The death toll just keeps mounting and mounting with no end in sight. Just what exactly is the goal anyway? The Afghans don't want us there and any modifications in the behaviour of those we are fighting will simply disappear the moment we leave.

A senior military figure has said that we will need to be there for 40 years! At the present casualty rate that means Britain will suffer similar fatalities to the US in Vietnam. Britain should admit that it is not a world power any more and should not be squandering precious lives trying to act as a world cop.

More and more British people are quite frankly infuriated by the unwillingness of any major party to change policy and feel there is no way of stopping the war if both major parties support it.

Surely it is time for public figures outside of politics to speak up and at least acknowledge the public's frustration. Something has got to be done to stop this pointless, wasteful war.

The NZ govt has just renewed its combat committment for another 3 years. And for what exactly? This war seems to have no clearly defined goal, or no single purpose toward which the allies can work. The Brits are dying at more than one-a-day I think. How long before the people say enough!

Its a mess, coz they cant very well just up-and-go now.

Interesting CIA document here from the days when one Mr bin Laden was in receipt of US arms & funding via the Agency's ISI pals in Pakistan. Any of it sound horribly familiar?

At least it keeps them busy. I'm for another 50 years, it's not like there's much of the country left.

Leave them out there. If they were back here, they'd only be starting fights and glassing people in Colchester and Aldershot.

My feelings entirely. I feel a lot safer with them as far away as possible. There must be some rogue asteroid we and our coalition partners can free as it hurtles sunward, surely?

You're all heart! But it's true I guess.

The thing about this conflict I find hard to fathom is the fact people seem to be suprised soldiers actually die in a war! Amazing isn't it.

It's a tricky question. The argument would be we are making it possible for an elected Afghan government to take over in time. But that doesn't seem very likely.

No country has had any luck conquering Afganistan in history, I don't think we'll do any better.

Obviously the world community needs to prevent the Taliban taking power again - no-one wants to see women being stoned to death in football stadiums ever again.

Really don't know what the best thing to do is. :(

Might have been an idea if the "world community" had thought about this before it employed the mujahedeen as a pawn in the Cold War, thus effectively installing the Taliban movement in power and undoing all the very considerable advances in women's rights that had been made under the Soviet-backed PDPA government (which as the legitimate government of the country had quite legitimately asked for Soviet military aid against the "world community"-backed Islamic fundamentalists - far from the "invasion" that the news organs of the "world community" portrayed it as).

Bottom line, the "world community"'s commitment to human rights, freedom, democracy and all the other buzzwords that "we" are supposed to stand for extends just as far and no further than their usefulness in serving the "world community"'s geopolitical interests. Anybody who believes otherwise is either deluded or woefully under-informed about post-WW2 history.

Before our resident "the only true socialism is bombing the darkies into democracy" posse start up, of course I'd say the same about the Soviet Union's motivations, or those of any other aggressive military power. A common accusation these people like to level at those who despise US imperialism is of supporting loathsome anti-American regimes on the basis that "my enemy's enemy is my friend", but it's hard to think of a more glaring example of this than US support for the mujahedeen in the 1980s.

bloody hell, I agree!

This business of people thinking we're in it because of, for example, womens rights, has got to be total bollocks shurely?

:lol:

All is not well in the world. Perhaps we both need a holiday.

(I've seen it argued on here many times that, for example, "we" most recently invaded Iraq in order to save the poor Iraqi people from their nasty evil dictator. I do find it hard to comprehend how apparently intelligent people could fall for this kind of crap.)

I don't even think that eliminating the Taliban threat of a return to terror training camps is even at the top of the agenda. They could easily and more cheaply deal with this threat with satellites and precision bombing.

In my opinion, it's a lot more to do with having another place to have a pro US military presence adjacent to a volatile, yet energy rich region.

On my cycinal days I would say yeah, the only reason we are there is the oil and regional politics. On my less cynical days I would like to think there are people, world leaders, that viewed that football stadium footage and are determined that atrocities like that can not go on, and that is a good enough reason to stay and sort out the mess. Surely not every world leader is corrupt?

I'll agree the west fucked up big time in the first place, supporting the mujahedeen and so on, but a mistake in the past should not prevent them from doing the right thing now should it? I'm sure the Angelic Upstarts are a bit ashamed of 'Guns for the Afghan Rebels' as well. It's worth remembering that this is the sort of thing left wingers were having collections for at the time, so it was not just the evil US right wing that were fooled.

