Afghan Nonsense — War on the Cheap
The U.S. military is a bunch of morons, total mental defectives, trying to fite a war on the cheap. A theater of operations that needs hundreds of thousands of men on the ground is being fought with 120,000 NATO troops, only 68,000 Americans, and we are supposed to be surprised that the war is not being won! Worse, when the war is going badly, the military presses on with plans to draw down the entire operation, even if that means failing in every regard! Idiots.
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What needed to be done was to send in a MILLION troops from many nations and go house to house searching for weapons and signs of Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and other guerrilla fiters, and shoot them all. After a month of such searches and summary executions, the bulk of forces could turn to training trustworthy Afghans for a competent national force to keep the savages suppressed. Within two months more (basic-training time and military education for Afghan officers by West Point and other military academics) the bulk of foreign forces could be withdrawn, and Afghanistan would be warned that if it regresses to a danger to the West, "We'll be back. And next time, no more Mr. Nice Guy."
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Let us compare Jengis Khan's conquest of, among other places, Afghanistan, which was accomplished by 1220 A.D. The descendants of Jengis Khan ruled Afghanistan for the next 600 years. So don't tell me that subduing Afghanistan is impossible.
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How did the tiny country of Mongolia conquer the largest contiguous land empire in the history of the world? Some years ago, I did some reading on this topic, and two of the answers are (1) extreme cruelty and the willingness to depopulate entire cities and regions to get their way, and (2) forced labor by conquered people, including compelled military service. The Mongols at times controlled armies in which Mongols as such were a small minority. But the great majority were unable to combine against their masters because they were fragmented, and the Mongols made plain that any mutiny would be met by mass death, including collective punishments by anyone who might have known about the plan but did nothing to stop it — even if, in fact, they did not know of an intended mutiny.
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In today's terms, the Mongols occupied the rear of the battle group, with their guns trained on their military slaves at the front of the battle group. They brooked no refusal to obey orders, and killed as many people (conscripts from conquered peoples) on their own side as they had to in order to maintain order and continue their conquests. Get the picture?
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American troops should not be walking in front of, nor alongside, unreliable Afghan troops that may have been infiltrated with Taliban or Al-Qaeda. Afghan military and police should be clear that if they try to kill Americans, they will be killed first and in punitive numbers. Any attack upon any American soldier or civilian worker will be treated as an attack on ALL Americans, collectively, and be met with countervailing collective punishment.
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Defeat the Taliban or We Will Treat You All as Taliban — and Kill You All! The U.S. should make perfectly plain that the reason we invaded Afghanistan was to COUNTERattack a Taliban regime that attacked us on 9/11, and that we will never permit the Taliban to return to power and thus be emboldened to resume training fanatics to attack the U.S. again. Ever.
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We need to tell Afghans that we want to save them from a return to the Taliban's theocratic totalitarianism, but know we cannot do it on our own. The people of Afghanistan will have to fite the Taliban to its utter destruction. Warn them that if, thru passivity or co-conspiracy, the people of Afghanistan do NOT destroy the Taliban, we will ANNEX all of Afghanistan to the United States, and never leave. Moreover, if even that does not suffice to end civilian consent to a Taliban takeover, we will DEPOPULATE Afghanistan by killing every single person over five years of age whose loyalty cannot be trusted, and replace them with Americans and immigrants from starving populations in the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and elsewhere. The name "Afghanistan" will be erased from history. Old regional terms used before the term "Afghanistan" emerged will be restored to use, and Afghanistan will, in Soviet-era style, be rendered a national "non-person", such that no one 80 years from now will ever have heard the word "Afghanistan".
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Mind you, the media-mourned U.S. death toll in Afghanistan is TRIVIAL. 2,000 in eleven years? That is only 2/3 of the people who died on the one day of 9/11 because of Afghanistan's Taliban and groups it assisted. It is 400 fewer than died in the one-day attack upon Pearl Harbor in 1941, when we had less than half the national population we have now. It may be less than 1/3 our death toll of another single day, the Normandy invasions on D-Day, June 6, 1944. (There is no universal agreement on the U.S. death toll that day, but it was almost certainly higher than 2,000.) I'm not impressed by 2,000 deaths over 11 years, esp. given that that is less than 1/15th the death toll from traffic accidents in the United States in a single year.
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Great decisions on defense of our civilization must not be made on the basis of maudlin sentiment exploited by enemies of the United States to drive us back inside our borders, and let things outside our borders explode to our mortal disadvantage.
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We must make plain to the people of Afghanistan that if we decide that it really is a question of You or Us who are to die, we will always choose to kill You rather than consent to have you kill Us. And that can very well mean ALL of you.
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We have the wherewithal. Afghanistan has many mountain-ringed valleys in which a single hydrogen bomb would wipe out the population of the entire valley. Not one American need be affected by the total obliteration of the Afghan population and then, 50 years later, repopulation of even the worst-contaminated sites by non-Afghan immigrants. Areas not attacked with nuclear weapons could be substantially depopulated by carpet-bombing and the use of other weapons of mass destruction, then repopulated, again, with the starving from other countries.
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We have tried restrained warfare. If that does not work, we MUST consider TOTAL WAR against Afghanistan. We should have no more regard for Afghans now than we had for Japanese in 1945. And the whole world must remember that we are the only country in the history of the world to have used nuclear weapons — and we can do so again.
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In 58 B.C., Julius Caesar invaded Helvetia (modern-day Switzerland) and commenced a horrendous war against the Helvetians, as the start of his conquest of Gaul. He says in his own writings (as I recall from high-school Latin) that he killed 40,000 Helvetians who refused to submit. The entire population of the world at the time may have been only 160 million. The Wikipedia article on the Helvetians says that 268,000 Helvetians, 70% of the pre-war number, may have been killed or forced out of their homeland by Caesar. That was part of the Roman Empire's defense against early barbarian invasions, and in conquering Gaul, Caesar laid the indispensable base of the Roman civilization that survives to this day in a community of nations and cultures called Western Civilization. In short, had Caesar not conquered Gaul, there is no way to know what the world of today would look like. We can be certain that the United States would never have come to exist, nor to build the great Roman building that is our national Capitol.
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Are Afghans our Helvetians? Helvetia was only a small part of Gaul, but it is the conquest of Gaul, which became the bulwark of the Roman Empire, that empowered Roman civilization to survive and transmutate into Western Civilization. Dare we, really, run like cowards with our tail between our legs from the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? This is a clash, not of civilizations, but of civilization against barbarism. Civilization must never retreat. Barbarians must be defeated, and civilized. Those who refuse to become civilized must be crushed, which may well mean KILLED.
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We cannot retreat behind Fortress America. There is no wall so high nor thick to save us from the new barbarian hordes. So either we go out and fite barbarism to total defeat, with the Peace Corps as much as our war corps, or we face a world of ever-increasing violence and barbarism, once the savages realize that they have us on the run.
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The situation today cannot be compared to the U.S. withdrawal in disgrace from Southeast Asia in the face of a Communist advance, because "worldwide Communist revolution" was plainly failing, in that the system was rotting at its core. The collapse of the Soviet Union, as its own people repudiated it, meant that we no longer had to defend against worldwide revolution intent on conquering US someday. The collapse of that civilization ended the Cold War's myriad small wars of Communist aggression toward total world conquest.
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Here, the collapse of civilizations is exactly what the barbarians want. They want ALL civilizations to fail, so they can impose their own retrogressive religious and cultural standards upon the unwilling. There is no unifying ideology here, despite casual talk in some circles of reestablishing the Caliphate. The forces of regression don't want a single, brilliant civilization under a centralized government. They want tribalism to regain control of the entire planet. The modern world is too big, too complicated, too scary for them. They want to go back to a technological age in which disconnected, tiny units went their own way, that is, to the ways of centuries past. Such people are a minority everywhere. By far most people in every society want IN to the modern age, not OUT. And they want human rights, just like ours. In fiting the barbarians, we are fiting for the future of the Afghan people as much as for our own future security.
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We have our own retrogressive barbarians here at home, who are actively trying to take us back more than a hundred years, to before the income tax's intentional redistribution of wealth; before antitrust legislation; before governmental welfare; before Social Security; before Darwinism; before union rights, civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights; before anyone even thought to say "God is dead". No thinking! Just obey. Obey whom? Obey them, the backsliders, the retrogressers, for whom all truth is between the covers of a Judeo-Christian Bible in which the God of Wrath IS the God of Love (but the God of Islam is neither of those), and Adam and Eve were the only two people on Earth, but their children married other people! We thought we had defeated these irrational fools, in a century of constant progress. But here we are, a century and more later, and they are rebounding!
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We can be gentle with barbarians, and have them ever menace us. Or we can crush them into nonexistence, leaving them only one choice: civilize or die.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:30 PM