Marc Thiessen recommends the FBI snatch Julian Assange (via Emptywheel):
With appropriate diplomatic pressure, these governments may cooperate in bringing Assange to justice. But if they refuse, the United States can arrest Assange on their territory without their knowledge or approval. In 1989, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum entitled “Authority of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to Override International Law in Extraterritorial Law Enforcement Activities.”
This memorandum declares that “the FBI may use its statutory authority to investigate and arrest individuals for violating United States law, even if the FBI’s actions contravene customary international law” and that an “arrest that is inconsistent with international or foreign law does not violate the Fourth Amendment.” In other words, we do not need permission to apprehend Assange or his co-conspirators anywhere in the world.
Arresting Assange would be a major blow to his organization. But taking him off the streets is not enough; we must also recover the documents he unlawfully possesses and disable the system he has built to illegally disseminate classified information.
The column doesn’t get into this (except to mention the word “indict” which is somewhat reassuring along these lines), but it’s fair to ask: does Thiessen think Assange should get a trial, does he think Assange should be tortured for more information?
I wish I could say I meant those as rhetorical or snarky questions, but I don’t.
Chad S
Arresting him wouldn’t stop Wikileaks at all, nor could they find and erase their archives. As usual, Thiessen is pontificating on a topic he’s totally clueless about.
General Stuck
While I don’t view Assange as a hero, I don’t want him arrested.
NonyNony
Thiessen is an idiot if he doesn’t think that Assange has already taken this into account and is ready to become a martyr for his cause. Because he has – you can bet on it.
GambitRF
Last year, the Obama administration stood up a new U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) to “conduct full-spectrum military cyberspace operations” in defense of U.S. national security. With the stroke of his pen, the president can authorize USCYBERCOM to protect American and allied forces by eliminating WikiLeaks’ ability to disseminate classified information that puts their lives at risk.
“However, should Obama ever use this power to shut down a right-wing organization on the internet, wingnuts like myself reserve the right to do a complete 180 and decide that this sort of presidential power is fascism.”
Xopher
If we weren’t the most powerful nation in the world, we would be considered an outlaw nation, a rogue state.
Or maybe that should be When we aren’t the most powerful nation in the world, we will be considered an outlaw nation, a rogue state.
flotsam
absofuckinglutely – take his nuts and turn them into tiny little kabobs – drown him in his own urine…oh wait, you’re not talking about them torturing theisen…nvm.
Anonymous At Work
Actually, I find Thiessen use of this particular precedent to be interesting. The idea that a government can, on the basis of national security and reluctance by the other nation, to sanction armed arrests of citizens of another nation, can be applied so many ways, that for a supporter of “enhanced interogation” to support it is very much playing with fire.
DougJ
@NonyNony:
That is a good point too.
LGRooney
Assange did not break any laws. He is not under the jurisdiction of any of our secrecy laws. What would be the basis for the FBI arresting him? The guy that gave him the information, or at least the ultimate source of the information, is the one responsible to the laws (although perhaps covered under whistleblower protection should there be a judgment of illegality in concealing criminal behavior as evidenced in the information made public and only after exhausting other means at correcting this concealment), not Assange.
MTiffany
Marc Thiessen needs to be waterboarded. But I’d settle for his beheading.
cervantes
It’s actually far from clear that Assange has violated any U.S. laws. And if he has, he was not on U.S. territory when he did so, therefore U.S. law had no jurisdiction.
Just sayin’.
cgp
@NonyNony
No way he calculated all of this from the beginning. He’s just riding the wave, and while he would definitely see the huge benefit of being arrested and put in jail, I doubt Assange planned it anymore than “Lets push those boundaries and see if we can make some chaos…” More chaos is better, and that’s the only math needed.
While I like the idea of WikiLeaks, I’ve yet to see the tangible benefits.
Citizen Alan
@Xopher:
That’s never going to happen, because we’re never getting rid of our vast supply of nukes and so we’ll never not be in a position to annihilate the human race if the rest of the world doesn’t give into our tantrums.
Perry Como
LOL. Wikileaks posted a 1.4GB encrypted (AES 256) file called “Insurance file.” Fuck off Thiessen, you neocon hack.
Batocchio
You’re right, they are serious questions, sadly enough. My guess is Thiessen would continue his usual stance: torture away, and then deny that it’s torture. The pro-torture crowd left special cases like the “ticking time bomb” (fantastical though they are) behind long ago. Thiessen has never let morality, the law or realities about torture (its radicalizing effect, its ineffectiveness for getting accurate intel, the vast superiority of “carrots” and rapport-building) interfere with his torture cheerleading. He’s been thoroughly debunked by Dan Froomkin, Jane Mayer (citing British intelligence and other sources) and Matthew Alexander, among others. Thiessen isn’t the brightest of torture apologists/proponents, since he often contradicts himself within a single op-ed or interview, but he is one of the most partisan and zealous. And yet Fred Hiatt fired Froomkin and hired Thiessen.
