I'm going to refer to America as my country for simplicities sake in the below post. My best friend is in the military, albeit the Canadian one. With all due respect to him and all servicemen who sacrifice for our freedoms and carefree lifestyle, I just don't agree with wanton, unaccountable death. Everyone here is acting as if a life being taken, or lost, is just a number; it may be my upbringing but that random Afghani that dies is someone's son, father, brother, best friend, community member, etc and he shouldn't be marginalized. What gives you (or us) the right to say that his life is worth less than a US/Canadian serviceman's? I absolutely hate it when a solider dies* but the unemotional, cold, bullshit statistic that the news offers for Afghan/Iraqi deaths is even more infuriating. "37 dead today in a roadside bomb, 2 unfortunate, God fearing, funny, good looking, American soldiers passed and 35 goatfucking mudhut faggot afghans who probably hate America and baseball anyway" Unacceptable. You war-hawks should get your heads out of your asses. What if the US was invaded by China next year? What happens to 'collateral damage' then? Would you respond to wikileaks the same way? Soldiers die as a work hazard, civilians by definition do not; that is what distinguishes them. A soldier is a son, brother, father, friend and community member but his job, by strict definition, places him at risk to die - he knows what he signed up for and he knows what he is risking his life for. A random Afghan farmer doesn't sign up to be blown to bits by a carpetbomb. Fuck your jingoism if you think that. You could counter-argue that the random Afghan farmer could be an insurgent or support them but my response would be simply, so what? The strongest military of all time can't stop a bunch of Afghani's with AKs and road-side bombs? Really? The example of the 27 hour firefight may light a passion in your belly but look at the flipside. Those soldiers should not have been in a position of weakness against a bunch of Taliban goatfuckers, that's tactically absurd given the might available to the US military. The Taliban just took advantage of their enemy's lack of pace. Besides, you're all arguing that all is fair in war then you complain that the Taliban don't abide by the rules. Which is it, are there rules or aren't there? Should there be rules? If not, would you be okay with the badguys coming to Main Town, Indiana and committing mass genocide? To my understanding, it's the bureaucracy that's choking any significant progress and that is more Capitol Hill's fault less the military. The Taliban should've been stopped a long time ago, the US is just reaping what they sowed in the 80s with their ridiculous policies. Now that there is not one, but two clusterfucks in the Middle East concurrently with a terrible economic crisis, record unemployment, shitty social services (education, public health) and Jersey Shore season 2. *On the widely popular sports show Hockey Night in Canada, one of the hosts, Don Cherry, is a passionate and almost senile Canadian. He posts tributes to every fallen soldiers every week and sometimes breaks down into tears when the departed is especially young. Some douchebag liberal Canadians are against "glorifying war" and that segment. I disagree, it's a simple and modest tribute to the ultimate sacrifice for the greater good. These servicemen have to abide by the rules, otherwise they're not fighting for the greater good. These leaks bring forth information that can prove or disprove the accountability of the military. Winning for the sake of winning, especially in a war on foreign land, is ridiculous.
What. The. Fuck? Nobody here is looking for or condoning wanton, unaccountable death. But when the idiots in a democracy vote morons into positions of power, and those Powers That Be decide foreign policy, declare war, and send troops into harms way, that's out of the control of the vast majority of people that are serving. If you have an issue with the foreign policy, or the military involvement on foreign soil, then take it up with the politicians that you voted into power and made it so. Don't, for one second, think that talking shit to the soldiers that are in the position of actually fighting that war, is anything other than being a total and complete douche. When someone, a soldier, is put into harm's way, where it's either you or them, it's ALWAYS going to be them. No ifs, ands or buts. There is no other justification required. Do all you can so that you and yours get home safe and sound at the end of your tour. Period, end of subject. It's war, and all bets are off. To say otherwise is just fucking stupid. And it's not like warfare in that environment is like the Old English battalions that line up across from each other... it's a fucking harsh guerrilla warfare environment, where nothing is as it seems. It must make you feel all warm and fuzzy sitting at home, watching Jersey Shore, being a sanctimonious moron, and talking about shit you know absolutely nothing about. Go drop another tab of E and fuck off already.
