The Afghan National Army is on a roll! Terrorists better pull thier skirts down!

[nc-1701]

Finaly some good news in 'Stan. I think that we might actually be able to win here. Unfortunatly no such good news from Iraq.

 

[cidknee]

I have a cousin who has done 2 tours in Afghanistan. One as a engineer, and one as a sniper. He was attached to a US special forces team. Man the stories he can tell. And yes hes Canadain.

Now, it is true that a vast majority of the males in Afghanistan carry weapons around,( its kinda a status symbol, kinda like cell phones over here) how many of them go to a school and shoot in groups? hmm I have been told that its against the Islamic religion to bring weapons to a mosque or a "holy" property. SO if you go by that logic, yeah, they werent civillians. And if they were, why were they stupid enough to KNOW that the US and others are watching them, and something like that would look ENTIRELY suspicious and well yes, its just asking to be killed.

Good news from afghanistan, and well maybe we should send some of those soldiers to Iraq? Also whats needed in the afghan army, is to find those corrupt generals, colones etc, and court martial them. shoot em, make the underlings see that corruption wont be stood for. Also, with all these nationalities, you are going to have trouble, anyone who doesnt think that there were alot of " problems" in the US army back in the 80s is a fool. The hispanics and the blacks didnt get along, and then you throw in the fact that alot of the officers were white, ughh it was a mess. How did they solve this? Well, they made the same rules apply to everyone. No exceptions. U break the rules, it doesnt matter if u are purple and have 6 arms... u are still going to be punished same as the hispanic white or black guy who commited the same crime. But like they said, its growing pains.

Good Job

 

[Che Guava]

Cidknee: Interesting stuff, I'd love to hear about some of those stories...!

From what I hear, afghans seem to have a pretty relaex attitude towards weapons and the 'danger' involved with them in general. An old friend of mine served in Afghanistan just post-soviet withdrawl with the Canadian army engineers, removing antipersonal mines from roads. Apparently the place was littered with 'butterfly' mines: ones just large enough to cause damage to your foot. The engineers had recruited some local men from villages to help them, and while the canaidans carefully detected and removed the mines from the ground, the afghanis, before bringing them to the disposal area, decided to amuse themselves by tossing them at each other, trying to catch each other unawares. Predictably, after a long toss, one of the helpers caught a mine a little too hard and set it off: it exploded in his hand, taking his thumb clear off and cautarizing the wound immediately. There was a moment of silence, then the rest of the afghanis fell to the ground laughing hysterically at thier friend, who sheepishly went back to work

 

[cidknee]

Cidknee: Interesting stuff, I'd love to hear about some of those stories...!

From what I hear, afghans seem to have a pretty relaex attitude towards weapons and the 'danger' involved with them in general. An old friend of mine served in Afghanistan just post-soviet withdrawl with the Canadian army engineers, removing antipersonal mines from roads. Apparently the place was littered with 'butterfly' mines: ones just large enough to cause damage to your foot. The engineers had recruited some local men from villages to help them, and while the canaidans carefully detected and removed the mines from the ground, the afghanis, before bringing them to the disposal area, decided to amuse themselves by tossing them at each other, trying to catch each other unawares. Predictably, after a long toss, one of the helpers caught a mine a little too hard and set it off: it exploded in his hand, taking his thumb clear off and cautarizing the wound immediately. There was a moment of silence, then the rest of the afghanis fell to the ground laughing hysterically at thier friend, who sheepishly went back to work

lol yeah those silly afghans... and if I could tell you alot of them, I would. But im sorry I cant. Turns out he was paired with an old squad mate of mine, running through the hills. And thats how he and I got talking at a family thing. We went off on our own and had a few real good laughs.

The afghans have always been known to be fearless. The russians werent scared of being killed by the afghans, they were scared to death of being captured.

 

[Yoda Power]

I did not take a look at all posts in this thread, so my points may have already been mentioned. I wish to make a comment anyway, because I feel it is important that people realise how to understand such news. I am currently writing a report on the NATO strategy in Afghanistan, so I considder myself to have some sort of insight in the situation.

The current NATO/Western strategy in Afghanistan has proved to make many mistakes so far, these are the two main ones:

• There are 32000 ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) soldiers in Afghanistan, controlled by NATO. This is 1 per 1000 Afghan citizen. Normally the rule when doing counterinsergency is 20 soldiers per 1000 inhabitant. As you can see the is not enough soldiers in the country. The result is that NATO has to use more aircraft in their war. This means more civilian looses, as it is harder for an airplane to see who's a terrorist, and who's not. The more civlians we kill, the more support Taliban gets. Many officers have already pointed this great mistake out, but the politicians are not willing to send more troops.
  
