Re: Afghanistan
The genocidal tone in this thread is a getting a bit high. Pump the breaks on that rhetoric a bit. Look, 30 years of war wreaks a hell of a lot of havoc on a society. If you're fed up, support immediate withdrawal. It's as simple as that.
By and large, the Taliban is made up of the Pashtun tribes while most of the Tajiks and Hazara either work with GIRoA or want to be left alone. Speaking about "Afghanistan" is way too damn general to be useful. There is no one war in Afghanistan. There is a separate war being fought in nearly every Pashtun district throughout the country. If the war itself is local, how successful do you think a national strategy is? You got it... it's shit.
There are more than two choices for governing Afghanistan, not just Taliban vs GIRoA. If the only choices were those two options, how did the Afghans ever manage before 1994? It is our own American idiocy at trying to create a centralized state in a historically decentralized region that's caused much of this mess. Frankly, the third option to the Taliban vs GIRoA debate is the most pragmatic, and simultaneously ignored option in terms of governance, rule of law, and local conflict resolution. We should have been trying to understand how informal systems work in Pashtun areas and leveraged that until GIRoA is strong enough to fill that gap. NATO has essentially created an enormous expectation of GIRoA fulfilling all the needs of the population, while GIRoA has no capability to: 1. protect the population, 2. resolve local disputes occurring largely over land ownership claims and water management, and 3. create a system that somehow balances informal governance traditions with a modern, service-delivering democracy.
Afghanistan is a tough place to work, but it's far more difficult if you fundamentally misunderstand the dynamics at play. To get an idea of where things stand in the Pashtun areas, give this report a read:
TB detainees on war progress. If the current state of the war isn't worth 30 pages of reading, then I'd say you're probably not really interested in this topic in the first place. If that's the case, this country is certainly not worth the vastly expensive carpet bombing campaign that some have suggested.
What's my solution? Dissolve the Durrand Line, create a unified Pashtunistan with Pakistan tribal areas, and let the Hazaras, Uzbeks, and Tajiks figure out a way to make this new Afghanistan work since they're the ones that largely support our concept of how Afghanistan should be. Let the Pashtuns rule themselves, as they essentially are fighting to do anyway (while sending a hearty "FUCK YOU" to Pakistan). Keep an eye on them through SOF and send a drone with hellfires their way if they decide to harbor terrorists, one of the few tactics that's gone well over here. Then wash our hands, and bring our boys home.
If we could have killed our way out of this way, we would have by now. If we could have spent our way out of this war, we would have by now. This is a political war that does not have a military solution, no matter how badly we want it to. Now what was that Clausewitz was saying... "War is the continuation of Politik by other means."