Afghanistan Crisis

[welshbairn]

2 minutes ago, Ad Lib said:

Sometimes deeply suboptimal outcomes are the best we can hope for, and sometimes they involve more military involvement on our part and lots of deaths. Sadly the world we live in requires us to weigh up which outcome is the least terrible for the largest number of people.

In Syria's case it would have been to encourage all extraterritorial parties to leave it to the Syrians to sort out from day one. Instead we fuelled a disaster that's still ongoing. Shame on us, and the idea that if only we'd sent more bombs it would have been sorted is farcical in a very dark way.  

[Ad Lib]

18 minutes ago, O'Kelly Isley III said:

Sorry, but I'm not labouring under any misapprehensions and I was making no linkage between these MP's and your support or otherwise; the point I was making, and which I note you don't acknowledge, was the historical and rampant hypocrisy of UK and other Western nations' foreign policy.

I freely admit that Western foreign policy has been hypocritical and flawed in recent decades. I am attacking Biden’s withdrawal for precisely that reason. It is but one example of terrible Western foreign policy decision-making.

18 minutes ago, O'Kelly Isley III said:

As for UK militarism, your sentiments are noble but stoked by a right-wing media too much Government strategic thinking remains rooted in the 19th Century when Brittania ruled the waves.  The world has changed and Britain's place in it has diminished.  Far too much of our young human capital, very many from poor communities, continues to perish overseas on military assignments of dubious premise.  Time for the penny to drop.   

From 2013-2021 fewer than 20 British servicemen died in Afghanistan. More British servicemen died in the Berlin airlift than that. I’d hazard a guess almost as many British servicemen have died from exhaustion on training exercises than that in that time.

Soldiers die in wars. That’s what happens. That’s a risk “our boys” sign up for. Their personal circumstances might have made them more predisposed to sign up for the military but it wasn’t like they were duped or forced to do it. No one enlisting in the last three decades did so oblivious to the possibility that NATO operations would sometimes occur in the Middle East.

[Ad Lib]

1 minute ago, welshbairn said:

In Syria's case it would have been to encourage all extraterritorial parties to leave it to the Syrians to sort out from day one. Instead we fuelled a disaster that's still ongoing. Shame on us, and the idea that if only we'd sent more bombs it would have been sorted is farcical in a very dark way.  

That was never going to happen. Russia was always going to get involved. You are living in a fantasyland where you can STRONGLY ADVISE autocrats, theocrats and dictators to respect the territorial integrity of countries whose borders were literally drawn as lines in the sand by former colonial oppressors.

Autocrats and dictators understand only one language: power. And if you’re not willing to use military power, they will anyway, except they don’t pay lip service to the Geneva convention.

[welshbairn]

9 minutes ago, Ad Lib said:

That was never going to happen. Russia was always going to get involved. You are living in a fantasyland where you can STRONGLY ADVISE autocrats, theocrats and dictators to respect the territorial integrity of countries whose borders were literally drawn as lines in the sand by former colonial oppressors.

Autocrats and dictators understand only one language: power. And if you’re not willing to use military power, they will anyway, except they don’t pay lip service to the Geneva convention.

The Russians only got involved after the West and the Gulf started supplying the Jihadis. Otherwise the Syrian army could have sorted it on their own. This was no Arab Spring, this was raging wolves from the Sunni and Western pro Israeli Governments waiting to pounce.

Edited August 18, 2021 by welshbairn

[GordonS]

12 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

The Russians only got involved after the West and the Gulf started supplying the Jihadis. Otherwise the Syrian army could have sorted it on their own. This was no Arab Spring, this was raging wolves from the Sunni and Western pro Israeli Governments waiting to pounce.

None of that is true.

Where do you get your information?

[Ad Lib]

11 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

The Russians only got involved after the West and the Gulf started supplying the Jihadis. Otherwise the Syrian army could have sorted it on their own. This was no Arab Spring, this was raging wolves from the Sunni and Western pro Israeli Governments waiting to pounce.

Rubbish, I’m afraid, on all counts.

[welshbairn]

The Russians were always partners of Syria of course, but they didn't seriously intervene till 2015, after 4 years of Western and Sunni Arab support for the Jihadis, and the Turks directly assisting ISIS.

Edited August 18, 2021 by welshbairn

[Ad Lib]

1 minute ago, welshbairn said:

The Russians were always partners of Syria of course, but they didn't seriously intervene till 2015, after 4 years of Western and Sunni Arab support for the Jihadis.

