05-22-2020, 06:08
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#1
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Quiet Professional
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Fayetteville
Posts: 13,080
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What Does Winning Mean in a Forever War?
An interesting piece. I know it's Pat Buchanan but.....
"What Does Winning Mean in a Forever War?"
https://townhall.com/columnists/patb...r-war-n2569263
"When a Wall Street Journal editorial warned this week against any precipitous U.S. withdrawal that might imperil our gains in Afghanistan, an exasperated President Trump shot back:
"Could someone please explain to them that we have been there for 19 years. ... and except at the beginning, we never really fought to win."
Is that true? Did we "never really" fight to win during our 19-year war in Afghanistan, except when we first ousted the Taliban in 2001?............."
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Pete is offline
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05-22-2020, 11:40
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#2
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Quiet Professional
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Free Pineland
Posts: 24,780
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A lot of that attitude was a SOF war turned conventional, and the resulting increasingly restrictive ROE.
Well, the Soviets damn sure fought to win and how did that turn out for them?
TR
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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - President Theodore Roosevelt, 1910
De Oppresso Liber 01/20/2025
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The Reaper is offline
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05-22-2020, 13:08
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#3
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Quiet Professional
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Arizona
Posts: 5,222
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We fought to 'maintain' some amorphous unicorn democracy we 'thought' we could nurture.
IOW stupid is as stupid does.
After the initial destruction of the Taliban we should have:
Killed as many Jihadi's as possible with extreme prejudice.
Left with a warning that if we come back everyone dies.
This is a waste of time in an Islamic Patriarchal country with an illiteracy rate that is huge and an educated populace to about the 6th grade.
Get the fuck out....
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PRB is offline
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05-22-2020, 14:29
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#4
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Quiet Professional
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Savannah, GA
Posts: 2,292
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PRB
We fought to 'maintain' some amorphous unicorn democracy we 'thought' we could nurture.
IOW stupid is as stupid does.
After the initial destruction of the Taliban we should have:
Killed as many Jihadi's as possible with extreme prejudice.
Left with a warning that if we come back everyone dies.
This is a waste of time in an Islamic Patriarchal country with an illiteracy rate that is huge and an educated populace to about the 6th grade.
Get the fuck out....
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By 2004 at the latest we should have been gone. Burning everything that we had built or brought that we didn't want to carry back with us. Done. We could have rinsed and repeated several times if needed since then at less cost in everything.
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The Main Thing is to keep the Main Thing the Main Thing
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abc_123 is offline
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05-22-2020, 15:27
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#5
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Quiet Professional
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Occupied Northlandia
Posts: 1,697
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And just like Vietnam....they should have never brought in the regular army....why?
SF kicked the Shiite out of them, what did we need RA for? It was totally within our power to conduct FID with a gubmint of their choice and allow them to take ownership with our backing in a low profile support role (btw, that’s what we’re trying to do NOW!)
2nd the brits should never been allowed Within 1000 miles Of AFG and we should have never tried to stop the heroin. It all just tied the talibs to the drug dealers money and bam, we’ll funded “quasi-insurgent-cum-drug-dealers”
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"The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles." — Jeff Cooper
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miclo18d is offline
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05-23-2020, 06:37
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#6
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Quiet Professional
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: State of confusion
Posts: 1,525
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Reaper is spot-on. We achieved our strategic objectives within three weeks. Then we "conventionalized" the war trying to "freedom" these folks. They simply don't want what we are selling. Our politicians are too dim to understand that; plus, they have figured out how to monetize the war for votes.
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JimP is offline
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05-23-2020, 07:28
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#7
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Quiet Professional
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: 18 yrs upstate NY, 30 yrs South Florida, 20 yrs Conch Republic, now chasing G-Kids in NOVA & UK
Posts: 11,901
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IDK,,
Are you saying SWA is a muhammadized VN,
with goats and ZERO social redeeming values?
Change my mind 
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Go raibh tú leathuair ar Neamh sula mbeadh a fhios ag an diabhal go bhfuil tú marbh
"May you be a half hour in heaven before the devil knows you’re dead"
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JJ_BPK is offline
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05-23-2020, 21:16
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#8
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Quiet Professional
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Tennesse
Posts: 766
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If you don't know where you are going, any road will do.
What do we want in Afghanistan, really? Can you articulate it in a single, easy-to-understand sentence? "Winning" and "defeating the enemy" aren't goals, they are catch-phrases. War is the imposition of force to achieve a geopolitical goal.
What is our goal? And do we have the resources and will to achieve it?
The original goal was to destroy Al Qaeda in retribution for 9/11 and destroy their presence in Afghanistan. As many have pointed out, we did that by Christmas 2001.
We tried to impose an alien form of government with western social, legal, and economic concepts onto a society that didn't want them. If we really wanted to make them comply we could... but we'd need several million troops. It's achievable - we've remade several societies in our image, but it took complete domination to do it. We never committed to that on the scale required. It wasn't worth it.
If the government of Afghanistan needs billions of USD a year and the full power of the US military to beat an irregular force of its own citizens, it doesn't have the backing of its own people and it deserves to die. Those that want to "stay the course" - in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria - cannot achieve their present goals. It is bloodshed for its own sake, without the chance for any meaningful victory.
It's past time to leave.
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scooter is offline
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