of the century that followed.

Olaf Rye

The blame laid at the feet of the Reagan administration is typically misleading. We in the west did indeed support elements of the Muslim world to fight the USSR, but even in this irregular war, there was a clear schism between those supported by the west and those whose sympathies lay with militant Islam and Iran. To be sure, the example of bin Laden is rather curious--he began in a relatively western camp and drifted into an exclusionary and insane brand of Islamic thought.

As for the skills and training provided, these were good enough for the Afghanis to kill Soviet conscripts but not nearly sufficient to fight NATO troops. This is why the main source of casualties are road-side bombs.

This conflict is certainly capable of being won, but as one sagacious commentator has pointed out, not under media scrutiny and with the idiotic rules of engagement that are more appropriate for police action rather than war. The political will to smash militant Islam is missing in all our governments, and the media with its cultural self-loathers (which assume this position only to show how brilliantly enlightened they are as some sort of dinner party posture) would not countenance this. For Christ's sake, the BBC even pillories Israel for defending itself, so imagine what they would say about letting loose the dogs of war to do what is necessary.

Dixon

Hayward, thanks for the history lesson but most of us dont need it as we lived through the events you refer to, observed them as they occurred and, at least in my case, I opposed the support that was given to the "Mujaehadeen". At the time I declared this in such discussions as we have here, although not of course online, as an immoral support for mediaeval throwbacks and savages. I proclaimed the view that the Soviet backed government in Afghanistan was best for its people AND the rest of us. Indeed, there must be a great many Afghans now in exile or living an existence of abject oppression who bitterly regret the demise of that regime. The end of relative freedom in that hell hole of a land.

More to the point, the war in Afghanistan was against the USSR, and it did succeed. The fact that those who the Americans and British supported are now our enemies is neither here nor there. Allegiances in conflict are dependent upon the circumstances at the present, not in a hypothetical future. The USSR was a very real and present danger at the time. Whilst nobody had the remotest idea that we would eventually be under attack in our own homelands by forces located in such a remote and backward place. It was literally inconceiveable. Your bountiful hind-sight marks you out as either utterly bereft of any sense of what life was like in the world of the late Seventies and Early Eighties...that is to say its actual zeitgeist as opposed to lists of events gleaned from reading...or else it marks you out as simply foolish.

Reagan was a man of vision. Pretty much nobody imagined it possible that the USSR would ever come to an end. It was as much a fact of life as insusceptible to alteration as gravity or the seasons of the year. But Reagan had almost alone envisaged that it was possible, that it could be accomplished by draining the USSRs resources and that Afghanistan was a marvellous opportunity to do this. Your cliched notion of "blow back" is facile. In the real world one can only address the realities as they are, not an infinite number of unimaginable future possibilities.

Finally, it was large parts of the left who actively supported the same Islamist savages as were being aided by Reagan and Thatcher. Our media, hardly a mouthpiece of the right, continually portrayed the "Mujehadeen" as romantic, noble "freedom fighters". They didnt need any government urging to do so. It was par to their mind-set at that time to portray such groups in that way. And that was something the left bought into. As one illustration, we can look at the series of reports presenyed on ITN by Sandy Gall who was "embedded" with the "resistence". Pure romanticism, echoing the mythology of T.E.Lawrence as constructed in the epic and at that time still immensely popular biopic by Richard Lean.

So if you think the elder exponents of your favoured ideological outlook are somehow exempt from shared responsibility for what happenned then you obviously havent a clue what the reality was like.

Carl

So, according to Sam Armstrong, Pop music has fatally weakened the west.

Most interesting view.

steve

If no. 2 is the priority then our troops are in the wrong country.

It's interesting as well how Melanie and some of the contributors put forward a view of the west as decadent that Osama bin Laden and the jihadists would share. What's that all about?

alan stoddart

Mary Riddell sums up the Left's attitude.... 'peace, not victory, is the great premium.'

'Better Red than dead' was presumably one of her earlier convictions.

