This I actually agree with Nexxo. I think that there should be more coverage from our press on the true human cost of the conflict both out there, and to families here. It could make the government more hesitant to start another conflict in the future. The trouble is though, that how many people here would actually take notice? Not many I would be willing to bet. It's the same with the people who line the streets when soldiers are coming home, both in coffins and walking, they want to feel the moment, for that moment, but that's all they are prepared to give. They have removed some of their guilt, and that keeps them happy. There are many though who know the true sentiment behind welcoming and mourning our soldiers, but many more who don't. They don't want to deal with the thought that there are people both here, and in Afghanistan, that have had their lives irrepairably changed for the worst. I see this when I am fundraising, I have lots of associates and friends who claim to be 100% behind our troops, but ask them to donate just a pound or an hour of their time to go towards actually enabling real support for them, and most of them wouldn't even bother.
I watched that video last night, before I posted. I do realise that the situation the soldiers are in can give rise to some of them choosing less honourable paths, but as the man said, it's a personal choice, so I stand by my "bad apples" description.
The art if bringing people to an understanding is to use experiences they themselves can draw upon, that they can relate too. we have all been drunk and we have all heard chaves having arguments outside our respective flats and on the streets. let us hope that we don't need bombs falling over our heads before people will reach an understanding, yes, a bit of a contradiction given my initial start of this post. I understand that. but some things should truly NOT be required to happen before things begin to sink in...for people to start thinking. Talk about contrasts during a conversation Nexxo, wow.
Very well said Stuart. I saw an interview on Newsnight with John Simpson the BBC world news editor and his opinions on Afghanistan where very interesting. When asked if UK troops should be in Afghanistan his replay was a very emphatic yes. The local Afghans we spoke to wanted us here and did not want the return of the taliban. Under the soviets there had been a lot of social change and freedom for women. The locals wanted their daughters to be educated not to be slaves to men. Simpson thought our role in Afghanistan was as a police force, maintaining order and allowing the Afghans time to form a cohesive country and it was working. The US led troop surge and change of strategy escalated the conflict to an actual war and was proving to be counter productive. Nexxo is correct that we have to be an example of accountability, honesty and fairness otherwise why are we there? The taliban wont fight by our rules but we absolutely can not consider fighting by theirs.
I'm sure you could find some Iranians who would "love" to see the US and the UK invade their country giving them "freedom" too, not to forget North Korea, where they hardly have anything to eat. What dear old John Simpson said about the Afghans love and affection for the "allied" troops is something best taken with a grain of salt, if not that, so absolutely not used as a mean to motivate and / or defend our presence there. After all, It would be equally easy to find local Afghans stating the opposite. Maybe I read you wrong...
Perhaps John Simpson feels we have amends to make. The Taliban, after all, are a result of US policy to hot-house the next generation of Muslim warriors to fight the Soviet occupiers, in US-sponsored fundie Muslim schools all over Afghanistan and Pakistan. As late as 1996 the US government thought that a Taliban government was just what Aghanistan needed. They figured it would be like Saudi Arabia: there would be Sharia law, some oppression of women and other religions, but there would be stability keeping the gas pipe lines and future Western mining operations safe. Remember this: back in the 90's the Taliban were our friends. There were Taliban delegates visiting Texas as esteemed guests to talk oil deals with US oil companies. As for Saddam: Rumsfeld shook his hands once. He too was our friend; we levered him into power and we sold him materials to make the WMD that gassed the Kurds (at the time we blamed it on Iran). And as we were selling him weapons during the Iran-Iraq war we also sold weapons to Iran. So excuse me if I view today's efforts to bring freedom and democracy to the Afghan and Iraqi people with some weariness. There are plenty of them who do the same. We are the enablers of the bad guys. What does that make us?