Zifnab
@LGRooney:
Yes, because this logic has stopped law enforcement the world over. :-p
That said, I imagine you’re right on more than one level. Assange publicizes the leaks, but he’s not the guy the FBI will go after. They’ll want to go after the leaker and anyone who helped hand the information up to Assange.
Going after Wikileaks now would be like going after the WaPo after Watergate breaks. It’s too late. The word is already out. And if you shut the organization down now, there would be someone else to fill the space quickly enough. Better to shut down Deep Throat.
beltane
The ultimate goal of people like Thiessen is the creation of a terror state, where all citizens live with the knowledge that doing or saying the wrong thing, or even being suspected of doing or saying the wrong thing, could lead to one’s arrest, torture, and summary execution, and where even one’s most intimate associates could be a potential informant. Thiessen’s “freedom” is the freedom of the 1930’s Soviet Union, where the KGB really did have a lot of freedom.
eemom
@General Stuck:
Srsly. “Taking him off the streets,” like he’s marauding around beating innocent passers-by with rolls of classified documents.
wilfred
‘Orwellian’ is overused but it’s apt enough here.
What other ‘authorities’ are out there? Maybe there could be a contest, or something.
Bostondreams
So then is Thiessen advocating that the government shut down the Internet? Because, like, I am pretty sure that there is to more it than a bunch of tubes that can be clogged up with stuff to prevent ‘dissemination’.
NonyNony
@DougJ:
I’d even revise my statement to suggest that Assange has probably taken the inevitable eventuality of his detention/assassination at the hands of the US government into account and has sent things into place to use that event to do something sensationalist. Some piece of information that if it were released now would be ho-hum but released in tandem with his disappearance/death would be ugly.
This is not a dilettante flitting around doing what he does without much thought and with a naive view of how the world works – this is a guy who has already shown himself to not be an idiot and who has proven to be fairly savvy about how the international media and world governments operate. Additionally, he has already basically given up his life for his ideals. He shows all the signs of being an extremist and extremists by definition don’t tend to do things by halves. Fortunately one of his extremes appears to be pacifism, so that’s good – we already have too many extremists like that running around.
In previous years I’d expect the US response to a guy like Assange to be character assassination – try to destroy his credibility. Because in previous years I didn’t expect the US intelligence community to be staffed by serial fuck-ups. But the last decade or so has pulled a curtain away from my eyes so I won’t be too surprised to see someone do something stupid with Assange. I just also won’t be surprised to see it blow up in their faces.
LosGatosCA
Wahoo! Extraordinary rendition, torture, and show trial!
Are we the greatest banana republic ever, or what!
New Yorker
I’m guessing Thiessen wouldn’t be so keen with having his old pal
Augusto PinochetDick Cheney arrested for leaking info about Valerie Plame.JohnR
We’re America – don’t arrest him, just kill him. We’re far too powerful and important to worry about the details.
Citizen Alan
BTW, not to take a dump in the punchbowl or anything, but if we’re all in agreement that Marc Thiessen is a repulsive piece of shit for actively trying to turn America into an Orwellian dystopia, it sure would be swell if the current Democratic president would take some steps towards dismantling our oppressive security state instead of maintaining or even expanding it. Bill Clinton was no prize in that area, either. Have we ever had a president who gave a shit about civil liberties?
General Stuck
@cgp:
That’s because in order for there to be tangible results from these kinds of leaks, they need to be focused on specific cases of illegality or malfaesance. Just releasing tens of thousands of documents of mostly after action reports is mostly just a statement that war is hell, and this one has become a quagmire needing to end. We already knew that, and that too many civilians have been and are getting killed. McCrystal himself has admitted this and ordered tightening of ROE to try and reduce such deaths, especially at checkpoints.
Also releasing this many documents, outlining US military operations over a long period of time, provides a roadmap of our methods of counterinsurgency warfare, to be studied for a long time by any number of unfriendly countries. Such information does nothing to end the war in Afghanistan. And then there is the incredible oversight of not redacting names of Afghan. contractors and informants.
It was sloppily done without any clear purpose to uncover stuff being done surreptitiously by the government beyond the ugliness of war. Of which, when that is the case, I support such disclosures of secret documents.
El Cid
Why should he be tried? In order to be consistent with Republican values, he should either be shipped to a 3rd country like Syria to be tortured, or sent to Gitmo or an Iraqi or Afghan prison and waterboarded 83 times in a month so that Republicans could then point out he had lavish meals of the sort which come in frozen dinners, like chicken and vegetables.
ajr22
Better arrest him and ship him off to a black hole quick, before he gets his hands on some old Bush era documents. This is just a classic Mark Theison temper tantrum. He is my nominee for biggest douche in the galaxy.
El Cid
@General Stuck: I think there is enormous value in learning the actual processes and effects of day to day warfare. This is typically gathered in a limited fashion by scholarship long after. The availability of details may or may not have an immediate effect — neither did the Pentagon papers, which were much more revealing and incriminating than what I’ve seen of these releases — but I’m at least interested in how things actually work than characterizations given by higher-ups.
wilfred
That was sloppy. Thank heaven we are now getting these people entry visas and putting them into witness protection programs.
