Triumphrat

Casper

I hope you will all take this in the spirit it was written................I am a Brit and this thread is primarily about British troops. This thread was posted on my Sussex based biker website; I am interested in what you think, but I have taken the liberty of posting my own opinion too......what's your view then?

I support our British (an allied)troops in Afghanistan 100%.

They do a tough job I am not brave enough to ever do; even in my younger days, what they do, day in day out.

But....why oh why are these brave lads and lassies ''lions led by donkeys?'' (the soldiers on the ground being the lions and the donkeys being the westminister politician who sent them to Afghanistan).

There are NO clear war aims IMO. There is no end game. The politician in Parliament spout obscene words of putrid sickening foul stench - how can they sleep at night when our troops are fighting for their mist like woolly aims and objectives?

Do I support our troops - to right I do. The British Army is a professional and well led force of men and women (ditto the RN and RAF too). But why are these desk bound poseurs of the Labour and Tory parties so weak willed and lily livered? Why won't they stand up and say to NATO and the USA, it is time to get out now.

Do I feel strongly about this matter? Yes I do. I am saddened by the waste in life and the avoidable terrible injuries. Get our troops back from these ''killing fields'' now. By the way I applaud the heroic men and women who've done amazing things out there; include the rear echelon support people too. But why try and impose democracy upon a proud and tough tribal peoples?

Do we never learn from history? Read the ''imperial game'' of the 1880s and the British Empire and the NW frontier wars. Remember the USSR and their attempt to subjucate these people in the 1980s?

We can withdraw with heads held high. Shame on you vile Parliamentarians who keep our troops in harms way.
I don't apologise for a serious rant; but if enough people write to their MPs and make their views known...change WILL come.

Casper

spank86

We should never have gone in but now we are there we owe it to the civilians in the country to pull out without plunging them into a massive civil war.

We need an exit strategy and then we need to pull out.

What we can't do is simply pack up and leave them to the mercy of whatever warlord crops up next.

Moke

Frankly I think Spank has it. The rights and wrongs of going to war are at this point irrelevant and will be discussed ad infinitum by so called "experts" for eternity.To my simple mind the Uk and the so called West cannot simply go around dictating to the other 75% of the planet what is normal and OK and use a mixture of fear, paranoia and power to justify their actions.

I have just started working for an organisation which has the following printed on one of its promo shirts " NORMAL is a setting on my washing machine" and I think that the sooner we Anglo Saxon Christians and their derivatives realise that there are lots of cultural normals out there and democracy has lots of interepretations the better. Frankly, if my son was killed fighting out there I would see it as a futile terrible waste. It took Europe several hundred years to vaguely sort itself, it had to be resolved from within. Who are we to assume and expect complex cultures elsewhere to solve their internal issues almost in an instant.

davids

While I think the invasion of Afghanistan wasn't well thought through and has a definite Vietnam feel to it we are part of an alliance to which we signed up for collective security and as a way to play our part in keeping conflicts to a minimum by a group of nations opposing aggression.

Any pullout needs to be done as part of that alliance with the others involved in this NATO based operation, military action usually involves casualties - sad and unpleasant but true & to be expected.

Nato either decides that it goes for broke in tackling the Taliban & Al Q'aeda with very large troop numbers with more from Germany Italy Spain etc, buying tribal loyalties to fight the taliban (an old imperial move but one that seems to work quite well) and a massive injection of support for the (cleaned up) central government, or we as an alliance and together decide on a different move, what we can't do is cut and run and ignore our treaty obligations when times are tough - once you let your allies down why should they trust you in future and where's the backbone to take unpopular decisions ?

What I'm most angry about is the constant cuts in defence spending over the years which has left us with armed forces which are poorly and under equipped for what is asked of them. Even now the prime minister is talking about defence cuts when we have troops on active service in TWO theatres of operations. On the bright side Bush has gone and there appears to be someone who is thinking carefully about things taking his place - and it looks as if Brown will go too so change all round is in the air. What we should not do is just cut and run without honour. Just my opinion but as valid as anyone else's contrary view.

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Is this a rhetorical question....

spank86

indeed, and when the interest payments on our national debt is greater than our entire defence budget you have to ask exactly what idiots got us into this position.

JimF51

We here in the US and you folks in the UK (as well as all the other nations involved, have G. W. Bush and cronies to thank. After 9/11, when he stated that we were going to hunt down Bin Laden and gang, it felt right. Over here, we had a huge surge in enlistments in the military. I supported him 100%. Then he forgets the primary mission and goes traipsing after a 3rd world petty (in the overall scheme of things) despot, for whatever real or trumped up reasons. If he had followed through with the original mission, I don't believe we'd be in anywhere near the situation we're in now.

After 8 years, it's another Vietnam type situation, difficult to extract from. I served during that fiasco, and have a brother and son serving in Afghanistan now.

Erich Maria Remarque had it correct in "All Quiet On The Western Front". When politicos want a war over something, put all of them in a stadium with clubs and bats. Last man standing is the winner, and the rest of the world goes about it's business.

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Jim F

"Are you a Mod or a Rocker?"
"No, I'm a Mocker!"

Tbirdnz

The original intention to go in was based on seeking out the safe haven places of the Al Qaeda and denying them a base to train and operate from. They appear also to move between northern Pakistan at will.

Since then the original scope has expanded to bring stability to the Afghanistan people. Whether that can be accomplished or not is probably an unknown. It's not something that's going to happen anytime soon.

Generally when you get adverse results of such losses that have happened recently you will always get a call to pull out. If you are going to do that everytime bad news happens you should never have gone in in the first place.

Brown has called to the Afghan government to rid itself of corruption, practically an impossibility. This has shades of supporting the similar corrupt South Vietnamese government.

I think they need to go back to the original intent, get people on the ground to improve intelligence and seek out Al Qaeda and knock them off with Predator missiles. Leave the politics to the Afghans themselves.

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Ride on !

bradtx

"Brown has called to the Afghan government to rid itself of corruption, practically an impossibility. This has shades of supporting the similar corrupt South Vietnamese government." -- Tbirdnz


As it sits now, this is the crux of the problem. The Americans learned a lot from the UK when local gov't. were handed back their areas in Iraq, semi sidestepping a, at least unreliable, state gov't.

All the powers that be are disregarding the lessons of history ... troop deployment required for occupation/stabilization vs. the invading force, treatment of local as well as state gov't. and treatment of the occupied state's military/police forces.

Pandering to civilian troop level concerns will, in the end, cost more lives, but over a longer period of time.

Brad

saphena

What's done is done, the only question of any consequence is "what do we do now?"

There are essentially two possibilities:-

Have NATO and the western governments continue their attempts to westernize Afghanistan or leave Afghan affairs to the Afghans.

How would we view the question if the boot was on the other foot?

__________________
Bob - Ringer, not dead yet
Switch to reserve ~120 miles, fuel panic ~150

spank86

which was an unworkable strategy from the off.

All we really did was move them about and kill off the most visible figureheads.

Lets face it Al Quaeda was never going to be an organisation like the scouts. It's a terrorist/guerilla organisation. Adept at going to ground and popping up somewhere else. We could have just as effectively isolated Afghanistan, sent in strike forces and air support to take out their training bases and leant heavily on the Taliban to reform with the help of the more moderate Muslim countries.

Instead we alienated everyone, dug ourselves into a quagmire and now If i may quote a man who once knew everything there was to know about the Arab world

"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour."

It goes on but for a man writing almost 100 years ago he seems almost prescient.