Afghanistan Plan Tonight: What do you want Trump to say?

1. We are leaving.
2. We will add a few thousand troops and continue training the Afghan army.
3. We will turn over the war to Eric Prince.
4. We will add 50,000 troops, secure Afghanistan and then invade Russia to stop aggression.

 

2 is the only viable option.

 

Every single one of those has major issues and are losing proposals.

Leave? Becomes latest terrorist hotbed and Libya 2.0. Both the Taliban and ISIS will share control with sights on the U.S.

More troops? Worthless, costly gesture with nothing to gain.

Finance private armies? Same deal as adding troops. Except this option has little control over their actions and rules of engagement, while still owning any miscues or atrocities.

Massive troop deployment to secure it? Never happen and multiplies all the worst aspects of options 2 and 3...large American casualties and way too expensive.

I guess I'd have to say leave altogether, eat our losses, deal with the new threats from the sky as they develop, and save a ton of money.

 

Well crap, Trump is taking advice from Seattlehusker now. I may has well have voted for Hillary.

 

Most of us want our troops to bolt now but the terrorist vacuum issue is a monster.

In a situation with no good solution, I can see real worth in waiting to severely weaken ISIS and wipe them out in Raqqa (and elsewhere in Syria) before leaving Afghanistan.

ISIS is now a player in Afghanistan and the organization needs to be knee-capped before we take off. As long as ISIS is still inspiring and appearing strong in the region, the vacuum left there would be too risky to toss up in a free-for-all.

Weaken ISIS by wiping out their capital and vast numbers of soldiers trapped in it. Then when it's time to bolt at least the Taliban has a better shot of retaking control again if they topple the Afghan gov. The Taliban is nowhere near the homeland threat as ISIS.

 

Trump himself stated to defeat ISIS their funding must be cut off and Pakistan needs to help. But look what we've got.
A) Allies in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the emirates that continue giving aid to terrorists.
B) Pakistan ISI has penetrated our government for some time now and used intelligence to strengthen their capabilities and comromise ours.

 

The idea of a total troop withdrawal is insane. We should pull out troops like we pulled out our troops in Japan. (In other words, we shouldn't.) Unless we're OK with accepting that we spent hundreds of billions of dollars, let a bunch of our troops get killed for nothing, and don't mind Afghanistan turning into ISIS 2.0, that can't be on the table. That means a permanent presence of US troops. Troop levels can vary as they have in Japan, Germany, and South Korea, but we can't pull out altogether and definitely can't pull out so long as there's any significant presence of the Taliban or any other advocates of radical Islam.

Having said that, we need to have a strategy to subdue the country to make it unreceptive to radicalism again. I don't know how we do that, but we've done that before and need to do it again.

 

Now if only a plan can be put into place to neutralize the radical elements trying to undo American life...

 

Have to completely disagree. Consider the past 16 years as an enormous sunk cost. Now we will double down and lose even more. Afghanistan is a land locked country. Whatever weapons terrorists possess there were attained because either we are our "allies" brought them. Our presence and often indiscriminate killing typically creates more terrorists than it removes. As bin Laden hoped, we have been drawn in and will financially ruin the west.

 

What a surprise that you favor US withdrawal. Didn't see that coming.

 

Quoting Deez:
"Having said that, we need to have a strategy to subdue the country to make it unreceptive to radicalism again. I don't know how we do that, but we've done that before and need to do it again."

Generally, it's a good idea to have a clear objective and strategy to achieve it before putting lives at risk and spending (borrowing) hundreds of billions of dollars. Just as you have no idea how to successfully rid Afghanistan of terrorism, neither do the foolish generals that have been running the clown show.

 

Of course we should have a strategy to successfully rid Afghanistan of terrorism. Most likely our generals do know how to do it, but they also have to work with what's politically feasible. It doesn't matter what their plan is if the public wouldn't go along, and it wouldn't.

Either way, I don't expect you to favor any US military involvement in Afghanistan, because about the only US military engagement in recent years that you haven't criticized is WWII. And I suspect you only make an exception for that because if the US hadn't gone, Russia would be an eastern province of a Greater German Reich today. And of course, Vladimir Putin would either never have been born or if he was lucky, he might be a decrepit old man in a slave labor camp somewhere. I'm not sure if that would have been better for the Russian mail-order bride business or worse. Kinda hard to say..

 

How many US wars since WWII have had favorable outcomes? Grenada?

This is Afghanistan.

Undefined aims, undefined troop numbers, undefined time limits - bashing Pakistan (which will bash back) and no new idea at all. As long as the U.S. does not pull out the war will continue without any end in sight:

If perpetual war yielding poor results and blowing up the national debt is what it takes to maintain the status quo, maybe it's time to end the status quo before it is crushed under its own weight.