Belli Interuptus?
(agree)

Oh my cynical days are more cynical than your cynical days.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but there is another way of looking at events.

- America was having a problem with terrorists trained in Afghanistan

- In September 2001, they successfully struck a target in America itself

- America convinced its poodles that this was a 'world' problem

- America decided to bomb Afghanistan (although if Bush had asked me, I would have told him that it would end up like Vietnam).

- Since then there have been no terrorist attacks on America but loads in Europe

- America has achieved its main goal

What really stuck in my craw recently was that breathe of fresh air Obama coming to Britain and telling us that it was as much, if not more, Europe's problem as America's. Priceless.

Surely the enormity of the mistake makes them the last people on the planet to do the right thing now, especially when none of them has repudiated the policies that wrecked Afghanistan in the 80s and brought us here? It's a repeated catastrophic delusion of western liberals that their countries will some how act in the interests of others. Why should they? They never have, and never will, it's not what governments (and still less their armed forces) do.

And it wasn't a mistake: neither successive US Administrations nor trendy pseudo-lefties were "fooled", having a go at the Soviets was the only thing that counted, whether for geopolitical ends or to parade their liberal respectability. Let's not forget for that matter that in US terms it didn't start with what we tend to think of as the "evil right":

Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser
Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [From the Shadows], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
B: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

More precisely, America was having a problem with terrorists that it & its allies had trained in Afghanistan.

Very few, in fact. Europe wasn't an aQ priority, and the main attacks have come from home-grown cells in countries that backed the war. Even the excitable al-Zawahiri's restated bin Laden's "truce" toward countries not involved in wars against Muslims. But yes, all our part in these wars got us was 53 dead in our own capital.

Bbbbut...

15 of the 19 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia and most of them spent at least 2 years in America before the attrocities, learning to fly at American training schools and garnering knowledge that would ultimately help them succeed in their aims...doesn't sound a very 'terrorist' thing to do to me. In fact, it sounds distinctly like an internal attack. From enemies with non American ideals, but an internal attack nevertheless.

America was atacked, partly from within using a combination of American intelligence and training and Saudi Arabian funding.

But we couldn't possibly see the Saudis as our enemy, especially as American compainies, including those run by Bush, were trading with them for years and continue to trade with them now.

That's Saudi Arabia...friend of America and a country where women are regularly executed in football stadiums.

The war is a farce, it always was and we'll never be able to impose any sort of 'democracy' on Afghanistan. The world is a mkore dangerous place now than it was before the invasion.

We've already done the wrong thing...

Why not have an alliance? They have much in common. Rich countries with powerful religious zealots

Saudi Arabia is very 'interesting'. 'Friendly' with the west but many of its citizens are brought up in Wahhabism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabi).

I agree about Afghanistan but before the high horse snorts and rears its head, there are quite a few "lefties" on here who bent over backwards to deny that there was anything wrong with the elections in Iran and the outburst of anger was just a "middle-class revolt" and therefore not worthy of comment/support. I remember one poster saying "there is no evidence that the elections were rigged in Iran". :lol:

We're fucked from all sides is the conclusion, I suppose. :(

St. Harper promises Canada will be out by 2011. The thing is, all we we get here, (crap media included - I'm looking at you, Globe and Mail, CBC...) is verbiage from him and the generals about supporting the troups and on and on, plus the trivia of inconsequential military 'events', like a hockey season with no play-offs. But no indication of progress, no strategic plan for how they will achieve victory, rout the Taliban.

Most of all, there's no information on what motivates the guerrillas to hang out in cold wet mountains with bad food for months on end, ie why they're resisting the Kabul government so relentlessly. Do they get up every morning planning how to accomplish more sheer evil for the fun of it? I don't think so.

At present trends, it's another Vietnam in the offing.

[QUOTE]

ban football?

two birds killed with one stone

The idea that the US would not have ousted the Taliban after 9/11 is a non-starter, considering they were Bin Laden's sponsors at the time. Anything else would have been tanamount to surrender to the jihadists and anybody who thinks we would somehow be safer as a result just isn't paying attention to what they stand for. It's not as if they're exactly shy about it.