“But apart from being a decades longstanding supplier of arms to the Syrian Army, Russia didn’t really get involved until after… er… the Arab Spring was underway and other groups were receiving similar forms of support from other countries”

[welshbairn]

6 minutes ago, Ad Lib said:

“But apart from being a decades longstanding supplier of arms to the Syrian Army, Russia didn’t really get involved until after… er… the Arab Spring was underway and other groups were receiving similar forms of support from other countries”

There's a difference between supplying arms to a sovereign state, openly and legally, and smuggling them to people who in any other context would be called terrorists by Western powers.

Edited August 18, 2021 by welshbairn

[Ad Lib]

5 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

There's a difference between supplying arms to a sovereign state, openly and legally, and smuggling them to people who in any other context would be called terrorists by Western powers.

Not when they’re a dictatorship there isn’t.

Literally on this thread there are people who correctly criticise (mainly) the US for providing arms to the Saudis in “open and legal” ways. Yet when Putin gives Assad the means to bomb or gas civilians you shrug?

Sometimes you have to arm bad people to stop or constrain other bad people and to prevent very powerful bad people from gaining power and influence over good people. That is a sad fact of life in international relations.

Edited August 18, 2021 by Ad Lib

[D Angelo Barksdale]

1 hour ago, Ad Lib said:

If doing so would cost a million civilian lives in Afghanistan over, say, a decade, for example, we could take seriously the claim that in aggregate the people there were worse off for it.

As it stands, the civilian deaths attributable to the war figure to April of this year, so over a two decade period, was estimated at about 71k, or about 4kpa. For the sake of drastically increasing the freedom and life prospects of (conservative estimate) more than 2 million women and girls in Kabul alone, that’s a decent return on investment. Excellent even, when you consider how many civilians were routinely executed under the Taliban before they lost control of parts of Afghanistan.

You're being pretty fucking disingenuous here.

So we're up to about half a mil here, minus the Taliban. 

You didn't even bother mentioning the Afghan security forces. You know, the guys you're expecting to sacrifice their lives fighting a decades long civil war.

1 hour ago, Ad Lib said:

I didn’t say it would be “too messy”. I said it wasn’t feasible. As in we would not succeed in creating the bare minimum conditions necessary to advance the interests of the women and girls living there.

By contrast it was feasible in Kabul. We know this because it actually happened for 20 years.

Feasible in the sense that that it only occurred as a result of installing a kleptocratic puppet government with no prospect of proper self governence and having our military occupy in perpetuity.

Bare naked Colonialism.

1 hour ago, Ad Lib said:

Of course we take a utilitarian calculus to this. You don’t do things that are demonstrably self defeating to the objective that matters most to you.

What do you think the objective that matters most to the US in Afghanistan ?

Wait, you don't genuinely believe we were still in Afghanistan to nation build or liberate woman do you ?

1 hour ago, Ad Lib said:

And by our Pontius Pilate esque foreign policy we will have been complicit in it. Complicit by our failure to use the military resources we have to reduce that pain and suffering.

No.

Given that you're in the minority here, positioning yourself to the right of the US President and aligning with all sorts of neocon ghouls, you can keep your white man's burden guilt all to yourself.

[welshbairn]

17 minutes ago, Ad Lib said:

Not when they’re a dictatorship there isn’t.

I hope your civil service work doesn't take you to a place where you have to decide how to share out power amongst religious and tribal groups who always vote for their own man or woman. Northern Ireland should be a piece of pish in comparison. Lebanon has tried its best but hasn't been helped by interfering neighbours. Liberal democracy isn't something you can just impose on a country where family connections mean far more than ideology. Success is no civil war sometimes, even if the price is dictatorship.

Edited August 18, 2021 by welshbairn

[Ad Lib]

10 minutes ago, Proposition Joe said:

You're being pretty fucking disingenuous here.

So we're up to about half a mil here, minus the Taliban. 

You didn't even bother mentioning the Afghan security forces. You know, the guys you're expecting to sacrifice their lives fighting a decades long civil war.

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.

10 minutes ago, Proposition Joe said:

Feasible in the sense that that it only occurred as a result of installing a kleptocratic puppet government with no prospect of proper self governence and having our military occupy in perpetuity.

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.

10 minutes ago, Proposition Joe said:

Bare naked Colonialism.

