Afghanistan is an unwinnable war: it's just a question of how much it's going to cost before any of the Western governments will admit they stand no more chance of victory than any other invading army any time in the last seven centuries or so.
But maybe the UK government will go over to the idea of Fair Trade opium before the war's over. Except that then the US would probably invade us.
For a more optimistic take, there's Peter Bergen's thing in the Washington Monthly. Among the upsides: Afghans like us a whole lot more than they like the Taliban, there's more political stability, and the generals seem to be reasonable folks who realize that random air strikes kill lots of civilians and make them not like you.
and the generals seem to be reasonable folks who realize that random air strikes kill lots of civilians and make them not like you.
I think Peter Bergen and I are just not watching the same war.
It's nice to know that in his war - in Second Life, or wherever - things are going so well, but on mainstream Earth....
Ah, I only read the first link before posting that. The 2nd has the response to Bergen. And it doesn't strike me as a very good response. I see a lot of this going on:
Whoever subtitled Peter's article: "Afghanistan isn't Vietnam!"
Eric: "That's not saying much... Iraq wasn't Vietnam either."
Peter's actual article: "Afghanistan isn't so bad... (in fact it's better than Iraq in these ways...)"
Well, Jes, this is all riding on McChrystal stuff, and McChrystal's the new guy.
So, Neil, the new optimism is now based on the first three weeks of a campaign in which US airstrikes have already killed civilians - and the Pentagon is, as is their standard practice, lying about it - and which is based on the idea that, unlike any other conquering army, the US will somehow be able to do more than just wander around Afghanistan killing "insurgents" and moving on while the Taliban shifts elsewhere?
Yes, I know the new plan is that each area will be completely pacificed and insurgents will not then return to it. What a smart idea, I wonder why no previous attempt to conquer Afghanistan thought of it?
This is the Friday report of meet the new boss, same as the old boss...
Yes, because changes in military strategy work their way through the system in three weeks. There may be some reason to think that this thing is hopeless, but so far I'm not seeing it.
There may be some reason to think that this thing is hopeless
The main reason is still what it always was: there's no reason to suppose that the US, especially with its history of kidnapping, torture, and mass civilian slaughter, will do any better in Afghanistan than any other attempted conqueror ever has. Especially if part of the plan is that Afghan farmers are to be forcibly prevented from growing their traditional cash crop of opium poppies: this is something only the Taliban (temporarily) succeeded in. (As I said: if the goal was Fair Trade opium, while the conquest of Afghanistan would still involve taking on the drug kings, it might then get the actual poppy farmers on the side of the Western conquerors...)
Yes, because changes in military strategy work their way through the system in three weeks.
If the plan was to stop killing civilians by airstrikes, yeah...
Well, here's one thing that bodes well for us relative to past conquerers: we have way more public support than our enemies. The USA had an 80% favorability rating, the Taliban is at 7%. 58% of Afghans think the Taliban are the biggest threat to their country. 8% think we are.
Now, I think that's all from 2005. But if those numbers, or anything close, still hold, we've got a shot at running a pretty good anti-Taliban operation before we get out.
Peter Bergen opted to mention the 2005 poll rather than link to the 2009 poll, I presume because he wanted to make the most optimistic case possible, and the 2009 poll (BBC/ABC/ARD) provides small room for optimism. The Taliban are still seen as a bigger threat than the Western military, but the optimistic response of 2005 has been falling steadily ever since. From the full polling data available here, the key reasons why Afghans think their country is moving in the wrong direction are security/warlords/violence (overwhelmingly first place), and in more or less equal second, corruption and economy/poverty/jobs. Only 8% of the negative responses blamed the Taliban.
I don't see any cause for optimism: I don't see that the US or the UK is doing anything that will enable this particular attempt to conquer Afghanistan any more successful than any other attempt in past centuries. And if all Bergen has is polling data from four years ago that's been overtaken by events, I don't see that he has, either.
Supposedly 63% support presence of US troops (from that link.)
Not really going anywhere with that, but interesting.
