[elblanco]

I think what I'm most troubled by is two things,

1) The level of false amnesia regarding all things Taliban, Afghanistan and Al Qaeda. There are some very not nice people there that would kill rape and murder every single person on the planet until they could convert the survivors to their particular brand of Islam. This is not a fantasy, this is their stated intent and has been demonstrated throughout the world for at least the last 10 years through a policy of terror attacks against soft targets from subways to nightclubs that have killed thousands of civilians. Anybody who pretends otherwise is a moron. I'm sorry to go to name calling, but I simply cannot have a productive debate with anybody too stupid to understand this.

2) The same idiots who think that our collective response should be...? What exactly? Whatever it is it certainly shouldn't be a military response followed by nation building.

The number of people here, right here, on Hacker News of all places, who obviously have commanded military and intelligence operations against non-uniformed combatants blended in to the local populace (and by the comments we have quite a few 3 and 4 star super generals with decades of counter insurgent operations experience), who know exactly the capabilities and limitations of not only the modern armed forces of industrialized nations, but all of the intelligence capabilities of the target countries. This is not a board about startups, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies should come on here and discuss serious strategy, this place is a gold mine! Imagine, all these experts, on one board, and all they want to do is startup tech business and make iPhone apps! Amazing.

By the number of these self-same experts, my reading of their comments is that apparently the response to a global terror campaign is supposed to be a petition and letter campaign, sent to the Taliban HQ and 12345 Terror Lane, Springfield, Afghanistan, asking them to please kindly reconsider a policy of killing the infidel in foreign lands as part of a plan to establish a global Caliphate. Apparently this kind of thing is not only possible, but works! With the vast historic precedent put forth by all the experts here, it's amazing how misguided NATO is with their silly sniper teams and drones. Silly NATO!

Anybody who wants to talk about how Iraq was a stupid war and diverted resources from the real problems will find my agreement. Likewise if you want to talk about how the Afghan war was mismanaged, underfunded and stupidly run by incompetent bureaucrats for the better part of a decade.

But the response to the wikileaks leak should not be "OMG You mean when we conduct counter-terror operations with the combined might of NATO forces civilians might die! Holy crap, I didn't sign on for that! Let's pull the hell out and resume being terror targets because that was so much better!"

[jawn]

At what point do the unnecessary deaths caused by war outweigh the unnecessary deaths caused by terrorism?

[elblanco]

So your counter response is that we should all have just sat back and been killed like sheep to the slaughter? I mean that as a serious question, because there's lots of "let's pull out!" going on here but no alternative courses of action being put forth that don't involve me becoming a terror target.

[plinkplonk]

"but no alternative courses of action being put forth that don't involve me becoming a terror target."

The United States (along with other European countries including Russia and other non Islamic countries like India) is a terror target irrespective of what it does in Afghanistan. If you are an American, you are (in the abstract) a terror target already and have been for a long long time. The odds of you specifically dying in a terrorist attack are (and always were) very slim.

No amount of destruction in Afghanistan will change that. Americans will die in future terror attacks whether you pull out of Afghanistan or not.

And no you don't have to have a "solution" before you say "This is not working". By that logic civilians could never decide to end a war. That is hardly democracy. There was no "solution" to Vietnam when America quit. That happened because American civilians made a decision they didn't want to keep paying in blood and treasure to "win" a faraway quagmire of a war.

"Pull out" is just as valid a suggestion as "stay on". You'd still be fighting in Vietnam if "stay and fight till victory" were the only choice to end a foolish war. A suggestion has to be opposed with reason, not rhetoric like "But ... But .. that will make us terror targets" and "Our generals surely know what they are doing (if American history is any indication this is a very dubious claim)" or "You aren't a general How would you know?"

The 9/11 attackers were Saudi but you guys went to war with Iraq. The present day epicentre of Islamic terror is Pakistan/Saudi Arabia but you guys are fighting in Afghanistan, all the while funding the Pakistanis who fund the Taliban. Wtf? A war in which you fund the people trying to kill your soldiers, and your ally's intelligence services train and provide safe havens for your enemies is not winnable.

The next Islamic terrorist attack could come from Somalia or Yemen or the United Kingdom or the Balkans or Saudi Arabia, or Iran or Indonesia or Turkey or Egypt.

Are you going to war with all of them (and stay a few decades in every ungoverned badland on the planet)? If not why do you want to stay in Afghanistan? What is the plan for "victory"? And how is "victory" defined anyway?

I (personally) want America to win (I am in general very pro American and I take some flak for it locally) but "stay on till the Taliban is no threat" is an impossible goal for victory. You don't have enough money (trillions more), or the time it would take (many decades) or the fortitude to absorb the required casualties (tens ofthousands ), to have even a low chance of success.

[elblanco]

1) The United States (along with other European countries including Russia and other non Islamic countries like India) is a terror target irrespective of what it does in Afghanistan. If you are an American, you are (in the abstract) a terror target already and have been for a long long time. The odds of you specifically dying in a terrorist attack are (and always were) very slim.

