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Events in Libya

Discussion in 'Serious' started by TheMusician, 22 Feb 2011.

  1. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    For the record, xp-T, I don't think you're a psychopath. A psychopath wouldn't care. But as an ex-military man you should make yourself familiar with the teachings of General Sun Tsu: The Art of War. Know your enemy, choose your battles wisely, and know when not to fight.

    First: know your enemy. The Taliban are a problem of our own making. They are training kids? Sure, in Madrassa we financed, with children's books exalting Jihad printed in the good ol' US of A. All to fight the Soviets in the Eighties. The West thought they would be a stabilising influence on the country, so what if they're fundamentalists? In 1996 the Taliban were visiting Texas to discuss oil and gas deals. They don't think like you and me. They have a religion in which we are the evil one's who should be nuked. And although the locals may not like them much, they like us even less because we are just another foreign invader messing up their country since the Sixties. The Taliban share their culture, language, religion. You forget that most Afghans don't really undestand why we are there. They rightly perceive themselves to have nothing to do with some Saudi nutters blowing up a distant village on another continent called:"New York". Most Afghans are dirt-poor illiterate farmers eking out a living in the dust. The Taliban are a fact of their daily lives, and by all appearances there to stay. At some point we'll have to talk to them too.

    Choose your battles wisely: it's pretty hard to kill a guerrilla army that hides amongst innocent citizens in a huge country. They all look the same to us. So what do we do, carpet bomb them? Worked so well in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon (Hezbollah). Shoot car bombers? How do you know those guys at the road side are not trying to fix their battered jalopy that has broken down once again, instead of trying to plant a bomb in it? Shoot the wrong guy and you have already lost.

    Know when not to fight. The Taliban have a religion that is all about fighting infidels. It's their reason for living and dying. Evil is not out to win. Evil's purpose is to keep playing the game. You cannot beat them because for them it is not about winning --it is about fighting. The purpose of power is to have power. Boot stomping on face, forever.

    So what you have to do is reverse the trend we (quite deliberately) helped set up in the Eighties: give young people in Afghanistan a better prospect than being a struggling illiterate goat herd or a Taliban Jihadist warrior. Give them a future to live for, rather than to die for. Educate the women, because it has been shown that the children of educated mothers are less likely to join the Jihad. Improve health care so babies survive, and people start to have long-term ambitions for them. Make people feel safe so that they can start thinking about a future rather than just day-to-day survival. Waking up every night to gunfire does not help with that.

    The real solution, xp-T, does not lie in killing people wholesale. Never has. You cannot defeat an enemy who are not out to win, but to fight forever, because they have nothing else in their lives. People stop fighting if they have a future to work together for.
     
  2. SolidShot

    SolidShot Minimodder

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    Hmmm. I wonder how much further your would have got in you PMRC with an attitude like that anyway.

    Bootnecks dont just blindly hate 'terry' and think that tactical nukes are the way forward. Part of defeating an enemy is understanding them.

    Having said that, some of the taliban show some of the worst traits in humainity.
     
    Last edited: 23 Aug 2011
  3. Da_Rude_Baboon

    Da_Rude_Baboon What the?

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    Wow that was an epic couple of pages. It was like a parody of trolling, including the mention of nazi's, "i have a girlfriend in real life" and a gay dog.

    I'm quite shocked and saddened that happened to you in Edinburgh. FWIW I apologise on behalf of our country.
     
  4. stonedsurd

    stonedsurd Is a cackling Yuletide Belgian

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    At the risk of veering off topic, you don't need to apologize. I was a thin-skinned pansy then and hadn't woken up to the cold reality that every place in the world has its share of twerps.

    Scotland is beautiful and bar one incident the people are lovely. My first tryst with love was in Scotland, so it will always be special to me anyway. Nothing a porcine pair of pricks in Edinburgh could ruin.
     
  5. xp-T

    xp-T What's a Dremel?