She would rather live under any regime, however bad, than fight against it.

Which sums up the Left's attitude to Islam today.

The same people who demand we get out of Afghanistan are the same ones who said leaving Afghnaistan when the Soviets were kicked out, was the cause of Islamic extremism...the same people who claim that leaving Afghanistan to itself in 2001 after the fall of the Taliban led to extremism...and now they demand we leave.

My theory is that they, Lefties, don't give a jot about the Afghans but are solely intent on causing as much trouble as possible for Western governments and societies.

Rob-NY

There is a reason OBL hid in Afghanistan on 9/11. He wanted the to draw NATO soldiers to that remote wilderness. There is no real victory or success possible in Afghanistan and has little barring on the Arab Middle-East which is why Bush kept involvement low key. However victory and success in Iraq actually means something in the transformation of the Middle-East and thus avoiding another 9/11. That is something few people understood during the Bush years.

Harold

"... But Reagan had almost alone envisaged that it was possible, that it could be accomplished by draining the USSRs resources..."

I thought Zbignew Brzezinski had precedence on this one, and can claim some credit for financing, training and arming jihadis (although there is enough credit to go round in Washington.

I also thought that students of Russia and the Soviet Union have long argued that the huge cost of the Great Patriotic War and, in a parlous state, of trying to keep up its defenses against the US, rendered the Soviet Union a slow motion car crash for the last forty years of its existence. The wiser among the Kremlin apparatchiks (not Khrushchev) were well aware of this. Afghanistan, Star Wars, the visionary Reagan (!) were not the cause of the downfall of the USSR, although clearly contributed.

Hayward Maberley

Mr Armstrong,
It does not matter how well armed, hi teched and acronymed up the forces in Afghanistan are, they are still the occupiers. The" natives" are there, they have no where else to go, they can just wait.

And in fact at some time they were armed with Stingers which means they were very well armed. As for skills they were also taught how to make IED& VIED.

Furthermore the other skills they were taught and acquired in those training camps run by the ISI on behalf of the CIA and the Saudi GDI have been honed by all the years of fighting. Those skills are just transferred from their resistance to other invaders from Alexander onward.

"Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan" by Frank L. Holt, read & learn. Alexander could not win in spite of extreme brutality, possibly originating the total war concept in dealing with hostile populations. By either wiping them out or selling them off as slaves to the traders who followed, thus financing the next stage in his campaign. Even he had to admit in a letter to his mother that he had met his match in fighting the Pashtun in their own mountains.

“Therefore, we should be able to destroy them without any problem.”

The UK should really know better as they have had two losses and a draw for their attempts in Afghanistan. They were quite brutal with their Bash, Burn and Bugger Off routine. The USSR was probably as brutal as Alexander in their attempt to subdue the country, but they withdrew in the end.

The longest insurgency the USA ever fought? On the soil of the US?
Against a people and in terrain somewhat similar to that of much of Afghanistan?

The USA example is right in its own backyard. Down in the South West in the so called “The Apache Wars” c.1844-86. The US won by extirpating various bands of Apache, Kiowa & Navaho, all lumped together as "Apache". Having the rest surrender often killing the leaders & shipping the old, women and children to Oklahoma & Florida hoping they might die out.

Well my idea of culture may differ from yours. I enjoy a range of music from early through to some current pop. I attend concerts and lectures, I read a lot, mostly non-fiction in the areas of economics, history and science. I like to bushwalk and cycle. I enjoy my job currently working in an Academic Library

The dumbing down of culture as you call it is an exercise carried out for very good commercial reasons, as far as they are concerned, by the captains of industry.
Those who run the Media and Entertainment industries and also the Fast and Junk food industries.

You do have a point with education systems but much of that has to do with the politicians, the policies that they implement and the funding constraints. Funny how they always manage to find funds for miltary adventures.

I do not feel inclined to go out and slaughter anybody but I suppose you may. In that case why not enlist in the arm of your choice?