Absolutely no disagreement from me. But we have to decide to either passively be the victim, or at least try and do something. Pulling out and sticking a target on our foreheads is the plan of naive and ignorant idiots with a deathwish.

2) No amount of destruction in Afghanistan will change that. Americans will die in future terror attacks whether you pull out of Afghanistan or not

Absolutely no disagreement again. But we have to decide to be active or passive participants in our own fate. After a long time of a rather passive policy towards Islamists, we've chosen to be active participants. Now that we're down that road we can take a number of different strategems:

a) we can take the ultra-right approach and kill every man, woman and child in Afghanistan through systematic carpet bombing and turn Afghanistan into a nuclear glass making factory, the "get 'er done" method. I think most reasonable people see this as the last bastion of morons on cowards.

b) we can carpet bomb Afghanistan with leaflets and letters asking them nicely to please stop thinking about killing us through a systematic campaign of nightclub bombings and airplane suicide pilots as part of an effort to bring forth a particular kind of global Caliphate. If you're old enough to remember events post 1980, you'll probably understand that this is hopelessly, childishly naive, suicidal and stupid (which mystifies me why this appears to be the majority course of action here on HN considering the average intelligence people here normally display).

c) we can try some other, middle, path that involves defusing the threat by improving conditions for the average "Mohammed" via a policy of specific nation building (as much as one can do in Afghanistan) and eliminating imminent threats from people that want to do us harm.

I think c is the right path, I think c is what we're trying to do. You'll get no argument from me that c is not always the path we've followed, particularly under the prior administration (and as the data shows). The problem I think is that we were trying to do c as run by people who thought a. I'm hoping that that situation is reversing itself under a hopefully non-moronic new leadership.

But you are simply, factually incorrect in thinking that the policy or actions is or ever was to pound Afghanistan back into the stone-age.

3) And no you don't have to have a "solution" before you say "This is not working".

Yes you do in this kind of case. In fact I'd say in most cases you can't do that in any capacity in life. "This is not working" can't be followed with "everybody stop whatever it is your doing!", is must be followed with "we should do this instead". Standing still is the same as going backwards because events outside your control will always overcome and move past you.

I hope that the new strategy is in fact a new strategy and not simply a doubling down on the past 9 years of incompetently run failure. We'll find out.

4) By that logic civilians could never decide to end a war. That is hardly democracy. There was no "solution" to Vietnam when America quit. That happened because American civilians made a decision they didn't want to keep paying in blood and treasure to "win" a faraway quagmire of a war.

When I grew up, my "uncle" was a South Vietnamese General ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguy%E1%BB%85n_Ng%E1%BB%8Dc_Loa... )who fled after the fall of Saigon and spent most of his remaining years trying to secure passage into the U.S. for his friends and family. I grew up steeped in tales of the end of that conflict. The Vietnam conflict solved itself, the U.S. (and the South Vietnamese) lost, full-stop.

More importantly, the two conflicts are not comparable in the way you are attempting to compare them. You may as well be comparing the Battle of Hastings to the Seige of Stalingrad. The Vietnamese Communists were not sending suicide bombers outside of Vietnam to your city to blow up a strategic civilian target as part of an effort to terrorize people into converting by the sword and establish a global Caliphate.

5) "Pull out" is just as valid a suggestion as "stay on". You'd still be fighting in Vietnam if "stay and fight till victory" were the only choice to end a foolish war. A suggestion has to be opposed with reason, not rhetoric like "But ... But .. that will make us terror targets" and "Our generals surely know what they are doing (if American history is any indication this is a very dubious claim)" or "You aren't a general How would you know?"

In what way would a passive response to the threat of global terrorism not be the same as sticking a target on our foreheads? If I came to your house, burned it down and started killing your family unless you converted to some particular brand of religion I happen to have chosen, you think the correct response is a shrug of the shoulders and/or do what I say? Is your brilliant stratagem to simply ignore me as I do this and hope I go away and get pushed around in the meanwhile?

I'm sorry but my and your respective worldviews are not even in the same room. I can never be convinced that the appropriate response to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda should be "meh".

6) "The 9/11 attackers were Saudi but you guys went to war with Iraq. The present day epicentre of Islamic terror is Pakistan/Saudi Arabia but you guys are fighting in Afghanistan, all the while funding the Pakistanis who fund the Taliban. Wtf? A war in which you fund the people trying to kill your soldiers, and your ally's intelligence services train and provide safe havens for your enemies is not winnable."

Agreed on all points. The U.S. response to the threat of terrorism was unfortunately crafted by ignorant, moronic, incompetent assholes who will probably never have to answer for the badness they spread across the planet. The good news is that I hope that if any good comes from the wikileaks leak is that it demonstrates conclusively how bungled and mismanaged the whole affair was quantitatively. My hope is that the new leadership is hopefully more competent to formulate a response that doesn't involve throwing a dart at a map of the world.