Tonal Crow
@Anonymous At Work: Quite. I seem to recall that Spain asserts “universal jurisdiction” to prosecute war criminals that happen to reside in Spain or in one of its former colonies. Maybe they’d be interested in adding to that an assertion of Thiessen’s wet-dream abduction power. Wooo-hooo! I know a bunch of war criminals who would detest the likely upshot of that.
Steve V
I remember once upon a time the GOP would argue that such resources should be used to pursue Osama bin Laden.
ajr22
Mark Theison=Der Untertan.
Throughout the novel, Hessling’s inflexible ideals are often contradicted by his actions: he preaches bravery but is a coward; he is the strongest proponent of the military but seeks to be excused from his obligatory military service; his greatest political opponents are the revolutionary Social Democrats, yet he uses his influence to help send his hometown’s SPD candidate to the Reichstag to defeat his Liberal competitors in business; he starts vicious rumors against the latter and then dissociates himself from them; he preaches and enforces Christian virtues upon others but lies, cheats, and regularly commits infidelity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Untertan
Cacti
@LGRooney:
Probably conspiracy.
Cacti
And possibly espionage.
me
@NonyNony: Read Perry’s comment above. You can torrent the file and save it for when/if Assange get arrested and the AES key is released.
celticdragonchick
@cervantes:
I don’t think that Thiessen is interested in things like that, considering he is advocating what could be considered an act of war by forcibly arresting a citizen of a foreign country in that same country without any due process or recognized writ, and then forcibly and covertly removing him.
This is the shit that North Korea does.
I am fucking flabbergasted.
Zifnab
@wilfred: No silly. We can’t give them entry VISAs to US soil. We just need to occupy the country until they are perfectly safe from everything and no one wants to hurt them.
This is just like Vietnam, only a million times better. We can’t leave because the liberals want us to and therefore won’t let us!
daveNYC
Carter, maybe?
“America, fuck yeah!” isn’t a reason?
Tonal Crow
@beltane:
Slight correction: his “freedom” is that of Romania under Ceausescu. Excerpt:
ET
I am going to start calling Marc “Marc the Moron.”
This would not deal a “major blow to his organization.” It would however give Assange some really fabulous PR and make those arresting him look fucking stupid. Marc think that a significant part of the population thinks like him, that Wikileaks is a bad thing. This is wrong. Most don’t know what Wikileaks is and of those who do I would guess that a significant percentage either don’t have a problem with it or love it.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@El Cid:
Ditto that.
There is also the deterrent effect. Just knowing that something like wikileaks is out there trawling for damaging secrets gives policy makers who are at least nominally honest and dedicated public servants an incentive not to spread blatant lies in public, in a way that would hurt them badly if the truth were to come out later, and it also gives them an excuse with which to push back against other people who are lobbying for something unsavory (“gosh, I’d really like to help you out, and I do love those delicious campaign contributions [nom, nom, nom], but if anybody found out about this deal we’d both be dead meat. Better luck next time, eh.”).
It won’t stop a Dick Cheney, but it might stop some other people (hopefully including the current occupants of the WH). We used to have a press that did this sort of thing, but apparently it is time to reinvent the wheel.
Dork
Fuck you Ben Nelson.
Linda Featheringill
Nah. Wouldn’t work that way.
twiffer
wait, so…our authority to disregard international law is a fucking memo? am i wrong in thinking that might not fly as actual authority?
fasteddie9318
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m just giddy with excitement about what’s going to happen the first time a foreign nation’s top law-enforcement agency tries to arrest someone on US soil without any sanction by our government. GIDDY!
fasteddie9318
@Dork:
Seriously; now that the ZOMG 60TH VOTE isn’t an issue, can somebody boot this fucker out of the caucus please?
wilfred
I think that’s about right. Thiessen’s function on the WAPO editorial page is to beat the drum for bombing the bejeesus out of Iran. The slightest possibility that someone might leak something that could impede generates threats like this against Assange.
celticdragonchick
@ET:
That works in Hollywood screenplays.
It doesn’t always work out so well when the people arresting you can also fuck over your family, your friends and anybody who has served you coffee at a Starbucks by handing out indictments for anything they can think up under National Security Laws and then wrap it up in one pretty bow under RICO conspiracy charges. All the while, they are also the people who have the microphone at daily press briefings saying how they stopped you and your “terrorist affiliated” organization from harming our troops or (fill in the blank again…) whatever they feel like saying to smear you (ask Richard Jewell…).
Even if this Justice Department declines to act at this time, you can be assured that one under a Palin or a Tancredo or (fill in the blank) in the future will not be so circumspect.
And they won’t give a shit if you or I think it makes them look bad.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@cgp:
Disclosures like this are small battles in a long war. There may be no tangible benefits at all regarding Afghanistan, but every generation needs to be reminded that our leaders are liars and murderers, which may act to constrain the next imperial adventure. The Vietnam experience did not stop American imperial designs altogether but it did make five straight Presidents reluctant to commit to large-scale land war.