What do you think the objective that matters most to the US in Afghanistan ?

Wait, you don't genuinely believe we were still in Afghanistan to nation build or liberate woman do you ?

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.

10 minutes ago, Proposition Joe said:

No.

Given that you're in the minority here, positioning yourself to the right of the US President and aligning with all sorts of neocon ghouls, you can keep your white man's burden guilt all to yourself.

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.

[Ad Lib]

19 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

I hope your civil service work doesn't take you to a place where you have to decide how to share out power amongst religious and tribal groups who always vote for their own man or woman. Northern Ireland should be a piece of pish in comparison. Lebanon has tried its best but hasn't been helped by interfering neighbours. Liberal democracy isn't something you can just impose on a country where family connections mean far more than ideology. Success is no civil war sometimes, even if the price is dictatorship.

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.

[Bairnardo]

Ad lib is interested in getting rid of certain types of government, and artificially injecting the ideals of one part of the world into another that doesnt actually want it, (and regresses to its previous ways after each amd every intervention) only where it is easy and convenient to do so. The permanent cost to future generations is of course, worth it.

Where bigger boys want to do it, we just shrug, sell them arms and seek trade deals.

I get it now.

[mizfit]

2 types of soldiers I’ve seen on social media commenting on Afghanistan.

1) the type who say we’ve failed the Afghans and to let them in.

2) the type who are apocalyptic with rage and are demanding we close our borders.

I have a feeling I know the reason most people in the second category joined the army.

[Marshmallo]

Good thread!

[WhiteRoseKillie]

11 hours ago, Ad Lib said:

It's not obfuscation when the context was literally about actions undertaken by the Government. The House of Commons doesn't have agency in international affairs, and crucially my role is very specifically not one that involves working for or taking instructions from the Government.

Indeed, if anything opposition Parliamentarians have more influence over what my day-to-day work involves than anyone on the Government's side, let alone the Government itself, because I provide them with information and explanations with which they then scrutinise Government activity.

If I work for Parliament I am not complicit for acts or decisions of the Government. Completely the opposite.

Millions of women and girls freed from a theocratic totalitarian state for an entire generation.

I call that a pretty fucking massive mitigation.

That you don't says more about you than me.

The context absolutely fucking wasn't. PJ said you worked for the State. No mention was made of the Government. You work for the State. As do I. I don't have to be happy about, but that is the situation, and I feel no need to lie about it. 

[Jinky67]

2 hours ago, mizfit said:

2 types of soldiers I’ve seen on social media commenting on Afghanistan.

1) the type who say we’ve failed the Afghans and to let them in.

2) the type who are apocalyptic with rage and are demanding we close our borders.

I have a feeling I know the reason most people in the second category joined the army.

I’m not really sure what merits the 2nd opinion or the lack of empathy coming from certain circles. I can understand the anger but not the lack of empathy. We can’t obviously absorb every single Afghan that wants refuge however there are many Afghans who will be hunted and killed

It was only last month the Taliban executed 22 unarmed Afghan commandos who had surrendered to them and I’ve already seen pictures this morning of renegade elements of the Taliban who have beaten a women and child in the street, blood soaked and left for dead and I don’t see why anyone thinks the Taliban can or are indeed are motivated to change. I did see it mentioned somewhere else that US intelligence said it would take 18 months for the Taliban to reach Kabul which means they were well aware the Afghan government would fall to the Taliban at some point so we absolutely failed in that respect when politicians and Biden were aware of this was the likely outcome. For it to happen 18 months down the line I’m sure would have suited them better though.

 

 

Edited August 19, 2021 by Jinky67

[Savage Henry]

2 hours ago, Bairnardo said:

Ad lib is interested in getting rid of certain types of government, and artificially injecting the ideals of one part of the world into another that doesnt actually want it, (and regresses to its previous ways after each amd every intervention) only where it is easy and convenient to do so. The permanent cost to future generations is of course, worth it.

Where bigger boys want to do it, we just shrug, sell them arms and seek trade deals.

I get it now.

“Liberal” ideals are no more of an imposition on Afghan society than shariah law is.   Likewise in Libya, which has - by a grass routes uprising - only achieved replacing savage dictatorship with chaos and sectarianism.  The majority of Syrians oppose Assad.  Unfortunately for them, Assad is the army, and the army is the state, and that relationship means that their Arab Spring was always doomed to failure.  

Edited August 19, 2021 by Savage Henry