Yes, but that number is a declining one. It's gone down even since 2007.
Jes is right. The US should get out of the way so that the Taliban can resume its regime of peace, love, and crushing homosexuals under rocks.
I should have put "and the UK" in there somewhere.
I doubt the Taliban can crush the UK under rocks, Walt. They have access to plenty of rocks, certainly, but lack the delivery system.
I have no idea how reliable these polls are, or how much weight to put on them, but the 2009 poll really makes Neil's point in 2. While the numbers have steadily declined, 27% say that it's "Very Good" that the US toppled the Taliban, and 42% say that it's "Mostly Good". Think how badly a government has to do for public opinion prefers foreign invaders.
Look up in the sky, apo. See the Moon? One big rock. Once Mullah Omar perfects his Attract-o-Ray from the caves of Waziristan...
I wonder whether the COIN strategy would have worked in 2001, early 2002. It's what I was sort of hoping the military would do in Afghanistan back then, which is why I was so outraged that instead we airdropped money and special ops and bombs. I really don't know whether it would have worked then, but I'm even more skeptical that we can turn back the clock and have it work now.
The spread of the war into Pakistan, on the other hand, I'm really fucking worried about and don't understand at all.
Jes is right to take the big historical view here. This is actually the Brit's fourth attempt to occupy Afghanistan. It never works.
There have to be ways to support Afghan women resisting the Taliban, but this ain't it.
There may be some reason to think that this thing is hopeless...
It had better not be so, because somewhere down the line is an alliance with the Russians and the Chinese in a campaign of extermination. Anyone remember what religion(s?) the Carthaginians practiced?
Baal Hammon, Tanit and Eshmun!
The Carthaginians were Phoenicians -- hence Punic Wars -- and a Semitic trading people in origin, from what's now Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine etc.
it doesn't strike me as a very good response
Strikes me as the proper response.
"This war is unlike our previous unwinnable wars."
"Yes, it's unwinnable for different reasons. Point conceded."
The important debate isn't why analogies are never perfect, though. It's whether Afghanistan is worth spending a trillion plus dollars and X amount of dead bodies on top of what we've already sunk over the past eight years, even if success is somehow possible. Thinking it is seems completely barking mad to me, but I guess mileage varies.
There have to be ways to support Afghan women resisting the Taliban, but this ain't it.
Arguably Afghans (including Afghan women, possibly) disagree with you.
(I have no idea how much to trust opinion polling in Afghanistan & I am unsure of the gender break up and how reliable that would be.)
22: Biohazard, what are you talking about? Have you been sneaking your wife's pain meds?
(More important than individual gods -- though Hail Ba'al Zebub, Lord of the Flies! -- we got the alphabet from the Phoenicians)
Arguably Afghans (including Afghan women, possibly) disagree with you.
They may not be experts in this history of occupations and counterinsurgency either.
I'm thinking that in addition to Daniel Davies' three rules for recognizing causes not to support, there should be a fourth formulated as a principle: An attempted change of course that doesn't include blaming the guilty and punishing them won't change enough to matter.
I don't see a way to stabilize Afghanistan that doesn't involve at minimum some sort of accommodation to the fact that opium production is a vital element of the Afghan economy. Opium is an extremely attractive cash crop, and I haven't seen credible alternative crops proposed. It's not clear to me how exactly one might come to an accommodation with large scale opium production given the other constraints on the problem (the War on Drugs being the most important), but I do know that making a habit of destroying people's livelihoods is a poor way to make friends.
Maybe the UK and the US should just start dealing opium to the Chinese again. We could give the Afghans a good cash crop and direct drugs away from the domestic population. It would be winning two wars at once! Plus! We would be decimating our economic rivals!
(Actually, I bet the ruling class in the US would do that if they thought they could get away with it.)
26: I'm thinking the unthinkable: A radical fundamentalist collection of 'stans with nukes. Can't live with them, could without them. Too bad, so sad.