 

That depends on how you measure a favorable outcome. If a favorable outcome is a perfect outcome, none have been favorable. Even WWII had a lot of downside. It crushed Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, but it greatly accelerated and made irreversible the decline of the United Kingdom as a global power, which led to massive instability all over Asia and Africa. Furthermore, it turned the Soviet Union into a superpower and launched international communism as a major global ideology that we're still having to tangle with both in the US and abroad.

If a favorable outcome is an outcome significantly better than the alternative, then plenty of our engagements have produced favorable outcomes. You mentioned Grenada, but frankly, the only ones in which it's even debatable are Vietnam and the Iraq War, and both of those mostly yielded a bad outcome, because we got tired and quit. What if we hadn't gone into Afghanistan at all? Well, Osama Bin Laden would still be alive launching and funding terrorist attacks all over the world, and he'd probably be a lot more powerful today than he was 16 years ago. Furthermore, we would have sent the message to the world that you can kick us in the nuts anytime you want and get away with it. Accordingly, other bad apples would have started kicking us in the nuts.

How'd pulling out work out in Iraq? Not so well.

 

The second Iraq war had a favorable outcome? For whom, ISIS? That's the dumbest statement I've ever heard from you.

Bin Laden would still be launching terror strikes? Hell, 9-11 was accomplished with box cutters and Saudi finance which provided visas and funds to attend flying school. The Saudis are the problem. Get real. As long as they are considered partners against terror the whole concept is a farce.

 

I'm not saying it had a favorable outcome. There's no question that we shouldn't have gone. What I'm saying the biggest reason why it didn't have a favorable outcome is that we got tired and quit. There was downside to leaving.

I'm not pro-Saudi by any means. However, Bin Laden was a bad guy, and he had a lot of money and used that money to launch terror attacks on the United States. Regardless of what the Saudis are doing, we're much better off with him dead than alive. Suggesting otherwise might be the dumbest statement I've ever heard from you, and that's a high standard.

 

Capturing or killing bin laden is totally different than waging war and toppling governments.

Did you forget why we left Iraq? Morale among the troops was low, occupation is expensive and drains resources, and the public wanted to bring troops home. That's why Obama won in the first place. Invading Iraq was a lose-lose proposition. If we stayed we lose and if we left the region wound up worse than before. So you are wrong again. Again and again and again.

 

If we hadn't toppled the Taliban, we would never have captured or killed Bin Laden. Furthermore, the Taliban harbored Al Qaeda. They enabled the bad guys.

In other words, we left because we got tired and quit as I said. The public wanted the troops brought home, and then we had to send them back, because the place turned to crap after we left.

Two other points. First, when I hear you and the Ron Paul idiots babble about how much the war costs, I wonder if any of you have ever read even a superficial summary of the federal budget or even looked at a pie chart. The War in Iraq cost a lot of money but not by our federal budget standards. That doesn't make it a smart use of money, but it didn't break our bank - didn't even dent our bank. Financially, we could stay there for a millennium with no problem whatsoever.

Second, Obama would have won whether we went into Iraq or not. The financial crisis and recession tanked any hopes that the GOP had of holding power, as did making an angry Walmart greeter the GOP nominee.

 

We are arguing about maintaining an empire. The concept of empire is one that has never been acknowledged as official policy and is denied by most Americans. But that is what we have and it is crumbling, both from within and abroad. By trying to maintain and even expand this empire, we merely accelerate the inevitable decline. It's wasting resources on a futile objective to control the globe.

 

Just mindless sloganeering. Again, I wonder if you've ever looked at even a summary of our budget. You had a stronger case 30 years ago. Our military budget is actually becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of our budget and GDP.

 

LOL. You are in complete denial.
First, GDP is increasingly less meaningful an indication of economic strength. Second, an unknown amount of military related spending is off budget, and even what is within budget much is unaccounted for.

More important than GDP are indicators of living standard. How much debt to income do people have? Which way is this trending? How sound are the various security nets (public and private pensions, social security, Medicare)?
What about the public perception of the stability of the justice system? The Congress?

All of these indicators have been trending downward and fools like you want to keep pouring billions into a global empire in order to maintain power for the less than 1% who control it and perhaps the 10-15% who benefit by doing the work for them.

 

I think staying is the only option as well. I have different view of what a desirable outcome is because I view a couple of those as untenable/unreachable.

I believe a strategic and efficient staying force is all we need to do. Keep our Special Ops/trainer assets engaged with training the "good guys" and when necessary, unleash them on groups that are coalescing into sizable cells. It doesn't' take a massive force structure to break stuff. Every time we see them consolidate to 20-30 members and take a couple of significant actions, we whack them. No it doesn't "win" but it doesn't "lose" either. I don't think we (outsiders) are ever going to have an impact on changing minds. We don't have to defeat them, we just have to keep them from hurting us here.

