We don’t have the money. We aren’t accomplishing anything more than the Soviets did. We’re being bled to death by a thousand cowardly cuts.

Either we find it within ourself to turn the place into a moonscape and utter destroy the will and ability of the Afghan fighters to resist…or we should just cut our losses already. Trying to fight a war with the towelheads in a half-@$$ed manner will only cost us men and money that we can’t afford to lose, and you can bet your boots the Taliban knows that!

Today’s war is about social re-engineering.

And this is a cause that conservatives support? I thought that conservatives opposed such things.

I agree with those who say we’ve already lost when we let the Iraqis and Afghanis write their constitutions basing the law of the land on Islam …

E.g. from the Iraqi constitution:

Article 2:

First: Islam is the official religion of the State and it is a fundamental source of legislation:

A. No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established.

B. No law that contradicts the principles of democracy may be established.

C. No law that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms stipulated in this constitution may be established.

Second: This Constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people and guarantees the full religious rights of all individuals to freedom of religious belief and practice such as Christians, Yazedis, and Mandi Sabeans.

Article 3:

(Iraq is a country of many nationalities, religions and sects and is a founding and active member of the Arab League and is committed to its covenant. Iraq is a part of the Islamic world.)

I’m surprised that CBS would let it slip that the fighters flowing into Afghanistan are members of al Qaeda. What they won’t tell you is that al Qaeda is now returning to Afghanistan after suffering a humiliating defeat in Iraq.

Iraq was a distraction alright – for al Qaeda.

Obama will allow the situation in Afghanistan to deteriorate until the pressure to leave becomes operative. The Democrats will then lose another war.

1. Weapons aren’t being made in local machine shops.

Pakistan’s illicit arms trade thrives

Wrong. It’s a thriving industry and has been for a long time. There are other sources of small arms entering into the region, to be sure, but to say that the local tribes of Pakistan and Afghanistan aren’t producing their own is not correct.

The best the world, or the USA, can hope for in that setting is to find ways to prevent the spread of the disease and hope it dies out someday.

The Afghan situation is a multiplicity of issues, none are insurmountable.

True. But none of them will be solved in the period of a single US administration. It will take several administrations to solve them.

We need a consistent policy that transcends any single President.

Allies, allies, allies, the Afghan’s want something quite different from the foreign fighters that invade to perform a number of bad acts, that’s not rocket science, if the President recognizes the need of more boots on the ground to keep the peace and promote the national progress, well, credit where credit is due.

An Asian nation that appreciates us and wants for the first time to be an autonomous nation state allied with the US should be a most precious commodity.

I say if we play bull O the woods there, we’ll be toast, but I also think that a good finesse player can reap big dividends too.

If any conservative who thinks that the US Federal Govt doing social re-engineering within its own shores is a fool’s errand, what makes you think it will be particularly successful in the Stone Age Country AKA Afghan/Pakistan ?

nagee76 on September 7, 2009 at 9:39 PM

Touche.

Well-below normal rainfall and winter snowfall across the majority of Afghanistan during late 2007 and early 2008 have led to the worst drought conditions in the past 10 years. Widespread losses of rainfed wheat crops have been observed by international non-governmental organization (NGO) officials across the country’s important northern and western growing regions, while the government of Afghanistan has also reported that irrigated crop yields have fallen significantly this year. Owing to the severity of current conditions and the breadth of areas impacted, wheat production in 2008/09 is forecast by USDA at 1.5 million tons, down 2.3 million or 60 percent from last year.

From: http://www.pecad.fas.usda.gov/highlights/2008/08/Afghanistan%20Drought/

So you have drought, lack of support farmers, international aid depressing local prices, and losses due to inadequate storage.

Looks like we might be “helping” them to death.

Yeah? Even after the cost of fertilizer and seed? Those are more expensive than for poppy. Also, wheat needs more water.

Noting that opium traffickers often loan farmers the money to plant and fertilize the opium harvest for the coming year, I asked the ambassador what programs are in place to provide loan support for farmers who want to grow alternative crops. According to him, there are essentially none. So if you’re an Afghan farmer who wants to grow wheat or strawberries instead of opium poppies, you’re largely on your own. (from http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2008/03/11/afghanistans_wheat_problem )

There is also the problem in international aid flooding the markets and depressing the price of wheat in the market places. Afghanistan has been suffering drought and wheat is less drought tolerant than poppies. And again we have the problem of transportation and storage.

2. For the first level farmer, wheat pays far more than poppy. The don’t get crap from a crop of poppy.

3. If the international press would actually report on the actions of the enemy, the pressure from the world would be a great factor for change. The number one thing the country needs is roads. This is what the people constantly ask for. Roads allows them to get products to market and to recieve goods in return. Civilian construction companies from India, China and Pakistan have attempted to build numerous roads across the country but their workers both foriegn nationals and local Afghans have been killed in droves by the Taliban. Again, if this was reported, the Taliban would be viewed as the low life scum they are instead of misunderstood “freedom fighters”.

