[lbo-talk] Re: Afghanistan [was: query: Arundhati Roy]

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Mon Mar 6 15:29:26 PST 2006


--- Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote:


>
> huh? what about the attacks in Spain and London?

That wasn't AQ, that was people pissed off about Iraq, a totally different (except in US propaganda) and totally unjustified war.


> Also, I'd think that we could learn not to use
> Hitler analogies. The
> Taliban was horrible, yes, but was it Nazi?

No, but Mike's point wasn't that they were comparable in lethality, it was that the war objectors (of which I was one) had no realistic idea of how to deal with the jihadi infrastructure in Afghanistan.

Was is
> worse even than the
> US allies, the Northern Alliance of warlords? Was
> the Taliban worse
> than the US military machine?


>From the viewpoint of Afghans, arguably. From the
viewpoint of Afghanistan's neighbors much worse. You should talk to Uzbeks and see what they say about Talibs.


>
> My objections against the Bush invasion of
> Afghanistan haven't
> changed. In it, the US acted as detective,
> prosecutor, judge, jury,
> and executioner rolled up all in one.

In this case, the US happened to be right.

It was
> attacking forces (the
> Taliban, al Qaeda) that were largely or partly of
> its own creation,
> without learning any lessons about how to avoid
> similar mistakes in
> the future.

True.

Once the invasion had been pulled off,
> the US largely
> pulled out, leaving the mop-up to NATO and repeating
> (on a smaller
> scale) US policy after the end of Soviet occupation,
> i.e., "liberate"
> the country by destroying it and then abandon it.

Also true. BTW I think abandoning Russia's Afghan allies was one of the more shameful things Boris Yeltsin did -- and he did a lot of shameful things.

It
> abandoned it
> because the successful invasion had reinforced the
> Bushmasters'
> hubris, encouraging them to invade Iraq (which had
> been the main
> target all along).

Also true, but not relevant to the desirability of ousting the Talibs.

Nu, zayats, pogodi!

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