Re: Casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan
Posted: Wed Jan 06, 2010 12:55 am
Good post, and I pretty much agree entirely.
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Please define what you mean by Taliban . Please cite your source that says an avowedly Islamist fundamentalist group is using drug income to fund it's activity , because that tale does look awfully like a black disinformation story .lwd wrote: Very early on they may have been anti drug. However they quickly turned a blind eye to it as long as they were getting their cut and most of it left the country. However that's the past. Currently drugs bankroll the Taliban.
hammy wrote: My personal view is that islamic terrorism exists in the style of you watching a lot of fluffy cumulus clouds on a breezy warm summer's day . The whole scene is continously changing , merging and melding in front of your eyes in chaotic fashion , and the truth is that there is no pattern to it , just temporary accumulations of little clouds into bigger ones for a while , before these disperse again .
Well I dont claim to be anything more than an interested bystanding skeptic , so please reveal this pattern .That may be a very accurate model. Of course there is a a pattern to it if you can watch it on the right scale and or have the insight(s) to see it.
Sorry , but I'm not convinced . Its like looking for the source of all the lights on one of those Disco mirror-fragment covered ball things going round on the ceiling in a dancehall .Well there is some central direction it's just that it has little power to compell.
I trust you are having a laugh here . Things looking up in the Yemen ? The inhabitants are mostly homicidal savages , and always have been . The Arabs say that when God created the Sudan , He laughed . He must have had a migraine when He created the Yemen .There's been no declaration of war that I've heard of and no sudden problem. Indeed things are looking up in Yemen in many ways at least for those interested in suppressing terrorism. Maybe to the point where something may be acomplished with a reasonable expenditure of resources.
Those groups have little in common except they all feel they are patriots. They also mostly disavow attacks on the USA. That makes them different from Al Qaeda, and the Taliban have provided Al Qaeda with a place of sanctuary so that makes the Taliban our enemies as well. Lately the Taliban have been making money from the Poppy trade in Afghanistan. Previously they suppressed it, but I guess lately they have become more pragmatic.hammy wrote:What is the linkage to the PLO/Hamas/Black September/Hezbollah/Islamic Jihad/Ingush+Chechen terrorists ?
This is exactly my view - and why you need to properly plan and control your response, so you retain the initiative and are on top of the consequences of your actions. That is also why I think it was wrong to halt Desert Storm without, to put it bluntly, clearing Iraq of Saddam and all the other problems there; if the Arab states in the Coalition were against that they were in the wrong, and again to be blunt, if the job had been finished properly they would have had to go along with it - and quite likely in private they would agree, its just that in public they cannot be seen to agree.hammy wrote:
The West needs to either get much harder , or get out altogether . As I posted elsewhere , earlier , there was a golden opportunity to get hard in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks , to tell the assembled Islamic world that they then had an immediate straight choice - to become civilised and progressive nations willingly , or to declare their emnity and see their states and civilisations destroyed , their governing establishments removed or made helpless , their personal riches stripped away , and their resources ( oil ) taken over by armed force and the future earnings arising disbursed soley under the control of the occupiers .
I do not think such an action is possible now .
A bunch of religious fanatics mostly in Afganistan and Pakistan employing violence to enforce their vision of the future.hammy wrote: ...
Please define what you mean by Taliban .
It's pretty widley reported here and pretty much taken for granted. For instance it's mentioned in most of the articles at:Please cite your source that says an avowedly Islamist fundamentalist group is using drug income to fund it's activity , because that tale does look awfully like a black disinformation story .
Not really. Local producers and processors make money on most Agricultural products. If they didn't they couldn't stay in business. Profits are also made up stream. This covers the drug trade as well as conventional agriculture.Also , note that you are implying that in the case of Afghan Poppy cultivation , the producers and local processors of this Agricultural product are the ones making the money out of it , a situation unique in the Global agricultural market .
FairTrade Heroin ?
hammy wrote: My personal view is that islamic terrorism exists in the style of you watching a lot of fluffy cumulus clouds on a breezy warm summer's day . The whole scene is continously changing , merging and melding in front of your eyes in chaotic fashion , and the truth is that there is no pattern to it , just temporary accumulations of little clouds into bigger ones for a while , before these disperse again .
Well I dont claim to be anything more than an interested bystanding skeptic , so please reveal this pattern .That may be a very accurate model. Of course there is a a pattern to it if you can watch it on the right scale and or have the insight(s) to see it.
Well most of the above are obviously linked by a belief in fundamentalist Islam. Many are linked in other ways but not all by the same ones.What is the linkage to the PLO/Hamas/Black September/Hezbollah/Islamic Jihad/Ingush+Chechen terrorists ? There isnt one really , except another lot of crazies arises out of other developments at random intervals and that having common aims , may run together for a while .