What makes our situation different from the Russians? Let’s take the partisan bickery out of this debate for a minute and focus on the actual situation.

We have been fighting there for about eight years now. Why are we not winning?

Is truely just increasing troop levels going to do the trick?

How do we avoid a repeat of Russia’s fate in that region?

In Iraq, at least they weren’t in tribal rule. Saddam was brutal but there was a State. In Afghanistan there is little more than loose tribes that are connected more by basic needs than a cohesive government.

I just don’t see how simply boosting resources and manpower is going to do the trick. This shit seems like it will take decades.

And with that, I don’t see how anyone (democrates, republicans, etc.) can stomach a never-ending conflict.

You can have all the troops that you want – but as long as there are safe havens for Haqqani/Al-Qaeda/Taliban in Pakistan, the US is going to progress in this war at the SAME PACE as it has in the last 7 years – which has essentially been meaningless.

I respect Michael Yon but does he even know what is happening in Afghanistan today ? Karzai recently allowed a law to pass which basically gives a husband to rape his own wife… thats right, he has a “right to sex once every four nights”..

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/17/AR2009081702364.html

Social Re-engineering ? Let these barbarians first learn to treat their women with respect and not as mere cattle.

For those who may know a little Pakthun history, please re-call what has happened to the memory of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan – he was from the NWFP and fought alongside Gandhi in the Indian Freedom movement – he was a pacifist to the core and tried to instill a sense of humanity to the Pashtuns who are a warrior tribe. After India’s partition in 1947, the tireless work of Gaffar Khan to improve Pashtun society literally went to waste in a mere two decades.

And he was ONE of THEM… And this was BEFORE Afghanistan became the center of US-Soviet geo political proxy wars !

If any conservative who thinks that the US Federal Govt doing social re-engineering within its own shores is a fool’s errand, what makes you think it will be particularly successful in the Stone Age Country AKA Afghan/Pakistan ?

This is going to come to a terrible end. But hey, when you are fooling yourself that you can win this war without going into Pakistan, what can you do ?

But then again, when your supply lines run through Pakistan, you have NO CHOICE but to fight with one hand tied to your back.

America needs a Hail Mary to win the AfPak war theater.

Of course, what animates and drives most conservatives today is their vision of Iraq as a “success,” and their desire to repeat that “success” in Afghanistan. What has become increasingly clear to me, however, is that an infidel nation cannot fight for the soul of an Islamic nation. This, in effect, is what our “nation-building” troops have been ordered to do both in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let me rephrase: An infidel nation can indeed fight for the soul of an Islamic nation. It just can’t win it.

Yes, 60 Minutes even. Outstanding segment on AFG by Lara Logan and her crew, that as a extra bonus gives a great profile of our Army. Watch CBS Videos Online Hat tip Capt’n Ed…….

I doubt the weight of return on unrendered poppy is quite that high.

You don’t ship wheat. You ship flour. In greased sacks it keeps for months. If they have donkeys they can build a gristmill 1/3 as efficient as a waterwheel. 12 donkeys can carry a ton of flour.

The American wheat farmer was globally admired for decades before using a mechanical reaper, and engine-powered harvesters weren’t universal until after WW2.

In this case, though, they not only lost, but they gave up valuable intel in the form of a video camera:

I watched the report up until they showed the video camera footage, at which point I recognized it was a replay of a report from last year.

We don’t have to destroy the fields. Here is the basic problem: you can harvest your opium by hand and send it to “market” on the back of a couple of donkeys and make enough money to last through the winter and buy a seed crop for the next season. Now imagine a farmer growing wheat on that land. How long does it take to harvest that wheat by hand to make the same amount of money? There are no farm tractors or combines or mechanical thrashers. Now once you have harvested it, what do you do with it? How many donkeys will it take to get a crop to market to make enough money to get through the winter and buy a seed crop? There are no farm trucks nor the roads and bridges required for them to get to market. But lets say there was. When the gain is delivered, where is it stored? There are no grain elevators. And if there was, there are is no railroad infrastructure to ship it anywhere. Again you need trucks and roads and bridges … stuff they don’t have.

Forcing them to grow wheat forces them into bankruptcy. They can’t get enough for their crop to pay for next year’s seed so they go into debt which is a big deal to them culturally. Add to that the fact that there isn’t adequate storage and the population of mice, rats, and other vermin explodes.

We keep trying to fit their situation into our concept of “normalcy” and that doesn’t work. What Afghanistan might be better suited for is mining and refining of metals and other raw materials than agriculture.

You can’t ask a subsistence farmer to compete with industrial scale farmers in a global grain market. Until they get combines and tractors and trucks and roads and bridges and storage facilities and all the other infrastructure required to build and maintain those things, we are better off thinking outside the box and maybe buying the opium from them or something.

It is not just the mob, heroin is not illegal in a lot of the world.

The Brits do not want us to just destroy the fields for fear we will alienate the people who have so few alternatives for making a living..but something has to be done. This can not go on.