Jay B.
@ET:
I only wish you were right, but there are a substantial number of people on this “progressive” blog who were supporting his arrest, writing passionately how awful he was for publishing the “unimportant” information (along with the important information of our informants) or telling those who support his efforts that they have blood on their hands. Others, in the meantime, declared that civil liberties don’t really mean much to them, or if they matter to them, their “friends” outwit them with “The Constitution isn’t a Suicide Pact”. And these are people largely passionate about the liberal agenda.
As far as:
I’m not even sure what that’s supposed to mean. Immediate withdrawal? Surrender? What it has done to a larger extent than the incredibly overlooked/dismissed WaPo series on the US public/private Spy Complex is brought up even larger questions about what kind of country do people want to have.
Do we want a secretive one, in which the government owns and doles out the information? Or do we want the information of the “nothing much” daily reality of the war we’re fighting and subsidizing? To say nothing of Constitutional liberties, the right to privacy and the vast apparatus they’ve built to monitor us “for our own good”.
I’d argue that most people if they knew about WikiLeaks either don’t care or are appalled. Those who fully support the enterprise are called “civil libertarian absolutists”, like that’s somehow a problem they should deal with, and we’re in the tiny minority in this country.
General Stuck
@El Cid: The Pentagon Papers were basically a compilation of day to day fighting in Vietnam, or study of the types of documents Assange released. They were also a counter claim to the massive lies the public was told about Vietnam. I don’t see that kind of thing with Afghanistan. And it is one thing to study military strategy after the fact, as opposed to having the kinds of detailed info of actual troops formulating and carrying out tactics of war fighting in a contemporary manner.
If all war would cease forever, which would be a good thing, then it wouldn’t matter the world receiving this information. But somehow, I doubt mankind, nor the US, is at that point of banning war altogether, and now, troops currently and in the future won’t be safer in the reality that the other guy might have some insight in what will happen next.
wilfred
Tangible benefits?
In a crowd, tightly.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7911036/Wikileaks-Afghanistan-log-Wikileaks-10-greatest-scoops.html
BeccaM
So… in abstentia, some other nation with whom the U.S. is less-than-friendly but not at war can decide to arrest anybody in America and sneak them out of the country for trial, conviction, and possibly even execution.
I mean, if it’s “legal” for the FBI to violate international law and sovereignty, as well as commit random acts of war, then surely North Korea, Iran, Libya or any other country on the planet can snatch American citizens right out of the United States, right?
Oh right, this is yet another installment of, “Laws are for other people, Love American Style edition.”
Zifnab
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.): Then Bush 41 fucked it all up by marching into the Middle East, winning, and having the common sense to pull out. After that, we went back to the operative assumption that the United States was Super Double Plus Invincible.
You don’t think it’s a coincidence we invaded Iraq twice, did you?
Michael
Sing it, Patriots – “Ah’m proud to be ‘Murkin, where at least Ah know Ah’m fraaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!”
celticdragonchick
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.):
I feel compelled to point out that the Taliban absolutely deserved every fucking bomb we sent their way.
I would not like to be the one to tell this young woman that she is acceptable collateral damage and that she and millions of other Afghan women will just have to “suck it up and drive on” as we abandon them to Dark Ages slavery, torture, disfigurement, ignorance and executions by stoning and firing squads for leaving their homes without their male captors.
grimc
@wilfred:
The papers claimed that the US government was asked if it wanted to go over the documents to do some pre-publication ‘harm minimization’. The offer was declined.
burnspbesq
@General Stuck:
I don’t want him arrested – I want to hand him over to the cousins and uncles of the first Afghan who gets offed because he was too fucking lazy to properly redact documents before releasing them.
NonyNony
@celticdragonchick:
So does she become acceptable collateral damage when one of our bombs hits her wedding party instead? Is that the magical moment when a dead Afghan becomes acceptable collateral damage – when it’s one of our bombs that does the killing?
wilfred
@celticdragonchick:
Guilt, eh? Well, apply for a job with USAID. I did.
You don’t know a fucking thing about Af. If you did, you’d have a little more faith in the Afghan people. Taliban were a real solution to the absolute nightmare of the civil war. Given time, the country and people would have healed themselves and the worst excesses of the Taliban would have disappeared.
Af is a traditional country, for better or worse; it will never be a paradigm of western ideals about anything. During the Catastrophe, Afghan women sold their dowrys in Peshawar to buy bullets to fight the Russians. You think they’re all on the side of the coalition? I fucking doubt it.
The country needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up, not shot to pieces or occupied by people who have no business there.
JGabriel
OT, but …
TPM has yet another Tea Party Terrorist, this time in PA:
What is it with these Conservatives who think Overthowing the Government = Defending the Country ?
I just don’t get it. Do they really not see the contradiction?
.
celticdragonchick
@NonyNony:
It isn’t acceptable either way.
When we leave, however, we do it with the full knowledge of what will become of her and every other woman in the country.
We need to be square with ourselves about that, because in the end, it simply a prettified version of “I gots mine, and FUCK YOU!” that we are selling to Afghan women.
