Ad Lib

If I am told to "get out and murder some locals" (by which you presumably mean civilians, rather than armed Taliban fighters) I would obviously refuse, accept being put in military prison, and lodge as a defence for insubordination at my court martial that I was being instructed to commit a war crime. This isn't fucking hard.

I don't oppose polygamy where all the parties involved genuinely consent to it. The vast majority of countries where Muslims are in the majority have legal bars on forced marriages. I readily accept that the enforcement of this is much more mixed. We should probably not let the Taliban take over Kabul and enforce it then, should we? But when those beliefs deny the civic agency of more than half the population, they aren't legitimate beliefs, and aren't ones we should tolerate where we are in a position to deny them legal force. Absolutely I do want to force some of my values on people. Not all of them. Just the bare minimum ones necessary to grant women and girls (and other oppressed groups) agency and physical safety.

I would be a lot more concerned if our soldiers didn't take into account the possibility that what they were being instructed to do was a war crime before doing it. I'm glad that most of them do.

It should read great grandfather. My great grandfather was hospitalised during the D-Day landings. He voluntarily enlisted in the British Army before conscription came in. He understood that when there is a genuine evil applying military force on civilians, and you have the means, you don't wring your hands and equivocate from the sidelines. You serve in whatever capacity is needed of you and accept that some wars are worth fighting.

No. Because it isn't my decision for there to be a military presence. There will be a military presence with or without me. So all other things being equal it is better that that military presence includes people who have concerns about the intervention, rather than just those who enthusiastically support it. No. That's why we don't literally put guns in the hands of people who have refused to obey a conscription order.

Yes, I am an advocate of enforcing the belief that women should not be forcibly married, raped, killed, and denied basic civic agency on those who do not believe it. These things are not "Western" values. These are values shared by vast swathes of the Muslim world and beyond. As others have pointed out already, Sharia law is every bit as much an "imposition" on Afghans as effective legal prohibitions on treating women and girls as war trophies. The difference is that one system belongs in the 21st century while the other belongs in the 9th. I do not insist that Afghanistan adopts a constitution comparable to that of a Western democracy. I do not insist even that it has the same laws that we do. I insist simply that women and girls are treated as citizens and afforded incredibly basic fucking freedoms from torture, rape and murder. If that's cherry picking I'm an enthusiastic picker of cherries. We did have an invasion force. It turned out millions of Afghans didn't want Sharia law. We put a military presence in place to stop theocrats from going door to door raping and pillaging Kabul. For at least the last 8 of the 20 years we were there it emphatically worked and was bearing considerable fruit. Then we threw our arms up in the air and said it was all too difficult and we couldn't "sell" caring about people half way across the planet to our own moral degenerates (better known as the electorate) and basically abandoned women and girls living real, meaningful and drastically improved lives to their killers. That's a moral stain on the West and one that won't wash away for centuries. Except in Kabul we had already made substantial progress towards this. Then threw it away.

I vote we start with Grangemouth and Inverness.

I don't care if the local people think a father should get to decide that his daughter is to marry someone. That is barbaric, illegitimate, and to be resisted. It is not acceptable no matter how much "cultural context" you apply to it. My point is you don't need to change "this way of thinking" to stop, or significantly reduce the instances of, forced marriage. It is a moral good to prevent as many of them as possible from happening even if 99.99% of Afghans fervently believe they should be allowed.

It depends on the context. If I went into the office tomorrow and was instructed to shoot a civilian, clearly I wouldn't do that. If I was conscripted into the army, and was engaged in combat operations and was instructed to shoot someone in the course of those operations, as long as that person was not a civilian or the context was not one such that I would be committing a war crime, I would do as I was told.

No it doesn't put it in the "vague" zone. Forced marriages are ones where the woman does not consent. If a male guardian purports to give consent on behalf of a woman or girl, or applies pressure on her to communicate consent to a marriage, it is a forced marriage. This addresses your subsequent points. As for your question about separation of men and women in terms of public facing roles in society, I also consider that to be unacceptable. It is clearly less severely objectionable than forced marriage and rape, but it is still barbaric.

Gosh, I wonder what it is about the prospect of being brutally beheaded and having their communities raped and pillaged, with no prospect of being protected by outside troops, that has influenced their decision.

Some people considered World War 2 to be unjust or unnecessary. I'm glad my great grandfathers and tens of millions of others like him didn't.

Forced marriage (note, plenty of cultures distinguish between forced and arranged marriage) is never acceptable. All marriages in which the parties involved do not independently consent for themselves, free from coercion, are unacceptable, regardless of the "values" of a society. It starts from the position that an adult woman does not have agency over her own body. In that context, that society is not one that is "chosen" but one that is imposed on her. When choosing between the range of societies that are imposed on people, we should always prioritise those that honour the basics of human agency. Especially, not despite, when the majority or the powerful in that society want it to be otherwise.

Because I'm not a draft dodger. If the democratically elected government of this country considers it necessary to conscript from the adult population, it would be unreasonable for a comfortably-off middle class man in his 30s, even a very unfit one with poor vision and hearing, to refuse to serve in some capacity. To adopt any other position would be hypocrisy on my part, and in all that I do I try not to be a hypocrite. If nation-wide military solidarity is what our democracy demands, I will follow that. One can absolutely protest in the political sphere that a draft was unwarranted and unnecessary, but that doesn't mean one wouldn't serve.