I would like to distinguish between the apo argument, which makes sense to me, and the rob argument, which doesn't make sense to me. Maybe success in Afghanistan is impossible for specific reason a), b) and c). But there's no way we can conclude from airy generalities that it can't possibly succeed. The Soviets would probably still be occupying Afghanistan if the US hadn't sold Stingers to religious extremists. The Taliban emerged victorious from the post-Soviet civil war because of backing of Pakistan. Given sufficiently modest goals, there is no Iron Law of History at work here. if the Obama administration's approach is doomed, it's doomed for specific reasons.
33: You're right: my argument is less specific and less thought through, and therefore holds less weight than Apo's. Mostly, right now I'm trying go grade student discussion forums, which are remarkably less interesting than this discussion forum.
Still. I'm right, and biohazard is high.
@ 31 - Agree that destruction of a farmer's livelihood is no way gain support, but is replacement of a heroin-based economy one of the U.S. goals in Afghanistan?
Check out the Globe's Big Picture series of photos of Afghanistan; see pix 8 and 35, soldiers outstanding in their fields of poppies.
Biohazard is high on truth, rob. You should try it some time.
According to the link in 35, you can buy a hit of heroin in Kabul for a dollar. A dollar!
No one around here deals that. Most people want you to get high on delusions, including several varieties of pharmaceutical grade Jesus.
And you can play "goat grabbing" on horseback! It's like capture the flag, except with a headless carcass. After this war is over and the Taliban falls, it would be pretty tempting to visit Afghanistan. Isn't that also where there are those crystal-clear pools of water in the mountains that are supposed to have magical healing properties? The photo of those was one of the most stunning things I've ever seen.
If you outlaw heroin only outlaw nations will cultivate poppies. Oh wait ...
Following the history of opium production for export around the world is an instructive exercise in globalization. It was not raised in Afghanistan in sufficient quantity for large-scale export until the late '70s.
38: Ohh. So you're not in Cleveland right now.
This. I would like to see this in person.
In my experience, the best high in Cleveland is ironic self-deprecation. In lots of the Rust Belt, actually.
44: I know! How silly! And weirdly charming!
23: I'm going with Eshmun. We are going to drive through the Cedars-Sinai campus today not because there's something specifically wrong but to satisfy the C-S god's desires to see us.
Otherwise the visits get arranged for us.
21. 25 - but probably not the Afghan women who have been killed by US airstrikes. 35: Fair Trade Opium Poppies! Heroin is the best painkiller ever and should be available on the NHS on prescription. It's the good old-fashioned British way.
38: Actually I'm in Wisconsin with my in-laws. I'm not sure what I was referring to with "around here." Neither my in-laws nor the people of Door county really traffic in the high-grade Jesus stuff. They have a little Jesus on Sundays and a bit before sitting down to dinner.
I should also add that I have known many many people who have spent their whole lives high on Jesus and were wonderful, warm, functional human beings. I was only pointing out that Jesus is very potent, and has messed a lot of people up.
48: You're in the Dells? With the waterskiing squirrel? And Tommy Bartlett's Robot World?
No, we're on Green Bay in a bayside cottage. The waterskiing squirrel looks nice, though.
Door County is the end of the peninsula that sticks out into Lake Michigan (pwned but too bad).
My father grew up one county north of the Dells. The tourist attractions were if anything, even tackier back in the late '50s/early '60s if not as extensive. Too bad, it really is an interesting geologic part of Wisconsin right on the edge of the unglaciated Driftless Area with some nearby very un-dairy farmish sandy areas and remnant rocky bluffs. The farm in Aldo Leopold's seminal A Sand County Almanac was just a few miles from the Dells.
In the '30s the Dells was a place where as a teenager my dad would go to be virtually locked into a cannery for few weeks while the pea and other vegetable harvests came in.
James Wimberly over at the RBC suggests that we buy the opium crop licitly, make morphine out of it, and give it to people in pain.
52 makes far too much sense to be considered seriously by US policy types. Especially since it doesn't involve any high altitude bombing or remote drones.