I'm not at all sure what you wanted to imply by your analogy. Clearly there are certain figures that encourage certain types of acts vs certain players. They would be very happy if all accepted their word as law but it's pretty clear that the various groups pick and choose what they wish to act on.Sorry , but I'm not convinced . Its like looking for the source of all the lights on one of those Disco mirror-fragment covered ball things going round on the ceiling in a dancehall .Well there is some central direction it's just that it has little power to compell.
On the other hand the Yemeni government is cooperating with the west now and actively trying to suppress the terrorist factions and is being aided in this by the Saudis. That's good news for us if not for at least some of the inhabitants of Yemen. Although in the long run it's probably a good sign for them as well.I trust you are having a laugh here . Things looking up in the Yemen ? The inhabitants are mostly homicidal savages , and always have been . The Arabs say that when God created the Sudan , He laughed . He must have had a migraine when He created the Yemen .There's been no declaration of war that I've heard of and no sudden problem. Indeed things are looking up in Yemen in many ways at least for those interested in suppressing terrorism. Maybe to the point where something may be acomplished with a reasonable expenditure of resources.
It doesn´t have anything to do with moral. War is outside any moral approach. It´s just what´s practical and what´s not. Exactly there is where the US lost it´s post WWII wars. William T. Sherman didn´t address the morality of burning Atlanta or Savannah down. He knew it was inmoral but still did it because it was practical military necesity. Curtis Le May knew that he was killing hundred of thousands japanses inocent civilians at Tokio or with the nukes at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. He care, personally, on that but as a military commander he saw no other option in order to win.In my opinion it is impossible for the USA to perform such a brutal act. For the most part our citizens are taught from an early age that such things are immoral, and our government and our military just don't work that way. Such a thing is unlikely to happen, at least in my lifetime, so for you to wish for it is probably an exercise in futility for yourself.
Karl Heidenreich wrote:RF:
There is already a jihad and it will only get worse. In order to win the conflict escalation is necesary. The West cannot and will not win the hearts and minds of the muslims involved. There is no chance of an unconventional warfare to win here.
Karl Heidenreich wrote:Byron Angel:
We are refering to two different scenarios of the same conflict. One is, indeed, in the West, where the goverments must win the hearts and minds not of the common population, which I do believe is identified enought with their own survival, but of their weak politicians. The other front is the one that requires that the western powers (i.e. USA) must unleash unlimited violence in order to anihilate all oposition in the mountains and valleys of the conflict areas.
There is logic in your argument. But I think there is a glitch there, if I may, of considering that the islamic masses behave as the western ones to the propaganda or public campaigns. I really will not trust the power of such an approach and can only give the enemy more time to organize their final assault.Prosecution of an intensive hearts and minds campaign within the islamic nations is IMO far more important. Extremist islamic ideologies must either be publicly discredited or moderated out of existence; It won't be an easy process, but then we haven't been trying very hard either on the propaganda front. And social propaganda is a very powerful weapon over time when properly deployed.
This example is misleading. The Mahdi only operated in Sudan, and posed threats only to Egypt and to Abyssinia. It didn't threaten anywhere outside that area at all. The British government didn't take twenty years to stamp it out - at first they decided to withdraw from Sudan, sending General Gordon to do it, only he had his own agenda. After the fall of Khartoum the Mahdist forces were fully engaged in a tribal war with Abyssinia which went on for the period you mention. Only then did the British as an Empire building operation go back into Sudan to remove the ''fuzzy wuzzy'' and used avenging General Gordon as the excuse.Byron Angel wrote:
This struggle will not be a short one. The last time the west was confronted with this sort of instability was the great Mahdist uprising in the late 19th century. It took Great Britain twenty years to stamp it out.
RF wrote:This example is misleading. The Mahdi only operated in Sudan, and posed threats only to Egypt and to Abyssinia. It didn't threaten anywhere outside that area at all. The British government didn't take twenty years to stamp it out - at first they decided to withdraw from Sudan, sending General Gordon to do it, only he had his own agenda. After the fall of Khartoum the Mahdist forces were fully engaged in a tribal war with Abyssinia which went on for the period you mention. Only then did the British as an Empire building operation go back into Sudan to remove the ''fuzzy wuzzy'' and used avenging General Gordon as the excuse.Byron Angel wrote:
This struggle will not be a short one. The last time the west was confronted with this sort of instability was the great Mahdist uprising in the late 19th century. It took Great Britain twenty years to stamp it out.
Today with globalisation the problem is very different. The problem is at home, not at the far corner of empire.