So you will whine to a group of officers on an internet forum but keep your trap shut in theater? Really? Do you really think you can motivate enlisted with your shitty att!tude?
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Revised Afghan ROE...
- Thread starter picklesuit
- Start date
So you will whine to a group of officers on an internet forum but keep your trap shut in theater? Really? Do you really think you can motivate enlisted with your shitty att!tude?
thank whoever brought up WW2 with point way more people got killed then, in that war.
Although little is 'obvious' in this life ... this post is obviously a cry for help.
Nursesoon ... we don't 'do' trolls on AirWarriors ... so why don't you cool off, take a couple of weeks off, and go take some blood pressure readings or something ... ???
QuagmireMcGuire
Kinder and Gentler
But if you wish to be persuasive and, at least drum up some modicum of respect for your position, it may be best to write in complete and coherent sentences.
Just saying.
So Gen. McCrystal is a whiny-ass liberal? Ignore this whiny-ass liberal while you're at it:
He includes the JCS among those advisors who share the blame, for putting protection of their their respective services ahead of their obligations to the country in supporting Johnson and McNamara's strategy despite their reservations, and then pursuing wholly different objectives in prosecuting the war. The administration tried to apply "graduated pressure", much as they had in the Cuban Missile Crisis, while the military resorted more or less to "kill every last VC". The result was a disconnect between military activity and strategy that resulted in a war effort McMasters describes as "futile". So was Cronkite wrong?
It's a cop-out to blame the media for objectively reporting the war and not playing cheerleader. It's a bigger cop-out to blame Americans for lacking the cojones to pursue the war they way you think it should be. We fight in their name. We sure as shit shouldn't be hiding stuff from them so we can do what we "know better". If they don't have the stomach for it, we shouldn't be there in the first place.
And wandering back on topic, there's no analogy to Vietnam here except what you project on it. There's no American or international outcry about civilian casualties and this policy is motivated by neither pandering to public opinion as is wrongly assumed about Johnson's limits on the use of force or a notion of graduated pressure as Johnson was attempting to do. It's a strategic move to support the strategy of "prevent, protect, build, hand-off" - seeing as how it's being reported by the head PAO vice an unnamed leak.
Most reasonable people recognize that our use of force is discriminate, and nothing about the new policy supercedes the ability of units to defend themselves from imminent threats. It's just setting the policy that breaking contact is preferable to pursuit into populated areas, because we have more to lose from inadvertently killing civilians than not getting every last shooter. There is a strategy in place, and it isn't exterminating the Taliban to the last man.
The hippies aren't the only ones guilty of seeing Vietnam behind every boogeyman. The Vietnam analogies are false and unhelpful. As are the WWII ones. We nuked two cities and burned several others to the ground, we killed more Japanese civilians than combatants. War is indeed terrible. But it's not carte blanche to repeat those numbers.
....and I'm off to a 9:15 brief.
All groups have their bad apples and you're certainly more than eager to smear the group on the basis of those few. Journalists are not historians, there is inevitably some inaccuracy in reporting events as they happen. But great journalism is out there.
Have you even read (former Marine) C.J. Chivers' many many dispatches from Afghanistan in the Times? Or this article from yesterday's WaPo? That's pretty consistent coverage if you ask me.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/12/AR2009061202123.html
Good reporting takes time to research and write - just because the cable news networks have to fill 24 hours with crap doesn't mean the media is crap.You want good journalism, turn off the freaking boob tube, and read the news clips selected daily by the SWJ crew:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2009/06/22-june-swj-roundup/
Think of it as an open-source Earlybird.
If the media is ignorant crap, why does the Pentagon bother putting out the Earlybird, eh? The good stuff is out there and people that care read it. If you think John Stewart or Bill O'Reilly is news......your mind's made up and the quality of the media isn't going to shape your views much.
Key issue
^^
This is the key to the whole issue. Does it hurt our war-aims more to let a few go, even if they will return to cause more damage, or does it hurt more to accidentally kill civilians in the process of pursuing the enemy?
In the end it's a hard choice to make. Do we risk losing in various situations due to caution and new ROEs? Yes perhaps. But is it worth it if the end result is better cooperation and goodwill from the Afghan people? Will visible and publicly-announced restraint help us more in our aims than actively pursuing every enemy even if we may harm others?
It's not quite Vietnam or Iraq. It's not WW2. We need to be careful not to let ourselves fall into the trap of comparing each war to the last, or rely too much on comparisons. Learning the lessons of history is one thing, letting specific examples disproportionately tint the way we see current or future events is another.
I have mixed feelings about the new ROE, but I think in the long-run it may end up helping us. Less dead Afghan civilians = less revenge-seeking idealists looking to cause trouble. It's a war of hearts and minds more than an old-school brawl. Then again, tying our hands behind our backs is never something we'd want to do. Maybe restraint is the best option this time?
