Author Gets It Right: Pakistan is Our Enemy

[exploited]

Haha just noticed your sig. I love it when Galt sons me into oblivion.

[Doncorelone]

Surprised no one has even mentioned Saudi Arabia, all the other countries are just symptoms of their terrible, terrible ideology. Stab the heart, not the right arm.

[Indy]

[exploited]

[Philly]

[Indy]

[exploited]

[Philly]

The real failure in Afghanistan was us entering with the expectation that we'd eventually take on the responsibility of ensuring they could operate as a functional democracy before we left. It's not possible for Afghanistan to be a functional democracy. Shit it's not even a real country. That's how we set ourselves up for failure.

[Indy]

That's very true. Both are states artificially held together by, in Iraq's case at least, a dictator and I'm guessing the Soviet occupation kinda/sorta held Afghanistan together for a while? The people there affiliate with tribes before they claim to be Afghanis.

But in our Full Metal Jacket delusion, we felt, like in Iraq, that in every Afghani is an American dying to get out, and that everybody wants a western democracy like ours--the great irony being that now we are the most sad-sack example of a dysfunctional "democracy" in the world.

Exploited your argument in summary seems to be going after the real culprits in the "war on terror" would have been... seriously difficult, thus it made sense to go after easy "wins" like Afghanistan or Iraq (although they turned out to be anything but). You openly admit that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are the two prime players but warn that they could seriously f*** with us.

To me, that's like saying we're going to fight a Cold War but leave Moscow off the grid and even more bizarrely call them an "ally."

Um...

[Philly]

Afghanistan wasn't being held together by anything in 2001. I'm not just being snarky when I say it's not a real country. I mean there was no such thing as a federal government outside of the major cities. Local warlords acting autonomously and shit everywhere else. It's always been that way in Afghanistan which is why the biggest fail of all was us putting the onus on ourselves to bring them democracy and stability.