Although the poppies do grow well in Afghanistan, there is no guarantee that they would be competitive long-term in a completely open market, but it would at least be a positive start.
53: Huh, that sounds like a completely plausible strategy.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that the strategy in Afghanistan will work because of this non-syllogism.
1) I thought it was too late, and that the surge wouldn't work in Iraq.
2) I was wrong then.
(Not to get into an argument about whether the surge really "worked" -- it achieved far more than I thought it would, which was "nothing".)
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Bleg: At some point, there was a whole thread about which charities people recommended. For the life of me, I can't find it. Can anyone point me to it?
Many thanks.
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56.3 Same here, if you include the payoffs to Sunni militias as part of the "surge". But whatever the root causes, things quieted down much more than I had expected.
57: I couldn't find it either. CA and I autodonate to Oxfam.
"We condemn the use of this video and the public humiliation of prisoners. It is against international law," U.S. military spokesman Colonel Greg Julian said.
It burns.
Reminds me of: And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?
57: I don't remember the discussion being very satisfying, and I can't find it either. We autodonate to Oxfam, the ACLU, the Global Fund for Women, and Doctors without Borders/MSF. After I switched to the current job, we dialed all the amounts way down, but I think at least some money goes to each every year. I''d have to check my credit card records to see.
52:Sorry, our ally Turkey has a near monopoly on growing opium for legal purposes, and would be extremely upset.
Previous Unfogged threads on charitable donations.
Also, this thread reminds me that when I saw this article on stoned wallabys, I was astounded by this sentence:
Australia supplies about 50% of the world's legally-grown opium used to make morphine and other painkillers.
I had no idea that a developed country was producing regular opium crops. Obviously I'm horrendously naive, because I thought that the licit and illicit sources of opium were the same. Is there a reason (besides the Australians) that we can't transfer some of that legal market to Afghanistan?*
*I'm only three-quarters tongue-in-cheek here.
21. 25 - but probably not the Afghan women who have been killed by US airstrikes.
& doubtless the women who have to put up with Taliban executions would be equally vehemently against the Taliban,,,
Thanks, Witt! We're setting up charity stuff for the wedding registry.
In the end we went with Heifer International and the local chapter of Meals-On-Wheels.
A half dozen countries each supply 50 per cent of the legal opium in the world.
The licit opium crop is much smaller than the illicit one (I think), and licit opium sells for ~10% as much as illicit opium (I'm pretty sure). So getting Afghans to grow legal opium doesn't really help the current situation on its own.
68: But it's the same product, right? Seems odd. I'm no economist, but I would think if the black market price is currently ten times the price for legal opium, policy choices could be made that would equilibrate the two.
The link in 52 suggests that part of the answer is increasing the market for legal opium products. He says most cancer patients in the US have morphine for their pain, but most in India (for example) do not.
I have to say that I read the article in 52 and I have no idea what to think, nor do I have the knowledge to properly assess it. Is it an idea like the flat tax, or like food stamps? No idea. Lurkers or others with expertise welcome to weigh in.
|| just a little Beck's style after an outstanding dinner-for-one. The champagne on the house helped. Considered giving the waiter my number, but that's just the good meal talking.|>
Di: People bringing you food and drinks are always sexier. It's not just a gender thing. There was a funny bit in a documentary on contemporary Japan Current/Vanguard which featured the bars popular with women there, where good looking young men flirt with you in private booths, in addition to bringing you food and drinks.
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Parenting style quiz:
Your daughter and her cousins come in the house with the bleached skull of a small animal. What do you yell?
a) Cool! Lets see if it matches the jawbone you found earlier!
b) Don't bring that inside, it has germs! go wash your hands!
Bonus question: What is it, anyway?
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73: Definitely (a)!! And, if teeth intact, follow up with:
c) Now, is this from an herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore?
72: I should really date someone in the food industry. Good food is such a turn on. (Was it the shellfish, maybe?) The seventeen God bless yous with the check, however, cut short any further plans to pick up the waiter. You're still cute, dear, but I wouldn't want to tarnish your immortal soul.