^^
This is the key to the whole issue. Does it hurt our war-aims more to let a few go, even if they will return to cause more damage, or does it hurt more to accidentally kill civilians in the process of pursuing the enemy?
In the end it's a hard choice to make. Do we risk losing in various situations due to caution and new ROEs? Yes perhaps. But is it worth it if the end result is better cooperation and goodwill from the Afghan people? Will visible and publicly-announced restraint help us more in our aims than actively pursuing every enemy even if we may harm others?
It's not quite Vietnam or Iraq. It's not WW2. We need to be careful not to let ourselves fall into the trap of comparing each war to the last, or rely too much on comparisons. Learning the lessons of history is one thing, letting specific examples disproportionately tint the way we see current or future events is another.
I have mixed feelings about the new ROE, but I think in the long-run it may end up helping us. Less dead Afghan civilians = less revenge-seeking idealists looking to cause trouble. It's a war of hearts and minds more than an old-school brawl. Then again, tying our hands behind our backs is never something we'd want to do. Maybe restraint is the best option this time?
I have to vigorously question the logic of the "balls to the wall kill 'em all through their human shields" argument. I only mildly question the reasoning that our killing civilians leads to more terrorists. The issue is, of course, very complex, but on balance, I do not believe it is worth it to create an event that is perpetually used to recruit terrorists in order to kill terrorists.
Terrorists are many things, and among those things, they are wound sponges I have learned. They remember every transgression against their people. I would wager that they are probably as ignorant as Americans to such matters as geography and economics, but their knowledge of centuries-old invations or attacks against their people are fresh on their mind. Google almost any Basque separatist website if you want some perspective. I would go so far as to say that most people are wound absorbant to some degree. How many of us would say we know more about what the Japanese did to American POWs than the decades of events that led to the trail of tears and beyond, with regards to Native Americans? Both are parts of our history, yet the former evokes stronger emotions for more on balance, I would suspect.
My point is that a terrorist can do harm for as long as he lives, but one of our airstrikes can do us harm for decades at least, or conceivably for millenia.
Terrorists are many things, and among those things, they are wound sponges I have learned. They remember every transgression against their people. I would wager that they are probably as ignorant as Americans to such matters as geography and economics, but their knowledge of centuries-old invations or attacks against their people are fresh on their mind. Google almost any Basque separatist website if you want some perspective. I would go so far as to say that most people are wound absorbant to some degree. How many of us would say we know more about what the Japanese did to American POWs than the decades of events that led to the trail of tears and beyond, with regards to Native Americans? Both are parts of our history, yet the former evokes stronger emotions for more on balance, I would suspect.
My point is that a terrorist can do harm for as long as he lives, but one of our airstrikes can do us harm for decades at least, or conceivably for millenia.
This is one of the more absurd statements I have seen here in a while. To echo what mmx1 said, to blame the 'media' for this new policy is simplistic and wrong.
Many of you seem to believe that the media consists of a few blowhards who have it out for this country, but I doubt more than a few of you actually bother to crack open a paper or dig into a news website and actually read the articles, not just th efirst two lines, and not Drudge. It is not too hard to find excellent reporting on the wars, as mmx1 has already pointed out with some good examples. Reading those articles or watching quality reports will give you an appreciation and some understanding of the complex and convoluted situation that we face in Afghanistan and the related fight in the tribal regions of Pakistan.
Whether you like it or not, public perception and support of the domestic population is critical to winning a war like we are fighting in Afghanistan. The whole 'hearts and minds' thing, remember that? It is not something that a bunch of whiny liberals who are saying that is critical too, our military leadership thinks the same way. From what I know General McCrystal is no shrinking violet, who is to say he was not the driving force behind this decision?
Stupid Question:
Are we still paying people every time we accidentally off someone over there? If so, are civilian casualties being over-reported / what's to stop one guy from shooting his obnoxious brother-in-law in the face and dumping him in the "Americans bombed us" pile?
/over-simplicity
Are we still paying people every time we accidentally off someone over there? If so, are civilian casualties being over-reported / what's to stop one guy from shooting his obnoxious brother-in-law in the face and dumping him in the "Americans bombed us" pile?
/over-simplicity
Good reporting is really hard to come by. A light in the darkness: http://www.michaelyon-online.com
His Arrowhead Ripper coverage was the final push for me to raise my hand.
His Arrowhead Ripper coverage was the final push for me to raise my hand.
The media, as a group, definitely tended to put the efforts of the Bush admin in a negative light.
While accurate reports were provided, and could be found if someone wanted to look, they didn't get the headlines/front page/above the fold presentation that the negative reports did.
I'm curious, do they still give the death count each time someone is killed, or did that stop with the inauguration?
While accurate reports were provided, and could be found if someone wanted to look, they didn't get the headlines/front page/above the fold presentation that the negative reports did.
I'm curious, do they still give the death count each time someone is killed, or did that stop with the inauguration?
