NATO Suspends Training for New Afghan Recruits

[eric]

[Sandman]

[The Dharma Bum]

Re-vetting the current troops to see if any have ties to the insurgency is singularly useless, if you ask me.

Someone could simply decide to kill an American soldier as a spur of the moment thing. I doubt these attacks are being made by trained and purposeful infiltrators. I think they are made by men who are torn between two sides and when they finally do make up their minds it's for Taliban and they attack.

I doubt much planning is going into these attacks.

[Indy]

How many more billions are we going to dump into this useless war before we finally bring our troops home? How many more of them have to die?

[Sandman]

[The Dharma Bum]

[Sandman]

I hear you. But you have to understand that afghans are simply not ”political”, in the sense you might think they are. The vast majority (well over 80%) of them are completely illiterate, and have no coherent political views to speak of. They don't read, they have no news media, except for a few scattered Urdu-language broadcasts from India here and there. The full extent of most of their political opinions consist of Quran passages and word-of-mouth conspiracy theories about Jews.

Point being, the whole idea of a politically-motivated insurgency in Afghanistan is a mythology. It's something that only anti-war westerners believe and propogate. I worked in the biggest detainee facility in the country, face to face with actual Taliban members, and one fun fact that I can tell you most Americans might be surprised to learn...............almost NONE of them know what 9-11 is. It's not even on their radars. They are also completely clueless about Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, the US relationship with Saudi Arabia, the attempted assassination of the Iranian shah in the 1950's, or any other supposed grievance that Noam Chomsky would have us believe the Taliban is deeply driven to avenge us for. They have no clue. Even if you tried to inform them of any of these events, they wouldn't have any historical or geopolitical context to place it in. They honestly don't even fully understand why the Russians invaded in the 80's, and that's literally the defining event of all of their lives.

Like I said, the main motivator for these friendly fire attackers is money and coercion. The main motivator for actual Taliban membership, in my experience, is power. I would compare it to growing up in the hood in America, the appeal of gangs to kids. When you are poor and powerless, you will join the organization that has money and power. There's really no political fire behind the eyes of these guys. There is certainly some religious and ethnic context to what they do, but that mainly manifests itself in what they do to their fellow countryman. Over 90% of civilian deaths in Afghanistan are at the hands of the Taliban, not coalition forces. That's another aspect of the war rarely reported by western media, but I guess it doesn't fit their narrative.

[The Dharma Bum]

No doubt. I'd say they are driven by religious impulses more than what we think of as political action. Their social structure is entirely theocratic and clan based, not secular and urban as ours is. But really, the power dynamic is the same in all social contexts. When you say the main motivator is money and coercion you are merely describing the carrot and stick that motivates our own culture as well...

[Boris Johnson]

[Sandman]