BoatBanter.com - View Single Post - Once again, the military establishment proves...

Harry 

On 7/11/10 3:55 PM, wrote:
On Sun, 11 Jul 2010 13:38:59 -0400, wrote:

So far this war is getting close to two times as long as WW II and no
sight of peace.

that's the nature of guerrilla insurrections. we don't have to 'win'.
we just dont have to lose

Far as I know, we've only won one insurgent war and that was when we were
the insurgents. The only way to "win" this one is to declare a tie or call
it a victory if we would rather continue to lie to ourselves (we stopped
fooling the rest of the world a long time ago) and leave.
The "win" will be stopping the loss of life for all and not having to
finance a war we can't afford.
This goes for Iraq as well.

I would go farther and say I defy anyone to come up with an example of
a super power putting down an insurgency except perhaps for the Nazis
and the Soviets. They did it by ignoring all rules of common decency
and it really just drove the insurgents underground. Is that who we
want to emulate?
It might be noted that the Soviets had their ass handed to them in
Afghanistan.
We watched the French in Vietnam and didn't learn anything, then we
watched the Soviets in Afghanistan and didn't learn anything.
Is the US just stupid?

The situation in afghanistan is worse than anyone is discussing,
vis-a-vis the US involvement there. Afghanistan may define a territory,
but it certainly does not define a country. Is there a period in the
lifetimes of anyone living in that "country" when it was a functioning
political entity, with an effective centralized government and strong
provincial governments who believed in the concept of nationhood?

Villagers in many parts of Afghanistan are often at war with the next
village down the road. Its US-imposed elections are corrupt. The
so-called central government is corrupt, and in reality, there is no
central government.