If we are okay with that, then there is nothing else to be said.
burnspbesq
@JGabriel:
“What contradiction?” Is what they would say if you asked them.
celticdragonchick
@wilfred:
Christ on a crutch.
You should have worked for Goebbels.
Godwin intended.
Ruckus
@celticdragonchick:
Agreed except for the part about being flabbergasted. Not surprised at all. Disappointed, absolutely, but not surprised.
LosGatosCA
@celticdragonchick:
In the Bush\neocon world that’s just a side benefit.
celticdragonchick
@Ruckus:
Indeed.
Sometimes, however, my shock and surprise button functions fitfully for a moment or so before burning out again.
MikeJ
If they tried this whole “snatch him without the coöperation of the host country” thing on Roman Polanski I’d be more likely to consider it a valid move.
celticdragonchick
@LosGatosCA:
I think you are actually correct on that, in a horrifying way.
wilfred
@celticdragonchick:
Shut the fuck up. I’ve actually been to Afghanistan and worked for the Afghan relief committees before you ever even heard of the Taliban. In 1993, you couldn’t ride a hundred meters on a bus without getting robbed. And that was before the Civil War. At first, Taliban brought order to chaos. No one knew at the time what they would do later.
Don’t prattle. You want to help? Go. Put your money where your precious convictions are.
burnspbesq
@MikeJ:
Naah, the Swiss can have Polanski. if we’re going to snatch somebody in Switzerland and bring him to the US to stand trial, why not start with the CEO of UBS?
General Stuck
@burnspbesq: In that instance, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@Zifnab:
Bush pere pointedly avoided a march to Baghdad, and if Bush fils‘ war hadn’t gone so badly there probably would be about a quarter million American troops right now massed on the Iranian border. We can’t stop the bullshit altogether, but we can slow it down.
JGabriel
@burnspbesq: Wikipedia has this note on Cumberland County, PA:
Hmm. I can just hear Peake’s neighbors now, “We-ell, you know, Ray makes some good points, haina? He really shouldn’ta shot that lawyer though.”
.
fasteddie9318
@celticdragonchick:
I don’t know who could disagree when you phrase it like that. Of course, all those non-Taliban houses, schools, and wedding parties we bombed probably didn’t absolutely deserve all those fucking bombs.
We’re talking about the woman who was so well-protected by the presence of US soldiers that the same thing that would have happened to her if we weren’t there happened to her anyway? It is funny that you’re using the term “collateral damage” in this context, since her particular situation wasn’t actually collateral to anything that the US has or hasn’t done, but all those people we keep accidentally on purpose bombing while we play whack-a-mole with guys who are mostly hiding out across the border in Pakistan certainly are collateral damage.
The Taliban are reprehensible, most particularly for their treatment of women. But there are a whole bunch of places around the world where women are subjected to unimaginable brutality as a matter of course, and, unless we’re prepared to invade every one of those places, the moral argument for staying in Afghanistan to protect the women lacks credibility.
wengler
This legal determination was made by the FBI for the express purpose of kidnapping President Manuel Noriega and charging him for the criminal action of not following the orders of his CIA handlers. He now resides in an American prison.
This is strong legal reasoning you people just don’t understand.
burnspbesq
@wilfred:
So did the Khmer Rouge, if memory serves.
You may not have known at the time. Don’t assume everyone was as naive as you were. Extremists do what extremists do. There are thousands of years of examples.
Perry Como
Freedom bomb or Taliban, make your choice. Of course, WikiLeaks is the real villain.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@celticdragonchick:
Since that has nothing to do with the ostensible reason for the invasion, I don’t understand your point.
Interesting moral calculus, how did you arrive at it?
wilfred
@burnspbesq:
That is bullshit. What do you think rural, Pashtun Afghanistan was like before the Taliban? It wasn’t Periclean Athens, beleive me.
Taliban did not have a clearly stated ideology that could have predicted their worst excesses. If they ahd, they would have had so much support at the beginning, including that from very traditional Afghan expats, most of whom were hardly disposed to religous fanaticism. There were actually groups among the resistance that were even more fanatical – Professor Sayyaf, for example.
I cheered when they hanged Najibullah, who had it coming. Most of felt that in time the good sense of the Afghan people would return the country to where was before the Catastrophe – every Afghani that I knew believed the same thing.
Amanda in the South Bay
Well, last week Charli Carpenter at LGM had a long, very controversial post advocating Assange be arrested, though presumably without torture or blacksites.
I don’t know, even though I’m all for gtfo-ing, I’m well aware there are lots of pros and cons to anything we do.
I have to admit, my first, selfish thought is to say fuck A-Stan, republics can’t survive open ended wars like this.
celticdragonchick
@wilfred:
Worked out real well, didn’t it?
Spare me your I wuz there and you can’t have any opinion but what I tells ya! schtick.