Ronald Reagan was not very bright and certainly did not really think very much on the consequences of his actions, Sorry but you can thank him to a great extent fro the current happenings in Afghanistan

“Ronald and Margaret used to love winding their enemies up and then going in and getting them”.

Ronald and Margeret would send in others to fight and to die. Ronald like a good many other Republican chickenhawks was never actually in combat. Nor as far as I am aware was Margaret!

Dixon

Harold, your sustained sophistry only serves to maintain your carefully crafted self-delusion. If there had been no Reagan, no Afghanistan, no "star Wars",moreover no thirteenth nuclear battlegroup, no MX missile prpgramme, no F117, B2, B1B programmes, no deployment of GLCM in the UK, no development and theatre deployment of Pershing 2, no fielding of the enhanced radiation weapon, no re-engining, avionic upgrades and service extension of the B52 fleet, development of new aerial ordnance and artillery, smart munitions and air-land warfare doctrine, then the USSR wouldnt have been arms-raced into the ground and would almost certainly still be with us. Not to mention the financial and practical support of dissident groups throughour Europe, particularly and ultimately critically in Poland. Although many of these things beagan before Reagans time as president, they all came to fruition on his watch, all contributed to his vision and most if not all would have been scrapped under the likes of another Carter type administration.

Incidentally the "Great patriotic war" ...which the Soviets only managed to fight as a result of massive arms supplies by America and the UK by the way...was no impediment to the USSR becoming the strategically dominant world power for the two decades after WW2. Or was that also our fault for supporting them when they resisted Hitler. More "blowback".

Your style of argument can go round in Orouboros type infinite self-consumption because it requires only the continual adduction of any number of an infinity of unknowable possibilities. But there is only one reality. Even if you arent grown up enough to be willing to admit that it doesnt suit you.

As the saying goes, if my aunt had testicles shed be my uncle.

Dixon

Hayward Maberley, I havent read that version of events...which is like saying "Im not taking what you are on" : the facts are that Alexander in three years killed over a quarter of a million of your beloved "pashtuns" (a concept which didnt exist at the time, but "whatever" you call a rose...) and had utterly crushed all opposition within three years. So thoroughly that after his death the region remained under Hellenic rule for several generations of the admittedly fragmented sassanid successors.

Whoever said it earlier was quite right...the Taleban and any other opposition in the region could be utterly obliterated in a matter of weeks had our leaders the moral fibre of their ancestors. Previous British actions in the region may have failed in spite of possesing the required bloody-minded ruthlessnes, but they had none of the devastating weapons now at our disposal. What we need yoday is a combination of both these elements.

Olaf Rye

Beware of the fallacy of history--the Marxist axiom sounds nice, but is deeply flawed. The military operations and objectives of the nineteenth century are rather different from those of the twenty-first and there is no clear association of Afghan nationalists with the Taleban. If anything, the Taleban do import some extraneous traditions rather than preserve traditional Afghan structures.

As for Reagan not being at war--well, this is true, but the resistance to the USSR was necessary despite the protestations by the leftist intelligentsia that were wrong on almost every occasion. The self-professed 'intellectuals' that derided Reagan and Thatcher as stupid were those that were duped most thoroughly by a mob of killers and thugs in the Warsaw Pact that were responsible for some of the most egregious violations of human rights and murders ever seen. The USSR duped these people chiefly by appealing to their intellectual vanity.

RocketDog

I know that it is another place and another war but it is worth taking a look at 'Kurds, Arabs & Britons - The Memoirs of Wallace Lyon in Iraq 1918-44' Introduction and Edited by DK Fieldhouse. ISBN 1-86064-613-1

The excellent Wallace Lyon got on through dint of understanding the locals and air power (largely). Dixon probably has it right there. I wonder what strength we have at Wallace Lyon level today? We have many fine young soldiers, but how many of them have had the opportunity to develop similar experience and grow the sort of relationships that can be crucial in these sorts of environments?