I didn't know I had the capacity to hate until I worked with the corrupt Iraqis or the boyfuckers in Kandahar. Your quote isn't as inaccurate as you'd like to believe, although I doubt your dissonance will allow you to believe otherwise. No man who has been in Afghanistan or Iraq speaks as flippantly about the gross differences in our cultures as you do. There are rules, and we are the only ones following them. And somehow, that makes us the bad guys. Your ignorance in military matters is obvious, but I understand that your dissonance clouds your understanding here too. Military "might" only matters when one is able to use it. How many countries are technically in the Middle East? 20? Whatever that number is, there are that many "clusterfucks." Every country is either a sham democracy or a dictatorship... Iraq is probably the closest right now to a real democracy. And that isn't very close. I agree with you though: mistakes were made, surely, but name one of these "ridiculous policies" that look so obviously stupid now, here in 20/20 hindsight. Without Google, please. I have no idea what "winning" is in Afghanistan because nobody has yet come up with victory criteria. Have you? What is the "sake of winning" in Afghanistan? As for the "greater good", you can't say that all cultures and their citizens are equal in one sentence and then later say that we're fighting for the "greater good" because we're playing by the rules. Lastly, the military in Afghanistan is more accountable than any military in the history of ever fucking ever. The sense of entitlement you feel to be privy to the horrors of war, my friend, has cost many American and Canadian soldiers their lives. Do I blame you? Of course not... but I give your cause and opinion no credence whatsoever. You're an armchair football quarterback, but instead of looking at the gridiron you're staring down the pitch. And finally: The Russians killed 1MM Afghans before being defeated. So what does that tell you? That attrition alone won't do shit in Afghanistan. The second sentence here is so submerged in bullshit I'm not even sure where to start digging. You simply have no clue about modern combat whatsoever beyond what you've seen in the news and on video games. Period.
I've wondered about this. What did we learn from the Soviet occupation, and how did it effect our approach to fighting this war? Did we think our invasion would be any less troublesome? Is the current state of things a matter of overconfidence on our part?
I'm not sure how much I can say without overstepping my bounds, but here's the short version: The US wanted to invade Afghanistan after 9/11 and sent in Special Operations Forces to do so. These SOF guys proceeded to take over the whole country without help, much to the chagrin of all the Generals in the White House who assumed that all SOF would be able to do was create blocking positions for regular forces to begin their assault (airfields and the like). SOF accomplished this takeover by promising many Afghan tribal leaders that they would never see another American again if they cooperated. These Generals (along with much of the rest of the military brass) were pissed. This was their war! They had been peacetime officers for 10 years, and now was their chance! If they didn't act quickly, they believed, the Afghanistan campaign would be over as quickly as it had begun... just like Desert Storm. So these Generals ordered SOF to pull back from their positions. Soon, regular military units were retaking territory; territory that belonged to the Afghan leaders that had, just a year earlier, helped the Americans sack Kabul. In an instant, where one enemy had been defeated a new, much more determined one sprung up in its place. It is this second enemy that we have been fighting since 2003.
Case in point. <a class="postlink" href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/health/Semrau+verdict+exposes+tragically+flawed/3339355/story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.ottawacitizen.com/health/Sem ... story.html</a> And, if you don't know, he ended it with a bullet, and was tried as a result. If you haven't already, you might want to read the article I linked above. While not really on the topic of the WikiLeaks story, it does show just one of many real-world examples of where good men are put into difficult, damned if you do, damned if you don't situations, and suffer very real life-altering outcomes as a result. I attended a Canadian military college years ago (longer than most of you have been alive, probably), and the warfare that we were taught, and learned about, was so different than it is today. Casualties were listed in the tens and hundreds of thousands... not in single or double digits on the national news. War was displayed and portrayed as ugly, and brutal, and there was no hiding that fact. Whether it was the trench warfare of WW1 and WW2, the jungle fighting of Vietnam, Korea... it was all a matter of throwing bodies out there to occupy land, and brute force. Go look at the historical photos of the time. Not saying modern combat is a walk in the park, but given the choice between serving in the past or the present, it's a no-brainer. The advancement of combat technology has provided the military with the ability to be almost surgical in their attacks, for the most part, and provided the world with real-time reports on what is happening. It's not just a Time Life photographer that is posting some pics a month after the fact any more... it's embedded reporters with real-time satellite uplinks and video. In some respects, I think this has made warfare appear to be more clinical than in the past. More importantly, it makes it seem like