I doesn’t fly with me. I was aware of what was happening wrt the Taliban in Afghanistan by the late 90’s, because I actually do pay attention to international news and specifically international arms commerce. A minor flunky in the Clinton admin made some news when he suggested the Taliban were a good thing going in Afghanistan around the time we were trying to negotiate a pipeline easement deal. I thought the statement then was astronomically ill advised.
As for your contention that monstrous, medieval and intrinsically evil religious totalitarianism is somehow better then the predation of local warlords..because it brought order…
I just think we may have radically different notions on moral priorities. I honestly cannot fathom your viewpoint on this. Thomas Hobbes witnessed the insanity of the English Civil war and was an unabashed Monarchist, but even he was unwilling to go where you seem to be going on this.
wengler
@Amanda in the South Bay
When the US military does leave Afghanistan it will be interesting to see how long the US friendly government lasts. I personally think the Soviet backed government which lasted 3 years after withdrawal(including outlasting the Soviet Union itself) will best Karzai and friends who will bolt long before the noose is tightened around Kabul.
Jay B.
@wilfred:
No, no, it doesn’t matter that you have first hand knowledge of the situation, it’s only acceptable if you have a hobby horse post hoc justification of an aimless, destructive war to toss at people.
mantis
@burnspbesq:
No, the moral argument for invading Afghanistan in the first place lacks credibility, if the argument for invading Afghanistan were to save women from the Taliban. It wasn’t.
In any case, the “well why don’t we invade every country where X happens” argument doesn’t hold water, as the question is no longer do we or don’t we invade. We already did invade. And a lot of people, resources, and time have been devoted to putting that nation on a path toward non-Taliban rule with some semblance of women’s rights. If we just pack up and leave immediately, it’s a very safe bet that all of that work will be for naught.
So yes, the moral argument for staying in Afghanistan to protect women does have plenty of credibility, as we devoted ourselves, when we invaded, to leaving the country in a better position than it was in before we invaded. Short of inventing a time machine and undoing the invasion before it happened, we are stuck with the very difficult task of living up to our promises and not fucking over a nation full of people those promises were made to.
MikeJ
@Amanda in the South Bay: It’s my belief that Assange and Dick Cheney should be treated the same way for endangering the lives of intelligence assets.
TaosJohn
Let’s see: the Taliban are conservative Muslims in their own country, Afghanistan. For some reason, our government thinks it’s OK to murder them. Afghans, in their own country. THEIR country, not ours.
What if a foreign power occupied Mississippi and decided it was OK to murder Southern Baptists??? Or blow up Tea Party meetings in Michigan by remote control? Or use “targetted killing” on the RNC?
I don’t think even liberal Democrats would think this was a neat idea.
wengler
@wilfred
And you were wrong to cheer. Secular Communist dictatorship is far better than fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship. But the US trained Osama and friends anyways and we all reaped the rewards of that.
Chickens coming home to roost and all that. But we aren’t supposed to talk about training al Qaeda, because learning from past mistakes is much worse than the alternative of clapping harder.
Jay B.
@celticdragonchick:
That’s a spectacularly dishonest reading of what he’s been writing, all of which i find more informed and interesting than anything you’ve said.
Or do you think the Taliban didn’t have popular support, especially at the beginning? Do you know the overall religious make up of the Afghan people? Are they usually liberal when it comes to religion? What’s the difference between a religiously fundamentalist warlord and a Taliban fighter? And why did the Taliban ALSO make deals with some of these warlords who we now support? And why is the government we’re propping up ALSO looking to make deals with the Taliban?
celticdragonchick
@fasteddie9318:
No, they did not. Neither did the German civilians in Hamburg or Dresden. At the same time, you can make that argument so that you cannot use force to save anybody at all, since you might hurt innocents who are already being hurt by the people you want to stop. I don’t see how that advances anything at all. Bombs are going to kill people you don’t want to kill, so you use them as sparing as possible. Soldiers with guns will make bad judgment calls and kill innocents. You try to train them not to, and weed out the idiots and the psychopaths. You won’t get all of them, unfortunately.
If you know a perfect way to kill off murderous religious fanatics embedded in the local population without hurting any locals at all, let me know. What you seem to suggest is that we throw up our hands and do nothing, since we might kill people by accident (as opposed to the other side which is unappologetically deliberate about it…).
fasteddie9318
@mantis:
Those people, resources, and that time were devoted to catching or bringing to justice the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack. We’ve failed to do so. It’s already all been for naught. Now it’s just a question of how much more you want to waste on the failure.
What promises? Women’s rights were at best a hopeful side effect of installing a stable, non-radical government, which itself was simply a secondary goal behind, again, militarily responding to 9/11. Now that we failed in responding to 9/11, we’re told that, oh wait, we were actually there to bring tranquility and democracy and ponies, but that’s not going so well, so oh wait, we’ve obviously been there all along to save the women. Since that’s apparently not working either (not to get repetitive, but Time’s cover story was maimed last year, not 10 years ago), I guess next we’ll be told to THINK OF THE CHILDREN, or warned that Mullah Omar has enriched uranium under his eyepatch, or some such. And this isn’t at all like the rolling list of
excusesrationales we were given for Iraq, not in the least.wengler
@MikeJ
You are comparing the former Vice President of the United States of America with a guy that runs a site dedicated to publishing secrets?
celticdragonchick
@Jay B.:
Really? What is the strawman that I have built, if indeed I have built one? He specifically said:
Prior to that he said:
If you agree with an apologist for religious fanatical tyranny, then that is your problem and not mine. If my arguments are uninteresting, then by all means, please don’t read them. I will not be offended. Really.
mantis
@TaosJohn:
You seem to forget the fact that the Taliban gave Al Qaeda a safe place to train and plan a massive attack on our country.