I would add that I'm still in favor of starting a Hong Kong of the Middle East type enclave and let like minded people just move to this new and better city. If I were king for a day, I would carve out 300 square miles of desert and start a new city. I think people would flock there. Before you know it, it would have democratic institutions, commerce and eventually people from surrounding areas would move to it just like they did Hong Kong.

You don't have to dislocate anyone, or conquer anyone. You just buy/rent some unused land in SW Afghanistan. It can't be any more expensive than some of the dumb stuff we've done in the past 16 years. I would make it the land of opportunity for all the fleeing Syrians, Moroccans, etc

 

Now that most of Syria has been secured, tens of thousands of refugees are returning. The western media narrative was that they had fled Assad because he was killing his own people. More fake news.

 

I was told this war was already over

 

to be fair, these kinds of wars are never "over". You can't get in the middle of what amounts to a civil war in another country and ever expect to "win" the war. You can't tell the bad guys from the guys and many of the good guys are only good because they profit and will turn into bad guys as soon as the money dries up. it is a no win conflict. That's why we've generally stayed out of internal conflicts.

In the future, if we can identify a country harboring/aiding terrorists, we just go whack somebody from the air and come home. It's what we should have done with Assad.

 

We are smack dab in the middle of centuries old conflicts. Any assumption that conflict will end in the foreseeable future is fools gold.

 

You're blabbing about a lot of unrelated problems. Some of them are real. Some aren't. Most aren't related to the topic First, the GDP does matter when it comes to revenue generation and therefore the ability to finance the military because it's the tax base. Second, I didn't just mention GDP. I mentioned that the military is a smaller percentage of federal spending than in previous years. You talk as though we're blowing half our budget on the military, and you're wrong. Is some off budget? Sure. How much? Neither of us know, so neither of us can comment.

 

Everything is related.

1. Economic growth in this country is now primarily generated through financialization. While some of the great wealth has been produced via production of goods and services (Microsoft, oil companies, etc.), a high percentage of the country's wealth is now generated through finance or what is known as "rent income." By rent income I simply mean the flow of money from individuals to the holders of assets. This can be interest payments on credit cards, mortgages, education loans, or taxes that go toward bond owners, tolls to private companies, etc. Wall street companies and hedge fund managers exemplify the home run hitters in a financialized economy. The federal reserve policies since 2001 and especially after 2008 have been designed to benefit the financialized part of the economy because that is now the primary engine of growth. The drawback is that the rest of the economy suffers as the accumulation of capital flows to the holders of financial assets and low interest rates punishes savers and encourages spending (going into debt). The low interest rates also stimulates demand by keeping payments low, but at the same time these lower payments and increased demand pump up asset prices, thus giving feedback to the cycle.

2. Financialization depends on the US dollar maintaining its position as world reserve currency. This is where the military-industrial complex (MIC) comes in. As countries contemplate setting up alternate monetary systems that would be more favorable to their own economies, it constitutes a threat to the dollar system. The petrodollar (an agreement to sell oil transactions in US dollars only) is the pillar of the system. Demand for dollars is high as a result which keeps the value of the US dollar high despite running large deficits. The US military serves the purpose of enforcer as does the IMF and World Bank when countries jump out of line.

3. Multinational corporations are able to set up shop in countries that don't nationalize industry, thus enabling them to take advantage of lower production costs and also avoid higher US taxes. Again, when a country plays by other rules such as Cuba, Iran, or Venezuela, there is no benefit to the multi-national corporation and the MIC is used to encourage the country to play ball. This involves propaganda, color revolutions, sanctions, etc.

One observation is that the economy isn't so much supporting the military as the military is supporting the economy.

You mentioned that the defense isn't an extraordinary high percentage of the budget. The budget was $3.9 trillion. A better metric is what percentage of the revenue is defense spending.

In 2016 revenue coming in was $3.3 trillion (Link). Military spending was shown at $620 billion (link). That's approximately one out every five dollars of revenue.

The ratio is one of every six dollars when compared to budget ($3.9 trillion) rather than revenue, because the budget includes money we don't have (borrowed money).

None of this distortion where financiers grow richer and richer at the expense of the general public happens without the combination of finacialization controlled by the federal reserve, and dollar supremacy supported by the MIC and financial institutions such as the IMF. But in the long run its not sustainable. Everything is predicated on debt expansion and global military force. If most of the general public gets left behind, they will not support this kind of framework indefinitely. GDP don't mean squat if its all targeted toward a concentrated sector.

 

A cartoon from 2010.

 

For those of you offended by the nazi's, imagine them as antifa.