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    Good point, you're right but what do we do? They just want to kill us and they'll fight for the sake of fighting.

    The bible says kill all gays but that was stopped lol

    I was saying some people that think a man loving his dog is gay, not that my dog is gay.

    But you already knew that didn't you :naughty: lol

    Well I never made it out there, five month into training and I was down and out with a broken leg.

    I just get what the oppos tell me and it's never good.

    By the way, when I was there I never said a word about what I thought, i'm smarter than that lol not much time to talk.

    Well sorry but I was never going to tell you, I don't know. But the current way of dealing with it isn't working.

    People in jail being made to fight wouldn't hurt though. Life timers in for murder ect
     
  6. Da_Rude_Baboon

    Da_Rude_Baboon What the?

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    Of course! :D
     
  7. mucgoo

    mucgoo Minimodder

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    A very very small minority wanted to kill Westerners originally. Say 1 in 10,000 people in the Arabic regions were actively work at try to killing foreigners pre 9/11.
    Now I think its fair to say that number has increased a hundredfold.

    Using violence to stop violence doesn't work. How would you react if say (just pretend) China occupied the UK in response to a single terrorist groups action killing say 10,000 Chinese. Chance are you'll react violently trying to harm Chinese were before you had no reason to.
     
  8. xp-T

    xp-T What's a Dremel?

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    I think they hate us more because they don't really understand that these people we're there to kill are a large problem. We can't go smile at them and say ok get on with it.

    Their murderers, over there someone who commits murder is put to death. If you steal then you lose a hand.


    Why do they think their people can commit crimes in other countrys and hate us for trying to put a stop to it. They kill their own for god sake. What's wrong with them.

    The fact that we killed sad-man-do-insane-things should make us seem better people because of how he killed his own people. The taliban do the same thing, even the natives stoned a taliban officer to death.
     
  9. ccxo

    ccxo On top of a hill

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    Can we get back on topic, as there has been important developments.

    Gaddafi's compound has fallen to the rebels, which takes another area of tripoli into rebel hands.

    Meanwhile, members of the rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) in Benghazi said they planned to fly to the capital on Wednesday to start work on forming a new government

    Its looking like the fight may well be over now.
     
  10. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    Nothing is wrong with them. They just object to getting caught in the crossfire. Every war in history has counted innocent civilians amongst the casualties. "Collateral damage", we call it euphemistically. Well, Ahmed the goat herd don't understand no international politics. He never heard of no Twin Towers. He doesn't care much for the Taliban either, but as long as they leave him alone it's all the same to him. But what Ahmed does object to, most strongly, is some foreigners wading into his country and bombing his home and killing his family because they thought it was a terrorist target.

    The natives get killed by the Taliban. They get killed by us, as collateral damage. The difference to them is?

    And an interesting detail is that the Taliban are, by and large, a monster that we, the West, helped spawn. We funded the fundamentalist Madrassa; we printed the children's school books exhaling the Jihad. We supported the Taliban in 1996, when we thought they would bring order to Afghanistan --not for the people, but for the gas pipelines. That they were woman-beating, oppressive *******s was well known but not an issue then.

    The Taliban weren't even at war with us. They had no involvement with Osama Bin Laden when he did his 9/11 thing. Bush (for specific reasons of his own) decided to make them the enemy, because they got in the way of said pipelines. Bin Laden was a convenient excuse.

    Seriously: know your enemy. Know your history. Know the politics. Else you know nothing.
     
  11. sp4nky

    sp4nky BF3: Aardfrith WoT: McGubbins

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    Quite a few countries have the death penalty but we like a lot of them, including for example, the USA. We don't complain when they kill their own people, do we?

    Then we go an invade a country that fully complied with United Nations resolutions, killed around a million people there and you're surprised that they are upset?

    As for Afghanistan, we bombed the Taliban's training camps, we killed (eventually) their leader, and we're still occupying their country. Again, it's not a surprise to me that some of their citizens think we're not 100% beneficial to them.
     