That's a very good point Nexxo. Our governments (both UK and US) have had the audicity to claim the higher moral ground for too long now. During the Cold War, we were arming countries that faced the threat of becoming communist states, without thought as to what the alternative would be (Afghanistan is one of these countries). We basically turned a blind eye to the human rights issues presented to us in these countries, because we were "saving" the populace from the red threat. The US even helped to arm Iraq during the Iran/ Iraq war way back in the 1980's. This was when Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam Hussain. I think it's about time the UK and US started to concern itself more with what is happening in our own backyard. We are spending billions funding crackpots, arming the wrong people, and fighting wars that should never have happened.
You have somewhat. The point was there is a general feeling that we are not wanted in Afghanistan and our presence does not do any good. Simpson's experience with talking independently to the locals was this was not true. I am not suggesting for a second this justifies the invasion or we should use it as an excuse to attack anyone else. Now we are there we have an obligation to the people to help them try and build a stable country. Unfortunately we now seem to be gearing up to leave asap by throwing large amounts of troops at the taliban, a policy which seems to be failing. Remember the talk about how we would be in Afghanistan for 20-30 years? Now we are starting to withdraw in the next few years. I think the reason we are there has been lost. Are we there to fight terrorism, rebuild the country, raid its natural resources or are we there because our presence sucks in radicals from all over the world eager to fight us?
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/taliban-study-wikileaks-to-hunt-informants/ not much else to say about it.. the guy is wrong for releasing these docs
On the original topic, I read in The Times on Wednesday that they'd found the names of informants, their locations and even fathers' names within the leaked documents already. So much for a thorough check of the logs... EDIT: For clarification, by 'they' I mean The Times, not the Taliban. Although I'd guess that if a British newspaper have, the Taliban sure as the non-existence of hell have.
This is a fiction. All primates, and perhaps some other species have mirror neurons in our brains. This means that if you watch me stick a needle in my hand, the same neurons will fire in your brain as in mine, even though you arent feeling the physical pain of the needle. This is the basis of empathy. Thoughout history we have constructed fictional borders for our capacity to empathise based on culture and communication. The earliest forms of empathy extended only to one's tribe - a fiction because tribal affiliation exists only in the mind. Fast forward to the invention of script and those borders were extended to religious affiliation. Jews saw Jews as brothers, Christians see Christians as brothers, Muslims see other Muslims as part of their extended families, and so on...Fast forward to the industrial revolution and markets and you get Nation States where the British empathise with other Brits, French with other French, Germans with Germans...The end result of these ever-expanding borders is that they encompass all of mankind. The lesser borders will persist, but it seems that someday we'll get there. These fictions, these constructs, are memes. Memes are virulent. They perpetuate only in minds fertile to their growth and expansion. Below the surface, it isnt a war between people that is being fought, but a war between the memes, between these fictions. On the middle eastern side, it's the meme that says "to be a Muslim, you must bring about the destruction of opposing faiths"...on the western side it's both religious and market-driven memes. The solution to these conflict of cultures is eradication of the memes who put their own interests over genetic self-interest and the expansion of our empathic borders, afterall, we're all biologically connected through a genetic adam and eve. Conflict only fortifies the tribal and religious empathic borders, and leaves us stratified. This is why I questioned your bias towards coalition soldiers, by supporting only one side you too are strengthening the borders that separate us, despite not fighting yourself. Surely giving your assistance to casualties of the opposing side will serve to de-radicalize that culture and prevent further coflict in the long term. Consider this. There is an Afghan mother. Her son fought for the Taliban before he lost his lower leg to a bullet and infection. The taliban have abandoned him, because he can no longer be a productive soldier. However a westerner helped her buy her son a prosthetic leg - a Westerner? really? Her son is back off fighting with the Taliban thanks to his renewed mobility, but the woman has become dissillusioned with the Taliban cause, afterall, who helped her when she needed it? This causes a rift between her and her son at the more fundamental tribal border level. She is no longer proud of her son's accomplishments, and the son no longer recieves that parental approval that every child longs for. In the end her son wasn't de-radicalized and dies fighting. The mother mourns his death, but also tells other mothers of the western charity, and how the Taliban got her son killed in her eyes. They, in turn, discourage their sons from joining the Taliban...afterall what mother wants their son to die for a cause that will abandon them? - Now scale that story across the board and what do you think will happen? That's right...there is no longer fertile ground for the "Jihad" meme to flourish. Middle eastern people arent inherently evil, just like western people arent inherently evil, it all depends on context and on the memes that inhabit them. So while it may be bad that wikileaks releasing information that may put coalition soldiers lives at risk, on the flipside its good that they released information that may save taliban lives. It's subjective. It's moot. The real challenge is finding common ground on which to expand our empathic borders, not bickering over how best to perpetuate our own limited, fictional, identities. Every Taliban soldier killed is on a very real genetic level, a relative of yours.