You should have put a coin in the picture for scale. Without that, I'd guess cat, but with no scale and no teeth, I could be way, way off.
73: Bah, no germs to speak of on something that is that long dead.
What my parents said: "Let's take it to the nature center and find out what it is!"
Turned out to be a fox.
76: There's another photo with what I think is an adult-sized thumb (attached to, I'm guessing helpy-chalk). Using that for scale, I was guessing chipmunk or squirrel. Or a very, very small Chicago Bears fan who wandered into Green Bay by accident.
I was thinking rodent, too, Stanley. I was going to guess possum -- but maybe I'm misjudging the size.
I'd say it's too big for a chipmunk. Could still be a cat; they're pretty small under their fur, if you've ever seen one soaking wet. I haven't gotten a good look at a fox in a while, though they're around.
There have been four rabid foxes killed in Durham this year, including one that bit a kid.
I would also say cat skull although a very small one. See here for reference.
It's probably not any rodent based on the shape of the jawbone (rodents have a prominent gap between their incisors and molars and the jawbone usually has a shallow U shape right in front of the molars (pre-molars maybe, they have no canines). It is also very snub-nosed, so I'd say cat, somewhat on the small or young side.
So now I'm sad because of dead kittens.
It is also very snub-nosed
Really? Is that based on the distance of the end of the nose from the huge eye socket? Otherwise the nose looks somewhat pointy to me (but not enough for a fox, which is more like a dog, longer snout/nose, I would think).
Yes, smaller cat, not necessarily a kitten, though, JP! I've had a couple of cats who were rather small, and whose faces were built like that.
Rory votes weasel or ferret or opossum.
I'm sad about dead kittens in general. Don't mind me, everyone should just continue with their rush-about modern lives.
If you google up some chipmunk, squirrel or rabbit skulls you can see that they have relatively longer skeletal snouts.
And really, if it's a dead kitten we can be sad, but if it's just a dead cat we're supposed to be like, whatever?
On the topic of outdoor dangers, by the way, if anyone has a cat (or dog) who goes outside at least on the east coast or mid-atlantic area, be aware that deer ticks are a real problem this year.
We have an ailing cat here whose problem defies diagnosis -- he's just stopped eating, is drinking very little water, has a runny face (eyes, nose) and is losing weight. He's an indoor/outdoor cat, and the vet found half a dozen deer ticks, which are very tiny, on him. We catch and remove regular ticks ourselves, but deer ticks are tough.
It turns out that the veterinary establishment simply does not know whether cats can get lyme disease or not. There's no test for it, no set of symptoms from which to diagnose. But tick-borne diseases are very high this season! So if you have an outdoor cat, be assiduous about the flea & tick treatment, and, uh, groom the cat.
73: I get it, it's a trick question. It's an Afghan woman killed by the US Air Force.
89: pars -- my mother's dog had similar symptoms (runny eyes/nose, lethargy, no appetite) and while her tests came back negative for Lyme, they treated her for Rocky Mtn Spotted Fever and she improved almost immediately. There were eyedrops and and big old pills.
92: Huh, okay. Things may be different for dogs than cats -- the vet said there's just no test for Lyme disease in cats. Dunno if there's one for Rocky Mtn Spotted Fever, then, but I'd think that they'd have gone for that if there was one?
He's been on antibiotics for a week, mostly because we don't know what else to do, and his face has cleared up for the most part, thankfully (he had begun to have blood around his mouth, actually, which I thought was a good datum! we can determine something from this! maybe he has infected gums or teeth and that's all it is! but no), he still declines to eat, needs a great deal of coaxing just to nibble a tiny bit of tuna fish. We're pretty stumped. The vet is stumped. Maybe cancer + nausea. He's not lethargic, just won't eat.
He's been in to the vet 3 times now, and I think my housemate, whose cat this technically is, is prepared to let him go if that's how it has to be.
It's part of the NYT's secret program to bring about all out class war.
94: "[...]the Independant Educational Consultants Association, a membership group trying to promote basic standards of competency and ethics"
Nice.