  12. Elton

    Elton Officially a Whisky Nerd

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    It's the occupation. Most people don't appreciate massive sweeping changes. Especially when that changes blows your homes into smithereens.
     
  13. MiNiMaL_FuSS

    MiNiMaL_FuSS ƬӇЄƦЄ ƁЄ ƇƠƜƧ ӇЄƦЄ.

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    That's only a typical western point of view based upon own cultural context - we see them as large problem, we see them as murders because they are to us based upon our understanding.

    Our opinion and our understanding is just that, ours, doesn't make it a universal view of the world.

    put in an extremely simple example:

    It may be that Afga's see something like this: we live in a relatively lawless country (at least in the poor parts) and the Taliban enforce some sort of law and order, so if somebody steals form me, the taliban will punish him.....am I not better off with the taliban than with no law? Unless I commit a crime then what harm are the taliban to me? None, they simply help to deter crime.

    Now, we don't see it that way, because we have law and order to a much greater extent, we have choice and control over the government controlling that law and order to some extent. So the Taliban look brutal to us - but if you've never experienced 'westernised living', then the taliban are not brutal...as there isn't a comparison to be made? The taliban are brutal compared to what? The Russian's that murdered many? The various wars before the Taliban?

    So put into their own context, Afgan's may not be aware that the Taliban 'are a problem', in fact the taliban have brought them a period of relative stability. Enter the West....



    All in all it has to be about giving the general populus a future - if there's actually a reason to support the West then they will.
     
  14. Stonerd

    Stonerd The monkey's out of the bottle, man

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    I agreed with everything you said until this point. Why should they support the West? in any context whatsoever? if anything we should be supporting them to find their own version of democracy within their own society. To expect them to want to be anything like us, let alone support us, after the havoc that's been caused in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is delirious. They have every reason to hate us, and I don't blame them.
     
  15. sp4nky

    sp4nky BF3: Aardfrith WoT: McGubbins

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    They already have a future. It may not be the one we want but if we go in and kill a bunch of people, we'll always be seen as invaders, not liberators.

    Imagine if China (or space aliens for that matter) came to England and said your way of life isn't working, we're going to kill the administration, the police, etc. and free you from their tyranny, I think most people would be quite upset and harbour grudges for a very long time.
     
  16. thehippoz

    thehippoz What's a Dremel?

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    as long as they got simon cowell
     
  17. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    Seems like a fair trade-off.
     
  18. eddie543

    eddie543 Snake eyes

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    I think some pro interventionist people are unaware of the" boot on the other foot point of veiw" or the stepping into their shoes point of veiw.

    A lot of western governments cannot see this.

    Countries that intervene by trying to bring democracy into countries that have never seen it seem to expect time and time again that everybody will love the prospect of being able to vote some **** in and out of power for the sake of their country being ravaged.

    Western states rarely formed democracy overnight and even when it was formed it took decades or centuries to become how it is today and it still isn't perfect.

    The world wasn't created in 6 days it has eveolved much the same as our relatively liberal societies evolved over decades and centuries.

    It will always be found that it is impossible to change Culture in a few months or even years of warfare and "peacekeeping". A dictatorship will not turn into a peaceful non corrupt democracy by destroying regimes.

    We may easily be finding ourselves picking up the peices of a broken country in supporting rebelions such as these.
     
  19. Elton

    Elton Officially a Whisky Nerd

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    Or we'll be conveniently picking up the oil that's been left over and leave once it's gone.
     
  20. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    ‘All over the world, men and women still find causes worth killing and dying for. And who are we to argue with them? Have we lived in their circumstances? Have we felt what they feel? No. It is not our place to say if they are right or wrong.

    ‘At Shorn Conflict Investment, we are concerned with only two things. Will they win? And will it pay? --Market Forces, Richard Morgan
     

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