If the government of Mississippi supplied and harbored a southern baptist terrorist organization which then attacked a foreign power, I would certainly see justification in that power declaring war on the US.
Amanda in the South Bay
@mantis:
I’ll admit to being skeptical about the “we have to save the women of Afghanistan” argument, even though my heart probably goes with it.
Back in the good old days of 2001-2003 I remember some neo-cons trying to co-opt feminists into supporting our imperial excursions. Looking back on it I think it was pretty cynical and I have to also admit to being a wee bit cynical about it. The fact is innocents are going to die and be maimed regardless of what we do.
fasteddie9318
@celticdragonchick:
Likewise, if you can think of a reason why the local population of Afghanistan should be uniquely blessed with our freedom bombs and liberty bullets while the millions of other local populations worldwide living under oppressive regimes don’t warrant the same special attention, I’m all ears. As for me, since we’re losing there anyway and all we’re doing is killing a whole bunch more Afghans as we slowly make our way out, I’d rather just be done with it. If that’s “[throwing] up our hands and [doing] nothing,” then so be it. We’ve been doing that with respect to oppressed populations all over the world for decades now, and still are, so I fail to see the urgency about this one particular case.
mantis
@fasteddie9318:
Really, that’s it? That’s all we’ve been doing there, full stop?
You obviously have zero clue what has really been happening on the ground in Afghanistan for the past eight years. Sad, since you seem to fancy yourself an expert.
celticdragonchick
@TaosJohn:
Probably because those same conservative Muslims conspired with some Saudi wacko named Bin Laden who was funding them and building training camps for them while merging the leadership cadre of his organization with theirs. You might remember that he was also that guy who sent 19 hijackers (who trained in Taliban/Al Qaeda run and owned camps) to kill a bunch of us a few years ago.
If the Southern Baptists take power in this country (The Handmaid’s Tale…?), institute a religious dictatorship and start a war with a foreign power over religious chicanery while killing thousands of their civilians in an unprovoked surprise attack, that power will have some moral claim to invading us at that point, I might think.
fasteddie9318
@mantis:
I thought we were talking about why we invaded (“the question is no longer do we or don’t we invade”…”[w]e already did invade”…”[y]ou seem to forget the fact that the Taliban gave Al Qaeda a safe place to train and plan a massive attack on our country”…etc.), not the litany of justifications why we’re still there. You might want to figure out which you’d like to talk about instead of jumbling them up.
Once it became clear that we weren’t going to get top al-Qaeda leadership (or, hell, if we actually would have nabbed them), we should have been packing up and moving out with the promise of another air campaign if we again perceived a direct threat to the US materializing there. I don’t take a “pot committed” approach to all the nation-building we’ve been bumbling around with there since I disagreed with all of it from the start.
Jay B.
@celticdragonchick:
Yes, he’s an apologist for religious tyranny. That’s it. It’s not hyperbole or misrepresenting his argument in the least to say that because he said the Taliban, at the time, were seen as a steadying influence after years and years of war (and no one knew what they would turn out to be) by the people living in Afghanistan, he’s actually in favor of the Taliban
There’s a vast chasm between stating a fact (i.e. The Taliban was largely welcomed in a country coming out of a hellish Civil War) and endorsing the belief. I suspect you know that, or, if you don’t, you might consider learning that.
Stefan
When we leave, however, we do it with the full knowledge of what will become of her and every other woman in the country. We need to be square with ourselves about that, because in the end, it simply a prettified version of “I gots mine, and FUCK YOU!” that we are selling to Afghan women. If we are okay with that, then there is nothing else to be said.
The situation in eastern Congo is absolutely horrific for women — rampant sex slavery, rapes, mutilations, etc. If we can’t leave Afghanistan because of the terrible situation for women that would result, then by the same moral calculus aren’t we also required to invade and occupy the Congo?
If not, why not?
celticdragonchick
@fasteddie9318:
That is a variant of “If I can’t save all person, then why bother saving anybody at all” as you watch somebody drown ten feet away from you.
We happen to be there now…and even if we are not in a position to help people in Sudan or Rwanda or fill in the blank with the 3rd world hell hole of your fancy….we are able to make some sort of difference for women in that place now at this moment in history. It will likely never come again in our lifetimes, and literally millions of lives are riding on what we do.
You are angry that a wedding party got bombed? Good! You should be! We can always do better to avoid that.