All the same themes continue. Warring sects in a fluid environment. Interfering liberal elitists trying to impose their world view in an entirely innapropriate environment. Honest soldiers left to get on with it as best as possible against a background of inadequate resources - and most importantly inadequate understanding

However, to draw upon the cultural issue that besets us here. We have been going to the dogs for time immemorial. Our conflicts with various Islamic entities would appear to be cyclical, with us using superior ordinance every hundred years or so to calm them down a bit

However, as the world changes (regrettably) and technology conspires to fill every waking moment with information that may or may not be true, or may or may not be relevant - blowing them up is probably no longer the (whole)answer

The answer may lie in the same process of alleged cultural degradation that currently besets the West. Simple measures such as building railways and other modernising influences will eventually close the door on the Taleban. For that we will have to wait. If it doesn't then we may need to use the ordinance again, in time, and probably from space

In the meantime a few Wallace Lyons and some air support might be able to keep the remaining Jihadis on their toes

Derek BLADES

For once Dixon has got it right. The communist government was a high point for the Afghans. Secular education for boys and girls, a national health service for mothers and children, food crops instead of poppies, and all-weather roads between main cities. All the good things, in fact, that the NATO planners can only dream about.

On the other hand, Dixon has clearly lost it when he suggests that there is a military solution. With all their hi-tech weapons and magical satellites the Americans cannot even deal with Osama bin Laden. What chance against a million strong Taliban militia which has tacit support throughout the country? If the Russians living next door could not do it, the Americans from thousands of miles away have no chance.

Joe Strummer

After the disgraceful and shameful Bloody Sunday apology by David Cameron today I want all our troops home. Their decent honourable individual lives are worth a million venal, back-stabbing politicians.

EDDIE

Why did Rome fall? Could it have been a loss of belief in its values? leaving Afghanistan will probably guarantee a nuclear war

Ian Hills

The trouble with terrorism (Irish republican, Islamic, you name it) is that it has the support of the left-wing media. BBC cameras try hard to catch Israeli, British and American soldiers infringing on mass murderers' "human rights", whilst the latters' atrocities are not shown. With a level playing field, I am sure that soldiers would not feel so restrained in dealing properly with terrorism. (There was no media presence to sabotage Alexander the Great's entirely successful Afghan campaign.) Now, the current Afghan war - which I am sure is just the precursor to an oil war against Iran - can be won, but only by observing the Taliban's own rules of engagement, and that means banning the media from the scene, as well as, of course, our troops being allowed to make use of the Americans' superior hardware, now that they are under U.S. command. Afterward, let the troops loose in northern Pakistan, again, with no media presence permitted. Then there'll be no risk of a nuclear jihadi state, and the area can serve as a bridgehead into Iran so that BP can get its oil back from the mullahs. One in six British pensioners depend on BP, and the Iranians are suffering under an islamist terrorist yoke, just like the Afghans. Fight on, but clear the area of media traitors first!

Harold

Dixon

"...was no impediment to the USSR becoming the strategically dominant world power for the two decades after WW2."

OK, so none of the many degrees you delight in telling us of was in history.

"The strategically dominant world power"! Indeed!

It is in poor taste to insinuate that the Russians could only save our skins because we supplied them with equipment. You will find that those at the time had a better idea of what we owed them.

Augustus

According to a recent article in The New York Times, a small team of Pentagon officials and
American geologists have discovered a vast scale of mineral wealth in Afghanistan.
"Afghanistan could become the Saudi Arabia of lithium, a key raw material in the manufacture
of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys." Huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, as well as lithium, are also there
to be mined. It may take quite some years to develope the industries, but eventually officials believe it will become
one of the most important mining centres in the world.

But instead of all this wealth
($1 trillion estimate) bringing peace, it could lead the Taliban
to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.
China will also be watching how this plays out. So, amid all the
wealth and abundance the country
has to offer, there is a sharp sword hanging over the West's head.... Err, now where have I heard that one before...?