We are there because the previous US administration thought it was a good idea. Ostensibly it was to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, but given that two years later Bush himself said that actually he was not a priority (in a rare moment of lucidity he said that troops stomping all over the place to find him was a dumb idea --someone must have had a word) we can dismiss that. The real reason was probably to do with gas pipelines and the massive natural resources buried there. But what seemed like a quick and simple command-and-conquer turned into a long, resource-draining mess. I guess the Soviets' previous Fail did not connect the dots for them. Anywho, the world economy crashed, US citizens started wondering why they were paying for some endless no-win, no-hope skirmish in a remote dust bowl full of towelheads they couldn't care less about (and 9/11? After the banks went down taking their savings with them they perhaps wondered whether those guys taking down the Twin Towers possibly didn't have a point after all), the US administration changed hands and suddenly this whole invasion became the last President's mistake. We haven't got a reason for being there any more. We just haven't found a politically face-saving enough reason for leaving yet.
All this is very true. What continues and reinforces tribal conflict is them-vs-us thinking. Also, research has shown that the best way to fight terrorism is to educate women. This is because before a Muslim son becomes a suicide bomber or martyr, he has to ask his mother for her blessing. It is a religious rule; he cannot proceed without it. However educated women are informed women with ambitions for their children. They are much less likely to give their sons their blessing to become a terrorist martyr. VipersGratitude's example is related. Middle-Eastern culture is all about relationship: who is your friend, who is your family, with both meaning practically the same thing. It permeates the way they live, do business and socialise. To make eye-contact with a Middle-Easterner is to make a friend. Treat him like a friend and he is your brother for life. Shake hands on a business deal and his word is as solid as gold. It actually is kind of like that. We would do well to get that. Hearts and minds are not won with shock and awe. They are won by building relationships from the ground up.
Yeah, whatever. Most Iraqi interpreters who worked for the occupying forces are fugitives living in fear of reprisal from radicalised elements in Iraq. Many had to grab their families and flee into exile. The US and UK refuse to give them sanctuary. After years of faithful and often dangerous service they have been abandoned to their fate.
Further to that point, I've noticed how much this thread has focused on the danger to soldiers with little regard to informants. Even if the Taliban gain knowledge about SOPs and suchlike, the danger to a named informant is likely to be far greater. If they are named, they are likely to be at least killed and most likely tortured and have their families killed. I guess the relative concern is exactly the point made by VipersGratitude.
I did mention that people who spoke to the ISAF forces risked being killed, whether innocent of informing or not. As for Vipersgratitude's theory, as far as I am concerned, I wouldn't waste my piss on a taliban fighter if he was laid on fire in front of me, read what you like from that, but it's the truth
And that is why we will fail. Being merciful to a Taliban fighter in distress would stand a greater chance at making him question his perception of us, his values and his actions than if you acted vengefully, which is what he expects. Jesus taught us to turn the other cheek for a reason. But hey, so much for our Christian values that our side keeps banging on about. We don't even know what that means.
Nexxo, how would you know what this theoretical taliban fighter had done before he was injured? Could he have helped strap semtex to a child? Or maybe he was one of the ones who had beheaded other innocents? I wouldn't lose any sleep over seeing one of them die, and I certainly don't feel a hypocrite either
Likewise, how would you know what soldiers coming home from war have done? Raped a few women? Pissed on a few mentally ill prisoners? Riddled a family with bullets? Who knows... "Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious" - Oscar Wilde