96: Yeah, that was the best part. In the future, the only way any of us are going to make a living is by defrauding the rich for useless "services", so good job fucking that up for us, Independent Educational Consultants Association!
94: Compare and contrast:
Universities must do more to end elitism in Britain by admitting thousands more students from poorer backgrounds, according to a new report commissioned by Gordon Brown.
[...] The all-party report, written by 20 experts and chaired by former cabinet minister Alan Milburn, was the idea of the prime minister and is due to be published on Tuesday.
It has examined barriers to the professions and has grown into a manifesto against social immobility in the UK - a key policy theme for Downing Street.
The report, called Unleashing Aspiration, also:
[...] • describes internships as the new excluding rung on the career ladder and demands a rethink about "qualification inflation", which has seen some careers such as nursing demand university degrees;
• identifies how journalism has become one of the most exclusive middle-class professions of the 21st century;
• reveals that 200 of the 260 cadet forces, from which army officers are drawn, are sited in private schools;
• calls for the closure of the government's "shameful" careers service, Connexions.
Hard to imagine such "class warfare" language even getting published in the US.
Limbaugh would consider that to be part of the "communism versus free markets" genre, not "class warfare".
Limbaugh is a greasy skidmark on the public discourse.
So how does this:
"The older generation of today's professionals, who were born in 1958 like me, came from families whose incomes were 17% above the average. The younger generation of today's professionals, who were born in 1970, came from families whose incomes were 27% above the average. Today's generation of doctors and lawyers, on average, came from families that earned two-thirds more than the average family."
compare with US numbers?
The rewards for higher education in the US have increased since the 50s as well. (I don't know the numbers, though.)
8
... There may be some reason to think that this thing is hopeless, but so far I'm not seeing it.
How about pointless? Why is this important to the US?
32
I'm thinking the unthinkable: A radical fundamentalist collection of 'stans with nukes. Can't live with them, could without them. Too bad, so sad.
Since the Taliban aren't going to be building their own nukes anytime soon this comment makes no sense to me.
56
(Not to get into an argument about whether the surge really "worked" -- it achieved far more than I thought it would, which was "nothing".)
Nothing seems about right to me. Any improvements were likely coincidental.
Hard to imagine such "class warfare" language even getting published in the US.
And it's still a pretty shameful mediocrity. Back in the day it would have been bugger the OTC being in private schools, let's get rid of the OTC and private schools full stop.
(Ah, Old Labour, how we miss you, the abolition of private schools & fox hunting, and the control of the commanding heights.)
let's get rid of the OTC and private schools full stop.
And make all officers senior to Major or equivalent appointments not ranks, yeah.
I think you're wearing the old rose tinted goggles, there Kier. I don't remember the core of old Labour ever questioning the existence of the officer cadre as such. And the "control of the commanding heights" stuff was Militant, who were deep entry Trots. Not that I disagree with any of that stuff, but it was never mainstream.
I'm pretty sure that Conference stereotypically passed resolutions on abolishing the private schools etc. in the '30s & '40s --- Orwelll mocks them for that tendency. Conference also passed `commanding heights', but then even Old Labour never really got the whole `internal party democracy' thing.
(So, yeah, rose tinted goggles.)
reveals that 200 of the 260 cadet forces, from which army officers are drawn, are sited in private schools;
Officers are not drawn from army cadet forces, any more than they are drawn from church choirs, hockey teams or Cub Scout packs.
Especially if part of the plan is that Afghan farmers are to be forcibly prevented from growing their traditional cash crop of opium poppies
Opium is not the traditional cash crop of the Helmand valley.
104: The Pakistanis have some around somewhere. How secure they are depends on which "security /terrorism expert" one reads last. In any event, as we now know, WMDs don't have to be real to trigger a war.
What's funny is that the US and the UK have both moved right, but to the exact same extent, so the distance between them remains the same. For example, stuff like Witt's quote would have been commonplace in the US in the 70s, but you wouldn't see something like Clause Four, even as a symbolic platform plank.