• ISAF has so far focused mainly on destroying Taliban bases that is an imediate threat to the big cities. An example of this is the Operation Medusa (just last month), which should destroy a Taliban base/town near the big city of Kandahar. From a military point of view the operation was a succes. The Taliban were driven away, and a high number of Talibans were killed. However if we take a closer look at what really happened we will discover that there is more to the story than this. All the Taliban leaders and their most important fighters fleed into the mountains, where they are out of our reach, in the first stages of the operation. The ones that remained were local Taliban forces, who actually lived in the town, these refused to flee because they wanted to defend their homes. These were the ones that were killed. After the operation was declared over on sep. 17, Taliban has been able to recrute many young men from the town. People who were related in some way to the dead Taliban fighters. Since sep. 17 there has been constant fighting in the town between local Taliban fighters and ISAF, it looks like Taliban might be able to recapture the town in a few months. If they do that they will be stronger in the area than ever before. First of all because they will have recruted more men that have been killed, but also because they will be seen as liberators.
  This is just one of many exmaples, where fighting the Taliban have made them stronger, even though we have killed some of them.

The goverment led by Hamid Karzai has also been making many mistakes. Some include:

• The election which Karzai won was not a real democratic election. There was much corruption, and some got to vote many times. In the southern part of the country, he is widely viewed as being an american doll. Besides that he doesn't have much power in the country, as most decisions are made by local warlords anyway.
  
• The Afghan army is consisting of many different nationalities (remember their are many different tribes, and languages spoken in Afghanistan). The biggest part of the army has recruits from the northern part. When these come to the southern/Pashtun parts of the country, then they act as if they were occupiers in another country, as loyalty to the tribe is much bigger than loyalty to the country (as in most of the Islamic world). This means that the local population in many areas is actually frightened of the Afghan army. There have been numerous reports of assaults made by the army on the local population. So who are going to help the scared Afghans? Not the western powers, because we are allied to the Afghan army. This is a big recruitment incitament for the Taliban.
  
• The opium production has increased extremly since 2001. It is much easier to grow opium than food, becuase opium qoesn't require a lot of water, which is an expensive thing in this dry underdeveloped country. The profit is also 4 times higher than growing food, so naturally the farmers want to do this. So who are buying ther opium? Not the west, we don't like drug traficking. Obviously the Taliban is buying it, and selling it too other drug dealers outside Afghanistan. This means that all the opium farmers are dependant on the Taliban, instead of the goverment. Ofcause the farmers are not interested in loosing their customers.

My solution: Well ofcause I don't have some sort of grand solution, such thing doesn't exist. But I can point out a few things that actually can be done. 1) Send more troops. 2) Buy the opium and destroy it, before the Taliban does. This is a much better use than what we are currently doing with all the money we try to help the farmers. When the war is over, then we can start to make the farmers grow food instead. 3) Don't attack the Taliban, make them attack us instead. This way the local population will not see us as aggresive invaders.

I really hope I opened some eyes with this post. I don't like bragging but I'm not laying when I say I have studied this very hard. I've read more than 20 articles on the subject, and even emailed journalists who where writing about the war. Ofcause the situation is more complicated than just these points. But they are deifently the most important ones.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

As an organisation it was effectively destroyed.
The base was destroyed and hundreds were rounded up.
But this civil war is really really old between the two groups.
Just wondering why we are siding with one group over the other. Is it just for convenience?

Taliban does not equal mujahedeen and neither is Al Qaeda. And the northern alliance fought the soviets along with the pushtun resistance fighters from where the taliban was formed. There are many more than two groups and they change places now and then. The struggle with the government and those that don't like the government change hands depending on who has power. I doubt it is for convenience.

Good news from afghanistan, and well maybe we should send some of those soldiers to Iraq?

Afghani soldiers in iraq supporting the rebuilding of the country would be quite a positive step. At first blush, I would have thought that would be a bad idea since we really don't want to be that brutal in our execution of the goals in Iraq, but the PR value would be immense and might discourage the resistance, what with the reputation the Afghans have.

 

[Yoda Power]

I need a refresher here. Why after we got Al Qaida in 2002 are we still fighting the Taliban?

I know some pople have already answered you, but I think you are forgetting one thing.

If we had just left Afghanistan in 2002, then Taliban would be in control today, and there is no reason to believe they wouldn't sponser a new Al Qaeda group. So what is your solution? To wait for another attack and then invade again?