Hi Sun Tzu; Re: "When you bomb a nation you are at war with them. You can call it supporting the opposition all you want. I suppose one can always find someone who is happy to see the overthrow of a government, then all wars are in support of the opposition <vbg>.";
The US bombed the bejesus out of France from 1942 through most of 1944 killing thousands of civilians. The US was never at war with France.
Re: "And to top that off, we had a lot of boots on the ground (doesn't matter that they showed up after the bombing. That is standard.) And those boots carried and used guns. So no, Afghanistan was an invasion, no matter the ruse.";
The US had boots on the ground in France from 1944 until what's his name threw us out. Again, boots on the ground is not the definition of invasion.
By the way, let's see how bloody Afghanistan has been. Was our "invasion" as bloody as others?
As of June 24, 2014, there have been 2,196 U.S. military deaths in the war in Afghanistan and additional 133 fatalities in the broader Operation Enduring Freedom outside Afghanistan.
en.wikipedia.org
Compare this to Russian experience in Afghanistan:
The total irrecoverable personnel losses of the Soviet Armed Forces, frontier, and internal security troops came to 14,453.
en.wikipedia.org
Now the British got involved around 100 years ago. Of course this was a much lower population so the numbers involved there would be proportionately lower. And did they have casualties less than ours? Uh, that would be no:
The First Anglo-Afghan War (also known as Auckland's Folly) was fought between the British East India Company and Afghanistan from 1839 to 1842; 4,500 British and Indian soldiers, plus 12,000 of their camp followers, were killed by Afghan tribal fighters.
en.wikipedia.org
The 2nd and 3rd wars were shorter, but again, this was a much lower population for Afghanistan. But still, UK casualties were comparable to modern US casualties:
Second Anglo-Afghan War
1,850 killed in action or died of wounds,
en.wikipedia.org
Third Anglo-Afghan War
1,751 killed, wounded or died of disease.
en.wikipedia.org
In short, Afghanistan has been an easy pushover for everyone who wanted to invade it.
Afghanistan has a population of about 25 million. Japan has a population of about 5x that. The total number of KIA in the war was 4 million (all sides, including China and Japan). US KIA in the Pacific theater were 106,207 plus 12,935 POWs held by Japan. Scaling those 106k down by a factor of 5, we get 21,000, about 4x worse than Afghanistan.
So do you really think that Afghanistan was so tough? Try working out the numbers for Germany in either war, the Southern US during the Civil War or even the Mexican War. Note that the vast majority of our Afghan casualties were not in the removal of the Taliban from power, it was in the crap that went on afterwards.
What Bush should have done was declare a victory and pull out in mid 2002. US objective should be to kick over regimes that cause us trouble, not to rebuild them in our own image. If they get replaced by another unfriendly regime, kick it over too. Kicking over is the cheap part. But there's little difference between Bush and the Democrats over this. Both agree that "nation building" should be US policy and both agree that the other is incompetent at the actual details of how to do it when that other party is in power. I think they're both half right, LOL.
Now in Iraq we did the "kick over" part (which I think was unnecessary and foolish), and due to various reasons have now pulled out. It's pretty clear that we're not going to go back. And so we're going to explore the policy choice that I wanted for Iraq *and* Afghanistan. That is, regime change (when necessary) followed by abandonment. And the future will reveal how that policy works out. I say it's going to work out better than (a) leaving countries that are actively waging war against us in power and (b) trying to socially remake the world using the US military as the tool.
The US is a classic sea power, now transformed into an air power. We do best by quick raids and blockades, not by invasions and occupations. This is the sort of strength that every sea power has had since Athens 2500 years ago. We're now returning to our strengths. Things will work out. "Mistakes were made," but we're a powerful country and will recover just like we did after Vietnam. And, with luck, another generation will learn the lesson of "no land wars in Asia".
-- Carl |