7) The next Islamic terrorist attack could come from Somalia or Yemen or the United Kingdom or the Balkans or Saudi Arabia, or Iran or Indonesia or Turkey or Egypt. Are you going to war with all of them (and stay a few decades in every ungoverned badland on the planet)?

None of these countries are the other. Yemen is not Somalia, Egypt is not the U.K., etc. Each place deserves it's own response. If it's the U.K. we'll probably sit down and have a chat about improving investigative responses. If it's Somalia we'll probably adopt a more "kinetic" approach. Afghanistan, in 2001, was not a place we could go and sit down and have a productive negotiation, "please stop harboring terror groups that conduct suicide operations outside your borders that kill thousands of civilians" was not a viable course of action.

8) If not why do you want to stay in Afghanistan? What is the plan for "victory"? And how is "victory" defined anyway?

I don't want to stay, it's a waste of time, lives and resources. There is no plan for victory. That is the definition of quagmire, one that we are all unfortunately in. Last I checked, the U.S. was not the only target of an Islamist terror campaign.

If I arbitrarily single you out and start beating you with my fists, do you try and make me stop? Or do you, randomly, stop being defensive and let me beat on your a little more? What's your definition of victory in a situation like that? My beating of you is arbitrary and random (in so much as you in particular are the target), there's no reasoning or convincing me that I shouldn't do that. If you want me to stop, you have to stop me. And even if you do, I might come back in a day or two and do it again. What's your strategy? You cannot talk me out of it, you cannot prevent it, you have to be where you have to be, and I have chosen you as the person to strike. You seem terribly sure that there's a way out of this type of situation that doesn't involve you fighting back.

9) I (personally) want America to win (I am in general very pro American and I take some flak for it locally) but "stay on till the Taliban is no threat" is an impossible goal for victory. You don't have enough money (trillions more), or the time it would take (many decades) or the fortitude to absorb the required casualties (tens ofthousands ), to have even a low chance of success.

Again, surprisingly, I don't disagree with you. Any sort of conclusion to this will not be a military one, but a soft one. Going back to the previous analogy, you have to figure out how to make me stop arbitrarily beating you, and once you do that, you have to implement that plan, and then see if it works, and all the while I'm beating you about the head and shoulders, so you have to defend yourself while you get your soft plan in place. We simply can't roll into Afghanistan, bomb a few caves, hold elections and wipe our hands. All that does is establish an environment that will devolve into exactly what we had before.

[plinkplonk]

I suspect we agree more than we disagree. The remaining differences are about whether there are only three options- "passive" == "do nothing but wait for the next attack" and "active" == full fledged war wasting trillions of dollars and lasting decades or "c" improving the life of th average Mohammed which in practice devolves to full fledged war and subsequent "nation building". Your analogies all suffer from being set up to have only binary alternatives and so are flawed - a ultra "passive" and sissy option and an "active" or chest thumping all out aggressive one..

In real life, I suspect there are a lot of options between those extremes (and a few beyond them). You could have just bombed/droned or even better captured the top leadership of AQ (at Tora Bora for example) and hung them from lamp posts wrapped in pigskin and never said a word or claiming credit. The message would have been delivered loud and clear, with you still free to hunt down the Saudi and Pakistani financiers. You could probably still grab the lot from Quetta and Riyadh with a few strategically placed billions in the right Pakistani and Saudi pockets or a private ( and believable) threat to cut off all aid to Pakistan and impositions of weapon and other embargos unless OBL and co are trussed up and delivered to you. The generals will all fall over themselves to obey.

I still disagree with you on civilians not being able to say "enough" to their governments without putting a complete military and strategic plan in place. No government would ever get criticized or elected out by this logic.

And as for comparisons of wars, there will always be differences in any two wars. But there are also similarities and lessons to be learned.

Sure the Vietnamese didn't have a Caliphate (but communism also had an impossible goal) , but the United States getting into a battle with high moral aims impossible to fulfill militarily ("Make you and me safe from communists" - Make you and me safe from Islamists") and no clear victory definitions or path, relying on technical superiority, staying and bumbling around long enough for initially friendly host population to turn hostile, rogue units killing innocents and the resulting back lash, leaks of "classified material", presidents campaigning to stop the war and then escalating once in office, loss of prestige worldwide,deep divisions in American society people foolish enough to trust the United States left twisting in the wind and generally getting sucked into a quagmire certainly sounds familiar.

And all this has nothing to do with why Assange should necessarily take the US side in a dirty war when the USA administration doesn't care to vet the material before publication. The witch hunt in the name of "saving innocent informants" is the height of hypocrisy.

That said this thread is overly long so I'll stop contributing. Politics and HN don't mix well. Cheers and have a nice day|!

[elblanco]

I think that we probably do agree more than we disagree.

Cheers.

[protomyth]

When making comments like this, I get the feeling you haven't studied what was happening around the world in the late 1920's and 30's. The USA's desire to isolate itself had consequences.