And given that the US had no option but to overthrow the Taliban, there was a clear moral and political imperative to attempt to bring democracy to Afghanistan in the aftermath. (I can imagine the reaction of the people who decry that attempt if the coalition had indeed pulled out once the Taliban had been vanquished. We would never have heard the end of it).

Obviously things haven't gone anywhere near as well as we might have hoped and the remnants of the Taliban have proved extremely resilient but given we are where we are, the idea that pulling out now would be in Afghanistan's/our/the world's interests is ridiculous. Thankfully Obama isn't that naive, even if it appears that plenty of his supporters are.

Pakistan is unstable enough as it is but the idea of a nuclear-armed state being over-run by a resurgent Taliban on its borders hardly bears thinking about.

Yes , if the Brits had given up after Dunkirk we would have saved a lot of lives and learned to live under the yolk.


Obviously though we must "stay the course": imagine if we had this traitorous talk of giving up after sustaining a bloody nose during WW2, hundreds of deaths is nothing in 7 years compared to the other great struggles where thousands were lost every day in some battles.

Listen up you cowards, war is not a video game-it does not end at the end of platform 10 or whatever. We are in the fight for our lives and way of life, literally, YES FUCKING LITERALLY. A big white feather for you pussies who advocate puling out now.

well I didn't see that coming.

It's 'Dunkerque' actually. ;)

WTF has Iran got to do with anything? Iran wouldn't be under an Islamic Republic with even election nominations subject to the approval of the clergy if the US and Britain hadn't destroyed its last experiment in parliamentary government 56 years ago. So when I hear of westerners bemoaning electoral irregularites there you'll have to excuse my scepticism.

And yes, "middle-class revolt" pretty much says it for me. Not much evidence now of the massive popular revulsion we were promised.

CarryOn

No, you listen up. It was the the very assholes who beat the drum loudest for the "War in Terror" who created the jihadist menace in the first place by backing international funding and recruitment for the likes of bin Laden and wrecking Afghanistan in pursuit of an earlier anti-Soviet crusade.

Comparing the present conflict to WW2 would be laughable if it wasn't in such bad taste. Nobody poses an existential threat to us. Western and Israeli deaths related to "terror" (including occupying soldiers killed by local resistance movements, hardly an act of "terror" in my book) have in the past decade totalled half of the losses in an average day of WW2 (and half of annual US road deaths or homicides).

The picture's a bit different from the Muslim point of view, of course: unknown hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq alone through sanctions and war since 1991; fewer in Afghanistan, but there no-one really is bothering to count. 1200 dead in 5 weeks in Lebanon in 2006 and at least as many in Gaza at the start of this year, while our leaders actively aided the onslaught or sat idly by. If anyone's entitled to see themselves as the target of a murderous war of aggression it's not us, it's them. And there was no 911 or even WMDs when Clinton's next Secretary of State said of 500,000 dead Iraqi children "We think the price is worth it".

Anyway, I'm not for pulling out of the Afghan mess. I want Nato in there. Forever.

I agree
Being there highlights the contradictions of this neo-colonial mess. These contradictions may cause people to wake up: moneys diverted from health care etc to war-obscene

But, the warmongers DO pose this fight and others as a fight for our lives and way of life so the logical conclusion is : total war IMO.

evidence schmevidence
for obvious reasons we may not see actual evidence cuz the regime is bent ..or there is no evidence

same for Iraq-we "knew" the arguments were bogus (without actual evidence but wasn't there a collective guffaw at Colin Powell's mock-up mobile chem warfare lab?) and as it turned out we were right

But it's not my war. Both parties were made in Washington. It's a domestic falling-out in a redudant Cold War marriage-of-convenience, and I'm happy for them to fight it out so long as they leave the rest of us alone.

The costs don't support anything approaching total war. We don't have a total war on civilian gun or car ownership, we just accept hundreds of thousands dead worldwide from those every year. Ironically the likely costs do support total war if you're unlucky enough to find yourself on the receiving end of "liberation".

And like I implied, the same logical conclusion surely goes something approaching 100 times over for the "other side" in any case, if we go by the body count. So where does that leave us? Dead, in a lot of cases. And facing a whole lot more jihadis motivated by revenge more than fanaticism.

There is no fight for our lives or way of life. The warmongers will pose the issues as it suits them, but we'd be dumb to let them get away with it. In fact much of it could be undone by intelligent statecraft on our part. But our leaders won't do it, they'd rather we just fear & hate, we stay dumb that way.

