Hope For Afghanistan?

[Perknose]

Taliban and Afghanistan restart secret talks in Qatar

This gives me some small sliver of hope:

No Pakistani official took part in either the October or September meetings, according to a member of the Taliban’s leadership council, the Quetta Shura. He said Islamabad has lost much of its traditional influence over a movement it has been associated with since it rose to power in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.

The only true "solution" for Afghanistan is one brokered between Afghanis. We are the Christian outsiders, the last in a long line of other countries (Britain, the USSR) who have tried to impose our will on Afghanistan and failed.


And, make no mistake about it, we have failed, at the cost of billions of dollars, thousands of American lives and casualties, and untold number of Afghani dead.

To me, the situation mirrors the obscene quagmire of Vietnam, wherein we are left holding the bag of propping up a corrupt, minority, quisling regime that cares more about the money we provide than the overall welfare of their country. We have done so because we have seen the culture of the arguably more popular, and while brutal, also arguably less corrupt opposition (VC, Taliban) as inimical to our values (communism, fundamentalist Islam).

We need to disengage and (hopefully) let the Afghanis on all sides decide the future of their tribal riven "country."

And, yeah, there will be winners and . . . losers. Women and more progressive and Western leaning folks will dead nuts be losers in the short run. But, if there's one thing we should have learned by now, it is that we can't unilaterally impose our social and political culture on another "country's" culture . . . and that when we try to by force of arms, everyone loses.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

The history of the region plays a huge role. I'm glad there are talks going on but, I truly doubt there will be a lasting peace. The longest period of 'peace' in modern history is the forty year period of Marshall law under the Russians.

 

[MajinCry]

Have the US soldiers been raping and such in Afghanistan with impunity? Kinda what made the Vietnam war stand out; the lads just did whatever the hell they wanted, with the propaganda being that the US was fighting to bring the Vietnamese indsutry.

Wasn't looked too favorably upon once it all became public knowledge.

Wouldn't be surprised, to be honest, what with shit like Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Have the US soldiers been raping and such in Afghanistan with impunity? Kinda what made the Vietnam war stand out; the lads just did whatever the hell they wanted, with the propaganda being that the US was fighting to bring the Vietnamese indsutry.

Wasn't looked too favorably upon once it all became public knowledge.

Wouldn't be surprised, to be honest, what with shit like Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

You don't know shit about the Vietnam war.

 

[MajinCry]

You don't know shit about the Vietnam war.

http://links.org.au/node/3343

Adopting a panel format featuring 109 representatives of the various divisions that comprised the US order of battle in Vietnam, the veterans took their turn at the microphone, answering questions put to them by a fellow-veteran moderator, members of the public and journalists.

The hearings were filmed, providing hours of material that became the basis of a documentary, entitled Winter Soldier, released in 1972. What we have in Winter Soldier is a largely unfiltered stream of personal recollections by recently returned soldiers.

Apart from anything else, it is an immensely valuable historical source. They were witnesses to atrocity and, very often, perpetrators

...

Anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone they said, "How do you know he's a VC?" and the general reply would be, "He's dead," and that was sufficient.

When we went through the villages and searched people the women would have all their clothes taken off and the men would use their penises to probe them to make sure they didn't have anything hidden anywhere and this was raping but it was done as searching…

The main thing was that if an operation was covered by the press there were certain things we weren't supposed to do, but if there was no press there, it was okay. I saw one case where a woman was shot by a sniper, one of our snipers.

When we got up to her she was asking for water. And the Lt. said to kill her. So he ripped off her clothes, they stabbed her in both breasts, they spread-eagled her and shoved an E- tool up her vagina, an entrenching tool, and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out and they used a tree limb and then she was shot

...


It was quite usual that there would be a sniper outside a village in the foliage, in the trees, and if we took fire from one sniper we'd return fire on that sniper and then continue to spray the entire village with machine gun fire and M-16 ammunition until we either ran out of ammunition or we had flown so far away from the village that we could no longer reach them with the weapons…The free fire zones were posted on the operation map in the operations tent and this gave us a policy to kill anything that moved within that area.[3]

...


I was hanging out the window observing what appeared to be a twelve year old Vietnamese boy standing there watching us. And as we lifted up with the load, the rotor wash increased because of the weight and it blew him into the path of a 2 1/2 ton truck with trailer which killed him instantly….I caught myself letting the shell down and I, and I, tightened up right away. And started laughing about it and joking about it with the flight engineer.[5]

...

p as VCS--Viet Cong Suspects -- and the lieutenant that rounded them up called the captain on the radio and he asked what should be done with them. The captain simply repeated the order that came down from the colonel that morning.

The order that came down from the colonel that morning was to kill anything that moves, which you can take anyway you want to take it… I turned, and I looked in the area. I looked toward where the supposed VCS were, and two men were leading a young girl, approximately 19 years old, very pretty, out of a hootch.

She had no clothes on so I assumed she had been raped, which was pretty SOP [Standard Operating Procedure], and she was thrown onto the pile of the 19 women and children, and five men, around the circle, opened up on full automatic with their M-16s. And that was the end of that.[9]

It goes on. I highly recommend you read what the people who fought in the war have to say about it.

Edit: Also, the sex slavery: http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/04/09/the-scars-of-war-vietnam-comfort-women/

 

[Omar F1]

Lets remember something before we judge the Afghans: Taliban was forced upon them and had never been elected.
They hadn't even fairly fought their way to power, as Taliban knowingly received substantial aid from two states.

Perhaps Taliban isn't even their main problem, but many others are.
It seems a complicated mess for many reasons, there is no way out, at least not in the next few decades.

I wish in my lifetime to know someday where all those billions of aid money go. (goddamn military spending?)

 

[trenchfoot]

Lets remember something before we judge the Afghans: Taliban was forced upon them and had never been elected.
They hadn't even fairly fought their way to power, as Taliban knowingly received substantial aid from two states.

Perhaps Taliban isn't even their main problem, but many others are.
It seems a complicated mess for many reasons, there is no way out, at least not in the next few decades.

I wish in my lifetime to know someday where all those billions of aid money go. (goddamn military spending?)

In any "normal" corrupted gov't, the "spoils" are confiscated by the leadership which uses these spoils to stay in power and shower upon themselves all of those luxuries they dreamed that they deserved. What little remains trickles down the descending order of the power structure until there is nothing left to be found by the time it's supposed to reach the folks who would most benefit from those "spoils" like real schools, electricity, food, jobs.