warfare is more controllable. Whether it's advanced aircraft, or predator drones, or multi-million dollar pieces of armor... the harsh person-on-person aspect of battle, or the sheer chaos surrounding it, has somehow been lost to the majority of people who watch it on TV, or the internet. Or think that they know what it's about because they've played some cool video games. But don't kid yourself, unless you're just out to eradicate the area by nuking them from orbit, war is still an ugly, person-on-person, in-your-face affair. And urban warfare is a fucking tricky thing, and requires more of the soldier's real-time analysis of situations than ever before. And sometimes, bad shit just happens, and that's just the way it is, and you have to accept that. Sometimes, there just isn't anyone to blame, or hold accountable. Look at Semrau. Somebody, somewhere, should have said, "it sucked, but it stops here... drop it". But they didn't. And that is the real tragedy. Something that would be afforded a wounded animal on a farm was deemed to be improper to provide an enemy combatant. In a weird way, I think the attempt to make fighting more "humane", has made it worse. There is something to be said for being brutal, and doing what's got to be done to get the job done quickly, and absolutely. Don't get me started on the number of operations that were fucked up because the civilians and politicians involved stepped in and stopped the process too soon so it could be "toned down" for PR's sake. And the biggest change in all that time has got to be the raw amounts and types of information. The ease of collecting it, and storing it, and stealing it, and transferring it, has been both a curse and a blessing. 30 years ago, it would have been almost impossible for 75,000 documents to be leaked. But 30 years ago, we never would have had that mass of information for something of that scope. Today, every lackey with a laptop is writing reports and power points about everything, and a vast amount of that information is wrong, or misinterpreted. And everyone is trying to validate their existence or gain political favour or just suck up to their boss by throwing their own interpretation and spin on that information. I can only imagine the nightmare that must be trying to determine the importance and validity of intel today. So yeah, I'm in no position to really know, but I'd tend to think it'd be a safe bet to think that a lot of that information that was leaked was somewhat useless. Or, potentially worse, erroneous. Regardless, it's still absolutely wrong to have leaked it. You have NO idea what kind of intel can be gleaned from those documents. It really is amazing how a whole bunch of seemingly useless scraps of information can build up to provide something that can give the enemy a serious advantage. I've only had introductory education about such things, but it was truly amazing and eye-opening. Hell, sometimes wrong info is just as useful as correct info. And it doesn't matter if it was old data or current data... it's all useful. If you can study the history of individuals, or units, of how they react, or think, you gain an advantage. As far as I'm concerned, if there is even one situation in which that leaked information could cause any risk to someone in our military, or supporting our military, then that is unacceptable, and those that leaked it should be held accountable as if they wounded or killed them personally. The "we need more oversight" line is complete bullshit. Go after the oversight in the political arena, as that's where the really criminal shit is going on. In the end, instead of oversight and increased monitoring and judgment of the military, I just wish that they'd be supplied with the equipment, training, logistics, and intelligence they need to get the job done as quickly as possible. And fewer constraints on how to get the job done. If that means collateral damage, so be it. That's just the way war is, and to expect anything else is just wrong.
I'll be the first to admit I'm an armchair quarterback in this area, but I take this as being what happens when you send a bureaucrat to run a war instead of warrior. Is that a fair analogy? I understand that may skirt the line of insubordination. It's only barely comparable, but in a street fight I'm not going to worry about rules, or what bystanders may think of me. I'm going to destroy my opponent quickly and efficiently before I get hurt, or others around me. I may look like the bad guy, but I'd rather walk away with that than bleed out with a good reputation.
I'm not sure how nitpicking this might be seen, but BrianH's post seemed to be more against "warriors", as in, people who want to fight and get glory/promotions from it, without regards as to the reasons for fighting. What I got out of the post was this: SOF goes in, makes nice with the locals, the locals and SOF go and ruin the enemy's shit, bam, done, the fight can end now (kinda). Generals want to look badass and show off their military might and warrior status, fuck things up and go back to show how great of a warrior they are. Where you got "bureaucrat" out of that, I just can't see. Are you referring to people who are not in the field as "bureaucrats" here?
No, not my point at all. I didn't mean warriors in the sense you used, but more in the traditional sense. Think Sun Tzu. Think the archetypical veteran NCO that's there to get his job done and get home. SOF fits the mould here: defuse the situation as best you can, use your environment, gain allies on the ground, avoid unnecessary bloodshed. By bureaucrats I meant the "show off" and "status" types. The ones who turn the whole thing into a political point-scoring fuckfest.