My point being that a common accusation levelled at those who loathe regimes like Iran is that they are somehow supporting American Imperialism.

As for you point about Iran, well that certainly explains what's going on. It doesn't excuse it though. Or does it?

And for someone who has the opportunity to access the Internet it's a bit rich to be so sneering about the "middle-class".

Well mass protest is pretty uncommon under dictatorships. They tend to clamp down on it hard for some obscure reason.

I mean, it was pretty much unheard of in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Are we to deduce from this that their regimes were in fact actually popular?

I'm not concerned with common arguments. I was against the regime when it lurched to the right in 1981 and when it clamped down on the left in 1983: I was against the US & Israel jointly arming Iran in 1986. But at the present I'm unconvinced by the (apparently crumbling) opposition, I don't see Iran as a threat and I don't see regime change as a necessary or popular option, or a legitimate one for outsiders to urge given the prospective costs to and the present acquiescence of the country at large.

Well what is going on? A seriously flawed experiment in institutionalising religious imperatives that many of us find undesirable as a basis of the state? That certainly isn't the direction Iran was moving in from 1905 to 1953. Who spearheaded the elimination of secular nationalist constiturtionalism as a poilitical force, leaving the clergy as the only viable opposition to the Shah's restored regime? Better ask the CIA and BP. If we fuck up a country's organic historical development, why should we have the right to criticise how things turn out? I think it's time incompetent powers like the US and Britain stopped playing God: they aren't good at it.

Who's sneering? I just don't consider the urban middle class representative of modern Iranian national political opinion. They were in 1905, or 1920, or 1951. But they're not now.

A fair point, though there was plenty of mass protest in eastern Europe in 1953, 1956, 1968, 1970 and 1980-81. But my point is merely that we're equally not entitled to deduce from limited sectional opposition that regimes don't govern with the consent of the majority. I'm as unhappy with Islamic government as anybody, but I don't consider outsiders entitled to jump on each outbreak of opposition as a case for demanding regime change.

warsaw 44, east germany 53, hungary 56, czechoslovakia 68, warsaw 80, gdansk...

So Mr Brown is saying today that this is a fight to save the whole world-THE WHOLE WORLD (emphasis added) :lol: :lol: :lol:

yes stay the course fella

but you know , if youve read OBL's statements you'd know that drawing the west in to these places is exactly what the terrorists want-beautiful really, making them squeeze their own pips..how can the west NOT take up the challenge?

Now lest my position be construed in the usual 'your with us or against us' vein ie if we don't fight the terrorists will win and we'll end up under a caliphate state...
the 3rd way is that people recognise the bullshit of the war on terror as manipulated by the ruling class and just topple the whole system

the other , less preferable,way which might be appealing to people in the UK-the BNP. From their site:

British foreign policy must be driven by one guiding principle alone – to serve British interests above all else. This iron principle will be strictly enforced by a British National Party government.

In reality, this means that Britain’s foreign relations should be determined by the protection of our own national interests – and not by our like or dislike of other nations’ internal politics.

Britain has no right to dictate the internal politics or social configuration of any other nation. We would also expect all other nations to grant this same right to Britain.

We would have no quarrel with any nation that does not threaten British interests. In this regard, a BNP government will:

- Reach an accord with the Muslim world whereby they will agree to take back their excess population which is currently colonising this country, in exchange for an ironclad guarantee that Britain will never again interfere in the political affairs of the Middle East or try to dictate to any Arab or Muslim country as to what their internal government form should be;

Interesting, because I have read American neo-conservatives (back in the day when Bush was in and they had power) state that their strategy (which the UK is going along with) was to open fronts in far off countries (Afghanistan, Iraq) to keep the fighting away from the US and Europe. They believed that if they didn't do this then another 911 was inevitable as Al Qaida would instead concentrate on attacking the US and its allies directly.

The most frequent argument heard against this strategy is that it is making the problem worse as it is creating more anti-US sentiment and radicalising young Muslim men into joining the fighting.

Is money no object for these people? I mean, we can see the cost (actual moneys spent on the wars and moneys divertted from essential services etc) but are there benefits that are beyond our comprehension-or is 'no more 9/11' it?

Bless their little cotton socks!

If that was from anyone else but the BNP, we would call it 'romantic idealism'. :wacko: