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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (69758)	1/29/2003 4:30:41 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

<<...For the record, I think that our armed forces are perfectly capable of invading Iraq, defeating any armed force that opposes them, and toppling Saddam. I have enormous faith in our military commanders and capabilities. I have much less faith in our ability to translate that military victory into the effective attainment of the political objectives behind the war. I know we can win the war. I’m less sure that we can win the peace...>> Nice post...I totally agree with you...I also feel the war may be more expensive and require sacrificing more American lives than most folks realize.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (69758)	1/29/2003 4:55:57 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

Our vaunted representative government barely controls Kabul and controls almost nothing outside Kabul. So when has it been any different? If you go back to "Kim" or earlier, it has always been a place of Warlords and bandits, with a weak Government. If we have the sense to just support Kabul, and take out any concentration of Bad Boys, as we did yesterday, we can keep a lid on it. Only Social Worker types expect us to turn it into Peoria. The Terrorist problem has several parameters. We can control our own borders, and the bad boys are pretty easy to profile. With a good intelligence system and the FBI doing a roundup, we should learn fairly soon how to keep them under control here. The Euros have a much bigger problem if the Terrorists go after them. They have the huge Muslim population the Terrorists can hide in. and much more porous borders. They can kill our occupying troops individually as they are doing now, and in groups with bombs as they have done in the past, but I trust our guys to figure out how to stop this, or at least keep it to a minimum. Hey, no perfect solution! It will be an ongoing problem indefinitely.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (69758)	1/29/2003 12:53:07 PM
From: greenspirit	Respond to of 281500

res-I said we were lucky to be presented with such a fat target We hunted them down in Mazar-e-Sharif, we tracked in the streets of Konduz, in the outlying town of Herat, in Kabul, in Kandhahar, in Jalalabad and in practically every hill and mole-hill in between. Special forces dug them out of caves, out of bunkers, and finally rooted them out of the mountains of Tora Bora. To paint this picture as being "presented with a fat target" is a stretch of high magnitude. We were not presented with a "Fat" target. We strategically planned well, logistically coordinated extremely well, and put all that training to use and executed well. The Taliban controlled 90 per cent of Afghanistan, now they control none of it. Contrast our military success with that of the former Soviet Union only a few years before, and the accomplishment looks even more impressive. They were working in their back-yard and suffered tremendous casualties, while using a force of over a hundred thousand troops. Sound strategy and great execution can often make it look like we were "lucky" and the enemy was foolish. Luck had nothing to do with it. We simply have the best operating military the world has ever seen. No one believed Afghanistan was going to turn into the next Japan within a few years. Winning the peace will take decades of struggle, careful influence, with the understanding that there will be many ups and downs along the way. But we've given them a decent chance. We've given millions there hope. A new day has indeed dawned. We shouldn't have expected any more...