Mmmh... waging warfare with large bodies of regular troops in terrain that hinders deployment, transportation, supply and communication, against a technologically inferior enemy using the terrain, he knows intimately, to his advantage via guerilla tactics and dirty war methods, possibly resorting to terrorist attacks, either with the support of the local population, or against population collaborating with the occupying forces... that does not ring any bells to you?Thumpalumpacus wrote:I'm not sure that any "lessons from Vietnam" are really applicable, myself. The geography, culture, military power, available strength, and internal motivation of the enemy were all different. Those are all factors in any decision to engage an enemy, and necessarily change the nature of the decision to be taken.Svartalf wrote:In the meantime, the US has actually LOST prestige as a military nation, because it has shown it never learned the lesson of Vietnam, and let itself be dragged into a morass from where it has difficulty extracting itself without leaving behind a situation worse than the one that was in place when they waded in.
Perhaps. The issue of Pakistan was certainly one best dealt with by diplomacy, and whether that was possible or not is doubtful at best, considering their lack of ability to control their own frontiers. I think a decisive victory might well have been possible had we been better able to close the routes through the Hindu Kush passes. Like any "what-if" history, that's debatable.and no, even without Iraq, you would never have succeeded in eradicating the taliban... Pakistan would never have let you do a proper cleaning of its North provinces, like Waziristan, even if by some kind of miracle you had beaten the logistical problems of operating there and done what a logistically favored and numerically superior Red Army failed to achieve.
So far as the Red Army, whatever logistical and numerical advantages they had were squandered through both political and doctrinal failures ... the failure to respect the locals being high on the list. I think that we could have avoided the problems we're having now, along those lines, had we not suffered the reignition of the Taliban resistance after the Iraq invasion started siphoning our resources.
Agreed. Our failure to close off the routes into Afghanistan assured that result ... and that possibility should've been regarded more seriously in the planning stages, I think.and let's face it, Pakistan is the root of the taliban problem, nothing will cure it if it's not eradicated at the source... a potential third Vietnam in its own right.
Have the Palestinians asked for any war criminals on our territory to be handed over for trial?BTW, are you willing to receive Palestinian based attacks on ground that both your government and any number of private persons and organisations in the US openly support Israel and its oppression and encroachment policies? Because your argument just justified that.
and I don't really agree that you would have succeeded where they broke the Red Army's back, even though you did not commit some of the same mistakes they did. The taliban rule mostly along the pakistan border, where they get support from across the Pass, but Karzai still is Lord of Kabul, not so much in Helmand province, or in places like Herat or Mazar e sharif... and the latter too are far too northerly to be taliban strongpoints... it's just a matter of local warlords.
And Pakistan never was a problem for diplomacy as a) the government actually fostered the talibans (where do you think all the salafist madrasas the original ones studied at are/were located?) and so might not be amenable to betraying warriors of islam to infidel forces and b) even had it decided that its brainchild had become a threat, it itself had grown too weak and ineffectual to deal with the problem, especially as the movement has large support at all levels and suppressing the talibans would most certainly precipitate a civil war that would start by said government being toppled... You know how things are there, you can't use diplomacy to politely ask for the impossible (unless of course that's actually an ultimatum).
As for the Palestinians, nice straw man, you know they can't make official demands since you don't even recognize them as a sovereign... but you still justified perpetrating acts of war against people who harbour your enemies, and disregarding their sovereign status.
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