This leads me to question the wisdom of granting battlefield access to the media to the extent that we do. The fact that we're receiving reports within minutes or hours of an operation's undertaking goes beyond the dissemination of potentially sensitive information; it seems to have had a profound effect on the public's interpretation of the military's actions in the region. Were we receiving information about the war every month or so, we'd at least have some sort of 'bigger picture' context for what we see and hear. As it stands, we do not. We hear '56 Afghans killed in U.S. bombing raid', and run with it. Even if reports emerge the following week that those Afghans were toting RPGs, the damage is done because news agencies aren't terribly concerned with self-correction and the average citizen's attention span won't accommodate it anyway. They are already on to the next thing, their opinions having been formed by incomplete information, evidenced quite clearly by some of the more idiotic opinions expressed in this thread. There is no opportunity to step back, assess all of this information critically, and then decide, because we're constantly smacked in the face with some new, urgent update that only compounds the general confusion. What concerns me more than WikiLeaks' decision to publish the documents was the apparent complicity of the New York Times in the debacle. The Times had no problem keeping that David Rhode mess under wraps until he was safely out of Taliban hands, but they didn't see the point in suppressing this information? We're talking about a massive collaboration between every major news organization on the planet to keep a story quiet in order to protect lives, but classified documents somehow don't qualify? That kind of malleability is disturbing. I'm as ardent a proponent of the First Amendment as you'll ever meet, but even I have to wonder whether such an overwhelming media presence has done us more harm than good during these wars.
I think it's all part of a larger problem, which is that the news (by and large) is no longer the news. It's now a ratings grab, with 10-20 second snippets that are designed more to be overly sensationalized than to actually report anything of value. When the "reporting" has this kind of objective, I think you can't help but have issues with what's reported. While there may be a few reports and reporters trying to to a legitimate job of informing their audience, I get mostly a "look at me" feel from the vast majority of reporters and their segments that I've seen in the past. Then you get the morons like Geraldo who was kicked out for relaying overly sensitive information.
Well that was the point, to be hyperbolic. I'll post my response to BrianH later today, I'm genuinely interested in having a legit discussion. My first post wasn't there to troll; I was raised and educated in a very pacifist kind of way soI cannot understand the "it's war, anything goes" mindset at all. In short, my argument is that it's a foreign soil war (ie. the US isn't being invaded a la Red Dawn, and we don't need to go all "Wolverines!!" on anybody's ass) so the rules of warfare must be followed, even at the expense of the lives of servicemen, because of the principle of the greater good. If these thousands of leaked documents, and endless press coverage annoy the military then they are doing their job - holding them accountable for their actions. It wouldn't be annoying if everything was in check to begin with. Sure it's asking a lot to make sure that every single firefight is by the book, especially in the clusterfuck that is Afghan territory, but it's not like the US soldiers are conscripts in the Soviet Army who would have to pick up guns from other fallen soldiers and do anything to survive. With the money, power and technology available to the US Military all over the world, they have to follow the rules that they themselves helped write. The Nazi military was despised because of their treatment of soviet POWs and breaking of basic human rights (outside the Holocaust, those were civilians) but anything should go in Afghanistan because it's our boys against what may or may not be the Taliban? More civilians have died in Afghanistan than all the coalition soldiers combined, yet none of you seem to mention that.
I ask you this in all seriousness; are you kidding? Is this how you really think? Forget even reading the news on-line or in print; did you even educate yourself about this war? Not to be a dick, but I can recommend ten different books that will give you a true knowledge of what is happening over there. That, or just enjoy the bliss that comes from ignorance.
So, you seem to agree that we are better than the heathens. I don't believe that "anything should go" in Afghanistan; I don't think we should even be there. However, if you are going to stay and fight, you shouldn't give your soldiers insane rules in the name of a foolish war doctrine that leads to their deaths. Also, the vast majority of the civilians (that is to say, non-combatants) in Afghanistan were killed by other Afghans. The VAST majority. You don't seem to mention that.
And I am so glad my Brother served 3 tours, now has PTSD and short term memory loss for you to be able to babble on like you know shit. You don't. Yes, the few times he's opened up and told a story it was not pleasant, but it's real. It's what he was trained to do. You seem to think the shit we're spoon fed via the various media outlets is all truth and real. Seriously? You think you know more about the truths than a guy that is still over there? And for the record, you can't classify civilian deaths in Afghanistan unless you're talking about friendly civilian deaths, which is tacitly untrue.
For the very few that think war is all about killing and the men and women do not came home with emotional pain; I give you this link. I feel like a Priest, but damn... My last post in this thread...promise. <a class="postlink" href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100803/ap_on_re_us/us_ptsd_military_dogs" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100803/ap_ ... itary_dogs</a>
I'm not Supertramp's #1 fan but if you're going to reply to his posts use actual argumentation as opposed to emotional knee-jerk responses. Yeah, I have a cousin who got injured during a tour in Afghanistan too, and while it sucks it doesn't serve as an argument either way. At least take the time to EXPLAIN why you feel his post is wrong as opposed to just asserting it. This is what BrianH does and why his posts are so much more informative and useful than ones like yours. Point: don't ruin this awesome thread by getting your panties in a bundle.