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[cowofdoom78963]

It's really not so bad.

This is a really long war, and after all who's perfect?

[PTTG??]

All the taxes that I am going to pay in my entire life are not going to be able to pay off what has simply vanished into thin air.

[nenjin]

I remember, my last year in college, trying to peg what we would make the top stories of the day in a theoretical newspaper.

Some blond 20-something was like "Why should I care about Afghanistan" when I argued it should usually be the top story.

Because $8.1 billion of your ****ing tax dollars just disappeared there, you stupid fucking ****, I wish I would have said. Instead I just generically said "because we're spending billions a year of our money to fight a war." Funny, we're not even SPENDING it as much as we are earmarking it to go into a money black hole.

It's never the body counts, never the horrors of war that seems to get people's attention...but tell them how much money they're losing, and suddenly it's relevant.

So one of those incidents is "Air strike called in by Marines kills seven children" and is labeled other, not civilian casualties. Probably just a mistake, but if you're feeling in the mood for a conspiracy you could probably raise a huge stink about it being intentional.

I didn't read through more than a few examples. Considering how many documents were leaked, I think they can be forgiven for mislabeling one tragedy as another.

[RedKing]

I know it's become fashionable to transplant the familiar mantras of the Iraq War ("colossal mistake", "never should have started to begin with", "they all hate us") to Afghanistan, but these are two very distinct wars. And Afghanistan itself has been two distinct wars.

I vehemently opposed going into Iraq. I marched in protests in Washington multiple times in 2002 and early 2003. I never opposed going into Afghanistan. I wasn't happy to see us going in, but it was something that needed to be done. And we more or less won that war by mid-late 2002. The Taliban were routed, the Northern Alliance was in control of most of the country, and opium production had dropped to almost nothing. We still had some work to do pinning down the last remnants of enemy forces along the Pakistani border, but that was an achievable goal, especially with sufficient pressure on Gen. Musharraf.

Then George W. FUCKING Bush made what will long be regarded as one of the worst strategic errors since Hitler invaded Russia. He pulled out 90%+
of our forces out of theater so he could go dick around in Iraq. We committed one of the cardinal sins of geopolitics: we created a vacuum, and then failed to fill it. And in the absence of a real troop presence and a committed effort to build institutions of governance and public services, the country went to Hell in a handbasket. Now, it could be said that the country was already Hell in a handbasket and pretty much had been since 1979. But that doesn't excuse the US. We made a promise to the Afghan people, and then we skipped town. And so the Afghans learned the same lesson the Kurds learned after 1991: don't trust the Americans, because they'll leave you hanging at the worst possible time.

Now we have a resurgent Taliban, Osama and Co. have disappeared to God-knows-where inside of the NWFP, the Afghans don't trust us, the warlords have had time to retrench their regional control, and a somewhat cooperative Pakistani dictatorship has been replaced with a fractious and uncooperative Pakistani democaracy. Musharraf may have been a bastard but he was our bastard, as the old saying goes.

Is the war winnable? I don't know. Honestly, we may have f**ked things up so bad by our six-year hiatus that it's not salvageable. But as long as there's any reasonable probability for success, I feel that we need to continue. But we need to do it the RIGHT way, not this half-assed, war-on-the-cheap that we've been doing for too long. Afghanistan needs to be our #1 foreign policy priority, and it needs to be on the front page, every day.

What kills me is that so many on the Left stood under the "Iraq is a mistake, we need to be focusing on Afghanistan" banner when criticizing Bush, and all through the 2008 election cycle. And as soon as Obama was elected, they act shocked and betrayed that we haven't packed up shop and left Iraq *and* Afghanistan.

[Phmcw]

It's true that while going to Iraq was an obvious mistake, the war in Afghanistan was hardly avoidable.
However, the question is : is the American commandment, is the nato, able to win a war, or rather, a successful occupation of a country. I'd say no.
This has always been the problem with democracy : It's ineffective to conduct a war and it's much worse if the war is long.
The troops are undisciplined, any casualties is resented, drastic and insanely expensive measures are taken to avoid loss of troops,...
And with that the military commandment is heavily politicized, usually quite corrupted, and the most troublesome commanders are usually kept in menial positions. 

[RedKing]

It's true that while going to Iraq was an obvious mistake, the war in Afghanistan was hardly avoidable.
However, the question is : is the American commandment, is the nato, able to win a war, or rather, a successful occupation of a country. I'd say no.
This has always been the problem with democracy : It's ineffective to conduct a war and it's much worse if the war is long.
The troops are undisciplined, any casualties is resented, drastic and insanely expensive measures are taken to avoid loss of troops,...
And with that the military commandment is heavily politicized, usually quite corrupted, and the most troublesome commanders are usually kept in menial positions.

You're absolutely right. That's why the democracies of the world lost both World Wars. Oh wait....