Dixon

Harold...oh come on, you just keep spewing more of the same. Obviously you dont know the first damn thing about it. Ever heard of "Arctic Convoys"? Never heard of the fact that for some years the USSR was the only nation with a deployed ICBM? That until it collapsed its land-based armed forces were so superior that it was an acknowledged fact that they could only be resisted using nuclear weapons. Everything...I mean, every...little...thing...you write, so totally confirms the validity of my initial comment in response to "Hayward" (June 15th 1.30) as equally applying to you. Are you perhaps the same person? Ot just two indistinguishable clones off the same blockhead?

Dixon

"Derek BLADES
June 15th, 2010 7:37pm
For once Dixon has got it right. The communist government was a high point for the Afghans. Secular education for boys and girls, a national health service for mothers and children, food crops instead of poppies, and all-weather roads between main cities. All the good things, in fact, that the NATO planners can only dream about."

But you see Bladdes, you only view everything in ideological stereotypes, so you crow about my agreeing with something that doesnt conform to your expectations of a "right wing" position because you simply dont comprehend that I am only "right wing" inside your stereotype addled mind-set. Im an individual. I make my own mind up about individual issues on an issue by issue basis, irrespective of "right"/"left" ideology. You should try it sometime. It could only do you good.

Richard

Dixon
June 16th, 2010 12:14pm

You have so many fields of ignorance that I feel I should help.

Of course the Russians needed our stuff, just as we needed their men. Without them,the war in Europe would have been lost; and the US would have thought twice about invading.

Read Overy "Why the Allies Won" Mawdsley "World War II" Murray and Millett "A War to be Won", or any number of other authorities.

"The strategically dominant world power" Even the Americans don't agree with your assessment. Many of their documents are now declassified. You can read them for yourself.

Attila

I think Hungary should pull out of Afghanistan too.

gareth

Afghanistan is a collection of mutually hostile tribes. It cannot be a democracy, nor even a stable State, unless it is a dictatorship. Pakistan is funding and training the Taleban, but NATO is dependent on supplies routed through Pakistan. It is, of course, desirable to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a base for jihad, but any muslim country is a probable base for jihad, and we can't invade and occupy them all. The way to deal with the jihad is to attack the regimes that support it and to cut off the main source of funding - the money we pay for Arab oil.

In the Wilderness in America

Ronald Regan was no simpleton as some of you suggest. He also played a huge part in the ending of the Cold War. Even the liberal lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, credited Reagan with that accomplishment on his death.

Derek BLADES

Dixon, 16 June wrote "But you see Bladdes,(sic) ..... Im (sic) an individual. I make my own mind up about individual issues on an issue by issue basis, irrespective of "right"/"left" ideology."

This is not the first time that Dixon has made the mistake of thinking that I, or indeed anybody else, is interested in the workings of his mind. Most of what he writes is the standard right-wing rubbish but he occasionally gets something right. When that happens I like to give him encouragement even though, as I also noted, his views on prosecuting the war in Afghanistan show his ignorance of history and his misunderstanding of the limits of military power.

David ben Duji

Napoleon is supposed to have remarked 'Most empires die of indigestion'. This meant that it was one thing to conquer a people or an area, in order to benefit from the victory, you had to invest an awful lot of time and money in it. The Roman Empire lasted a long time because they did invest in roads, towns and 'the fruits of Mediterranean civilisation'.
The campaign in Afganistan should not have been begun until the question 'If we achieve victory, what do we do with it?' was answered.
Some people have been referring to Churchill and David Low's cartoons. One you could evoke is the one showing the world economy in the early 1930s as a huge lifeboat, with 'The Small Nations' frantically baling while the figures of France, Britain, the USA and Weimar Germany saying 'Phew, that's a nasty leak! Glad it's not in our end of the boat'
You could change 'The Small Nations' to Israel, Lebanon, Moderate Muslims, African and Arab Christians frantically baling 'Jihad' rather than 'Depression', while the other countries look on and say 'Phew, that's a nasty leak....'