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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (77443)	6/22/2006 12:42:28 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 81568

That's changing the subject, and it's also wrong. Was invading Afghanistan ineffective? No. Getting involved in another war before Afghanistan had been stabilized was, but the original invasion made sense. But here's a question for you: why do you say the current approach to Iran is ineffective? Because there's no invasion involved? How do you know this approach won't work? Is the Taliban still running Afghanistan? Are there still 4 million Afghan refugees sitting in Pakistan? Is Al Qaeda still training tens of thousands of men a year in Afghanistan? No. Is your standard for US actions that either it work perfectly or it's "ineffective"? Afghanistan has a democracy, if not everywhere, and the Taliban is out of power, if not entirely in the south and their bases in Pakistani Waziristan. Afghan democracy is not up to Euro standards, but it's never going to be, given the nature of the place and the people. It's still a vast improvement from the pile of theocratic rubble it was five years ago, and people are voting with their feet to come back into the country. A lot of your arguments (and here I don't mean you personally, but the memes current on the American Left today) are based on pretending to know what would have happened if some other course had been followed - if only the US hadn't gone into Iraq, Afghanistan could have been stabilized, etc. But as the Left would be swift to tell us, you do not win a guerilla war by simply blanketing the area with your troops. You have to move to co-opt and cut off the bases of guerilla support. Our problem is that the Taliban have bases of support in the Pakistani tribal lands that we cannot reach, as well as popular support in areas of southern Afghanistan. Would more American troops have solved this problem? No. But we'd be hearing a lot more about how you can't win a guerilla war with conventional ground troops. That I can promise you. Re Iran: I call the diplomatic approach ineffective because it has proven so until now, and shows no promise of changing. The Iranians have skillfully been playing for time, knowing that the UN always has room for another 15 expressions of serious concern before even starting to take any action. So they make agreements, they stall, they break agreements, they negotiate some more, etc etc. They are scarcely bothering to hide their intent to get a bomb, and the know that given the choice, Europe will accept it rather than confront them.