The type of government has little to do with it. It's the type of war. This is a lot harder, because it's not an open battlefield slog against a uniformed army. It's guerrilla warfare/counterinsurgency. The kind of thing that the French spent decades on in Algeria and Vietnam without success. Hell, the thing that the Soviets spent a decade on in Afghanistan itself. I'm not oblivious to the fact that this is in many ways much harder to decisively win than Iraq. But I reject this notion of "we've already been there eight years and look at how it's gone", because IMHO at least six of those years we really weren't there. After the drawdown in 2003, we're only now really digging in and getting our hands dirty.

And yes, the casualty numbers are going to spike as a result. And the first 8-12 months are going to be some of the worst, because we're finding out that after years of honing our tactics and equipment for fighting in Iraq's deserts and urban centers, we're now fighting in mountains and river valleys against a completely different kind of enemy.

I don't say this in a cavalier manner or as some kind of blind uber-patriot. I have a good number of friends in uniform and more than a few deployed. My brother is in Iraq right now on his 3rd tour, and after he gets rotated home in a couple months, I have little doubt he'll have to switch from learning Arabic to learning Pashtun. Iraq already cost him his marriage, some of his hearing and probably set him up for long-term PTSD from having his brain rattled around like a maraca from too many IEDs. But I think we have to give this at least two years of *real* effort before we start chalking it up as a loss. And I'm hopeful that with Petraeus in command, he can figure out a way to make it work. I have a lot of confidence in Petraeus.

And to get back onto the original topic, as I said--I'm ambivalent about the leaks, because while it does give an illuminating snapshot, it also makes the military's job harder by disclosing tactical information. In the same regard, there's a lot of things with the Mexican drug war that are totally f**ked up, but just dumping raw intel out there would be a huge impediment to the legitimate law enforcement activities going on.

[Nikov]

Well said, RedKing. My cousin got attacked at the combat outpost his engineering platoon was building and he had the job of calling in support from the Polish, who showed up in T-72's and Mi-24's.

I guess those Taliban... forgot about Poland.

[Aqizzar]

the Polish, who showed up in T-72's and Mi-24's.

Those Pollack bastards have Hinds?  Dammit, why doesn't America have any of those?  Admittedly, the Afghans know pretty much everything there is to know about shooting them down, but c'mon, some things never go out of style.

[Phmcw]

You're absolutely right. That's why the democracies of the world lost both World Wars. Oh wait....

Well, yes, it is. You can hardly say that the military performance of France, Belgium and England have been impressive. And the war would have been a completely different story without the Russian dictatorship, who did and took most of the casualties.

The type of government has little to do with it. It's the type of war. This is a lot harder, because it's not an open battlefield slog against a uniformed army. It's guerrilla warfare/counterinsurgency. The kind of thing that the French spent decades on in Algeria and Vietnam without success. Hell, the thing that the Soviets spent a decade on in Afghanistan itself. I'm not oblivious to the fact that this is in many ways much harder to decisively win than Iraq. But I reject this notion of "we've already been there eight years and look at how it's gone", because IMHO at least six of those years we really weren't there. After the drawdown in 2003, we're only now really digging in and getting our hands dirty.

Yes, we've lost most of their sympathy and are deemed untrustworthy. I'll agree to send troops there, after having heard a plan to make them do something useful (else than guarding pipeline).

[fenrif]

Little update to the wikileaks thing: boingboing have a short little thing up about a wikileaks/TOR volunteer being detained entering the US.

Spoiler:  The article (click to show/hide)

A volunteer for Wikileaks was detained by officials Thursday while entering the country at Newark International Airport.

Jacob Appelbaum, noted for his work with the Tor online security project, was searched and "interrogated" for three hours before being released, according to a source who asked to remain anonymous.

Wikileaks, a clearing house for information submitted by whistleblowers, released a trove of "War Logs" last Sunday relating to the conflict in Afghanistan. Appelbaum delivered a keynote speech at the recent HOPE conference in Wikileaks chief Julian Assange's place, and gave an interview to Boing Boing about the content of the logs.

According to the source, Appelbaum was stopped by customs officials and spoken to for at least three hours by a team that included a U.S. Army investigator. Army Pvt. Bradley Manning was named last week as a possible Wikileaks source in relation to the classified logs.

Appelbaum's interviewers demanded that he decrypt his laptop and other computer equipment, the source said. After his refusal to do so, they confiscated it, including three cellphones. The laptop was returned, apparently because it contained no storage drive that investigators could examine. He was also asked about his role in Wikileaks and informed that he was under surveillance.

The FBI also asked to speak to Appelbaum earlier today in Las Vegas after his talk at the annual DEFCON hacker conference. Mr. Appelbaum, the source said, had an attorney present who declined the request on his behalf.

Appelbaum, reached Saturday afternoon, said he was unable to comment.

Personally it's kind of a "well duh" situation. But I do find the whole thing with the laptop funny. I can imagine the interrogators being like "DECRYPT YOUR LAPTOP!" and Appelbaum trying to explain to them that he can't, because theres no HDD in it. Must've gone on for a while.