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[Sir Pseudonymous]

...but it's still pants-on-head retarded to send foot soldiers in when you can just drop a bomb on the house of the guy you want dead, even if that means a chance for collateral damage.

And then we wonder why an American would drop so much dox on his own government like that. And we wonder why they hate us.

No one's wondering why he did it; he came right out and said it. His motivations just so happened to be fucktarded, and entirely disconnected from his actions.

American infantry has gone into worse, like, oh, Fallujah. The real reason we don't send boots on the ground in Pakistan is because seeing real live Marines on Pakistani soil might make them all go completely apeshit, kind of like what would happen if real live Pakistani soldiers showed up in rural Texas after they've bombed it several times, which I kind of wish would happen just so they'd know firsthand what it's like.

Yes, let's send them into as horrible a situation as possible, because like, they've totally been in situations like that before and that was just dandy! Fuck all this newfangled "technology" that lets them take out their targets from a hundred miles away with less collateral damage than a full fledged firefight would cause!

Is 'collateral damage' really still in use? You know what that term means, right? It's not a hole in a wall or a shattered picture. It's some five-year-old kid screaming when he sees, through the smoke, his mom's head roll around on the carpet away from the pieces of scattered meat that used to be her body, and then screaming again because he just noticed half his fucking leg is gone at the knee and the shock's starting to wear off. (Ooh, that's not gonna grow back, is it? Hope you like hopping, Stumpy!)

Yeah, little Ahmed had such a bright future as a poppy farmer or thug for the local warlords masquerading as religious fanatics; it's not like any of those eighteen year old kids packed into a personal carrier rolling up to his village to raid a house that contained an important member of the criminal syndicate attempting to seize control of the country, who ran off in the opposite direction half an hour earlier on account of how fucking obvious an armored column moving in is, and whom any asshole with an old soviet antitank gun and enough training to know which end to point at the apc can kill in the blink of an eye would have ever amounted to anything, or were even real people.

You know, it makes sense to kill the women and children on a genetic basis anyway. Screw it, we're not getting anywhere with these half-measures so let's go all the fucking way. Dump shitloads of Sarin and VX on the whole Swat Valley, gunning survivors down from helicopters like Sarah Palin shooting wolves, then upload it to the front page of some .mil site with a soundtrack from Slayer. (Heh, what're you gonna do now, Julian?) Zero American casualties and no more terrorists in the region. Problem solved!

If you must use a strawman, can you at least have the decency to come up with one a little more clever than "derp you think commanders should try to minimize their own casualties herp let's just kill everyone then no more casualties derp"?

[Virex]

Yeah, that in a nutshell would be why America isn't gonna win the war in Afghanistan any time soon.

If someone bombed your house, killing your family and claiming they were merely "collateral damage"... well, you're gonna be angry, right?

Interestingly enough, they don't seem to get angry when the Taliban does it...

[Duuvian]

Yeah, that in a nutshell would be why America isn't gonna win the war in Afghanistan any time soon.

If someone bombed your house, killing your family and claiming they were merely "collateral damage"... well, you're gonna be angry, right?

Interestingly enough, they don't seem to get angry when the Taliban does it...

Prove this?

[Virex]

Just the feeling I get from the fact that according to what I've gathered from the papers, support for the Taliban is growing, while they appear to be rather fond of bombing public places.

[Eugenitor]

There's actually an argument, presented in all seriousness, that an armed assault will consist of an APC rolling up to the front door to get picked off by an old anti-tank gun, American soldiers are much too precious to be actually put into combat, blowing up the entire house of a guy with four wives will kill fewer civilians than a gunfight near that house, and killing Pakistani kids doesn't matter anyway because they won't grow up to be much of anything?



Play this and don't stop until you've killed all the terrorists.

Virex, support for the Taliban is increasing because the Karzai government is utterly, hopelessly, corrupt, to the point of outright theft. It takes a large chunk of bribe money to make a government official there do anything. On the other hand, the actual religious-nut Taliban (as opposed to the biker gangs calling themselves that) offer what somewhat resembles order and justice, even if they do have to stay mobile to avoid the space aliens' airstrikes. And that's seriously what we are to them, with impressive technology but incomprehensible customs.

There are no good solutions. If NATO leaves, the Taliban run the place. If NATO presses forward, the Taliban go into hiding while the locals get mad at the space aliens kicking in doors searching for them. If NATO mostly leaves but keeps up Pakistan-style airstrikes, the Taliban run the place with a side order of random Taliban and civilians getting blown up. If the Afghanistan war logs prove anything (and in this thread, everyone's at least looked at the subject matter in question, right?), it's that we've been there for almost ten years, and won almost all of the battles but still accomplished jack shit. The counterinsurgency effort is an epic, monumental failure. The only way to have any real success is to completely alter the mindset of the region's natives, and that's not possible. The only alternative is to kill them all.

[Virex]

The only alternative is to kill them all.

It seems that this approach, when taken earlier (6 day war anyone?), would've solved a load of problems we have today.

[Osmosis Jones]

-snip-

I've started just skimming this thread since it devolved into an argument over the morality of war, but I have to comment again to say that this was an excellent post.

[Bill the dwarf]

This is getting nowhere.