Current Affairs Afghanistan

Status
Not open for further replies.

Del-boy

Player Valuation: £40m
The twenty year war is coming to a close in September with the withdrawal of NATO troops from the country. Save for a few to be left as security for Embassies, should any be placed there.

The Taliban are already advancing across swathes of the country to the North and South and very much have Kabul in their sights.

The Afgan army seems unwilling or unable to stop them and are pretty much fleeing the battlefield leaving heavy equipment and tons of ammunition for the Taliban.

Senior American military and Intelligence officials believe the Taliban will fully control the country within the next six months if not sooner.

Tens of billions have been spent by the UK government on this war and hundreds of UK service personal have died and many more seriously injured. As for Afghans themselves the number of deaths is in the thousands.

The question is, has it been worth it? What have we achieved? What does the future hold in a Taliban led country for ourselves, are we safer, or will it lead to a breeding ground for future terrorist training camps.

In my own opinion, we should never have went there. Blair’s involved us is in this war to feed his own vanity as he wanted to show he was a world leader along with Bush.

The twenty year war may be ending, but the issue of Afghanistan will be with us for many more years.
 
War


what is it good for ?
I can remember when we invaded Iraq and there was loads of peace protests going on. I was walking through the centre of Newcastle on a Saturday afternoon and there was a group of young lads dressed in full camo gear with massive grins chanting ‘what do we want WAR! When do we want it NOW’
Some horrified looking shoppers
 
We screwed ourselves on Afghanistan by invading Iraq.

Think about it this way: if you intervene in a country, the goal is to get out having replaced the existing regime you don't like with one you like better. You Brits were really good at this. It's how you built an empire. Your SOP was to approach the most powerful group that was out of power, and offer them the opportunity to be in power in return for policy concessions. You got in, left some troops behind to make sure that the new regime didn't screw it up, and got out.

This is hard to do in Afghanistan due to the terrain. The most powerful group understands that they just need to go to ground in the mountains, and harass the foreigners until they get tired of the harassment and leave. The most powerful group then just reasserts itself, and life goes on like nothing happened.

You lot tried three times in Afghanistan at the peak of your powers and failed. The Soviets failed. We failed. If you want to win, you need enough elite soldiers to dig the resistance out of the mountains. We pulled ours out of Afghanistan to invade and pacify Iraq. That worked a lot better, because Iraq doesn't have the mountains.

By the time we sent our elite soldiers back to Afghanistan, the Taliban had recovered enough that there was no digging them out of the mountains.

So we failed. It's not that hard to understand if you have some command of history, but the political masters of armies tend to get there by trampling political opposition even in the special cases. As a result, they tend to think that military special cases are just as easily overcome. If they are smarter than that, they don't invade Afghanistan in the first place.
 
I know it's semantics, but didn't the actual war finish about 18 years ago? The rest of the time has been "peacekeeping" and training?
 
They ain't livin' properly
Break 'em off a little democracy
Turn their whole culture to a mockery
Give em coca-cola for their property

Not this time America.
 
The western interventions have been a misguided disaster.

A tragedy that the Afghanistan people will now have to live under a fascistic fundamentalism.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Welcome

Join the Everton conversation today.
Fewer ads, full access, completely free.

🛒 Visit Shop

Support Grand Old Team by checking out our latest Everton gear!
Back
Top