Their prospects are now horrendous. Because Western governments are trying to appease people like you by withdrawing the one thing that ensured those lives were in a better place.

The choice was not between Assad being allowed to gas schools with impunity or "hand over to the Jihadis". If a NATO military presence was what either (a) forced outright Assad's government to resign or surrender or (b) brought them to the table to negotiate a peace settlement and a powersharing agreement, we would have been looking at international mediation directed precisely at the protection of the rights of vulnerable groups. There is no prospect that an agreement would be reached that a Taliban-esque flavour of Sharia law would be permitted in Syria in those conditions. We can all reasonably disagree about whether NATO had a feasible military strategy to bring us to that point, but just as the choice in Afghanistan wasn't between "total withdrawal in the summer of 2021" versus "a massive surge in NATO troops" so too the plausible outcomes in Syria were a lot more complex than "dictator or Sharia".

He literally described a situation in which I'd be conscripted.

This might come as a surprise to you, but strategically competent dictators with tanks and guns can be really effective at preventing people who oppose them from successfully rising up against them.

I don't have to defend the poor immigration and trade policies of our rubbish government. Our country isn't falling apart, stop being melodramatic. We have a fucking useless government that has very poorly managed the resources and relationships at its disposal, and that has weakened our position in the world significantly, but in global terms we are still essentially fine, as are your kids and granchildren. You know who's not fine? The 15 year old girls in Kabul who are being beaten, raped and murdered by people with AK-47s strapped around their shoulders.

Yes, I absolutely want to impose on absolutely every single corner of the planet a political structure which gives women and girls meaningful legal and social protections against forced marriage, rape, stoning and beheading. I couldn't give two shits how "artificial" that is or isn't. If a society is writing off more than half of its population based on its sex that is no more defensible than slavery. There are moral absolutes.

Literally no one is saying that it was as successful a mission outside of Kabul as in it. I'm not sure why you think this is a killer point. Fewer than 3 UK military deaths a year in operations in Afghanistan in the last 8 years. Like I said earlier, we're probably losing more men from heat stroke on training operations on hillsides in the UK than in Afghanistan. Foreign policy shouldn't be dictated by the whims of the electorate. The electorate are fickle and short-termist. The whole point of governing is to do the right thing because the people left to their own devices won't or can't think in strategic terms. I've already said if drafted I'd gladly serve, so fine.

I think there was a strong case for boots on the ground, as it may have reduced the overall number of casualties and led to greater stability more quickly between the warring factions, but I appreciate reasonable views could differ on whether that would have worked.

I'm literally criticising the whole of NATO (and America especially), not just the UK Government in isolation. They should have "got this presence" by "not withdrawing". They are literally the two examples other people asked me about earlier in the thread about whether I'd support fresh military interventions. I agree with you that our strategy towards Saudi Arabia has been a counterproductive one. I agree with you that we shouldn't arm them to the hilt. And I agree with you that invading Riyadh would not achieve any strategic objectives that would justify it. I don't require a "guarantee" of success at all. I think we should only initiate military operations that aren't absolutely certain to be complete and utter failures. Until this withdrawal of troops happened, NATO's military intervention in Afghanistan was not, by any objective standard, a complete and utter failure. It achieved many strategic objectives and drastically improved the lives and prospects of several millions of Afghans. Apparently this is a controversial statement now? Who knew.

I’m not interested in imposing liberal democracy on anyone. I’m interested in getting rid of governments that behead, stone, rape and subject people to forced marriages and replacing them with administrations that don’t do these things, even if they aren’t democratic and even if they rely on foreign soldiers to guarantee it. Within the category of cases in which such an outcome is feasible, as Afghanistan was for essentially two decades, that is a more acceptable state of affairs than tolerating theocratic barbarism, regardless of whether or not it is ever likely that a self sustaining liberal democracy will ever emerge from it.

Even when you include all of those deaths, you’re still looking at less than 50k per annum, with a heavy skew towards the first decade of the conflict. Relative to the lives of several million women and girls being effectively non existent, that’s not even close to an intolerable price of freedom. There is no prospect of Afghanistan being self governing without external military support while also respecting the most basic of rights of women and girls. So there is no point trying to make it self governing in that way any time soon. The next best thing is a puppet state that liberated millions of women and girls from a theocratic barbarity. I don’t care what their motive is. I care what effect their actions have. And since we couldn’t “undo” the conflict that ravaged from 2001 through to 2014, my starting point is the Afghanistan we had when the decision was taken to withdraw troops. That Afghanistan was a better one by orders of magnitude for the majority of Afghans than the one they will now live in for the next 20 years. I’m sure the Governments of NATO member states are taking a very intense straw poll of the General Nonsense sub forum of a Scottish Football website to determine their foreign policies. Actually, it would explain a lot as to why Biden took total leave of his senses and pushed through with an absolute clusterfuck of a withdrawal plan signed off by his predecessor with absolutely zero regard to the likely consequences.