Just saying “Fuck it” and wandering away while clucking our tongues over our bomb casualties and leaving millions of women to a Dark Ages living nightmare is akin to saying “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”.
Stefan
Taliban brought order to chaos.
You know who else claimed they brought order to chaos?
Hitler.
Hey, I’m just sayin’….
Stefan
What if a foreign power occupied Mississippi and decided it was OK to murder Southern Baptists??? Or blow up Tea Party meetings in Michigan by remote control? Or use “targetted killing” on the RNC? I don’t think even liberal Democrats would think this was a neat idea.
Oh, I don’t know — it depends which country, doesn’t it? If, say, Canada invaded and starting wiping out Tea Parties, I might not think it such a bad thing.
At least they’d bring order out of chaos….
fasteddie9318
@celticdragonchick:
That would make sense, I guess, if in order to save the drowning person I had to empty a 12 gauge shotgun into a crowd of bystanders and hope nobody gets shot, plus there’s a pretty good chance the drowning person is going to drown even if I try to help him/her.
But just so we’re clear, if Osama bin Laden relocates to the Sudan and hits us again, we’ll be able to save the Sudanese women then right?
celticdragonchick
@Stefan:
You do what you can where you happen to be. A police officer obviously cannot be everywhere at every moment to stop crimes, but that does not absolve him or her from failing to stop one that is happening where s/he happens to be at a particular moment.
We are in Afghanistan, and we took responsibility, for good or ill, over the social institutions of that country and for building a nascent democratic polity. At some point, we either have to stand for the strength of our convictions and our commitments, or go back to playing REALPOLITIK cynical games with brown skinned people who don’t matter much to us in our well fed, gated country club communities.
I am actually a bit astonished that people at a putatively progressive blog seem so eager to write off millions of people and leave them to slavery and worse while offering up feeble excuses that we killed some of them in accidental attacks.
It is smug, patronizing, and self satisfied, but it isn’t particularly progressive.
Stefan
I am actually a bit astonished that people at a putatively progressive blog seem so eager to write off millions of people and leave them to slavery and worse while offering up feeble excuses that we killed some of them in accidental attacks.
Hey, I’m astonished that you’re so eager to write off tens of millions of women in the Congo. We certainly have the resources to invade and occupy them if we really wanted to. Is there a good reason why, knowing what we know, that we shouldn’t take responsibility, for good or ill, over the social institutions of Congo and for building a nascent democratic polity there? At some point, we either have to stand for the strength of our convictions and our commitments or not….
celticdragonchick
@fasteddie9318:
It would make even more sense if some of the bystanders were throwing rocks and metal pipes at the drowning person, which would be a little closer to the truth of this scenario if you want to pass it off as an analogy to Afghanistan today.
Again, you want to pass off moral cowardice as a virtue, and utilitarian expediency as the desired norm. I am not surprised your attempted analogy had to be dishonestly skewed in order to try and make that argument.
Ruckus
@Stefan:
Darker skin?
fasteddie9318
@celticdragonchick:
We’re the global police force? Really?
Cacti
@celticdragonchick:
But the Taliban brought order.
Order uber alles.
Ruckus
@fasteddie9318:
You didn’t know that?
I thought everyone knows that the last superduper power has to be the worlds policeman, because we are superior, we are mighty, we are the bestest, we have superpowers, damn it.
/ 8 year old boy
Jay B.
@celticdragonchick:
You know who is really going to liberate Afghani women? Afghanis! Or do you think that military occupation usually implements long-term, lasting, progressive social change?
fasteddie9318
@celticdragonchick:
Well, I guess, in which case I have to hope my shotgun rounds only hit the people throwing stuff and not, say, any children in the crowd, and meanwhile most of that stuff keeps hitting the drowning person anyway, making it more likely that he/she is going to drown regardless of what I’m doing.
It was about as “dishonestly skewed” as the contention that anybody who doesn’t think AMERICA: FUCK YEAH when it comes to women’s issues (or, well, the issues of some women, not all I guess) is practicing moral cowardice. This doesn’t at all sound like the charges that were hurled at people like me by the neocons over Iraq a few years back, not at all.
celticdragonchick
@Stefan:
I already answered you, but I shall be generous and assume you missed that.
No, we do not have the resources to invade the Congo without a draft and a massive additional expenditure of money we don’t have, and we have no legal mechanism or right by which we may do so. I think the last ill advised and dubiously legal invasion we undertook showed the limits of that thinking.
What we have is the ability and the responsibility to help people in a country where we have influence, power and resources at this moment.
If you want to argue for a Pax Americana, by all means have at it. I rather suspect you are actually in the “don’t bother saving any of them” crowd, but you tell me…
Silver
@celticdragonchick:
The point is that we aren’t doing better. We kill lots of innocent people. The fucking general in charge said that, by the way, before he got canned.
It seems fair that if you’re going to blame me for chopped off noses because I think getting out of Afghanistan is a good idea, I get to lay the bloody mangled mess of body parts that results from an errant bomb at your feet.
Why do you like killing children so much?
Zifnab
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Well, that’s the real joke, isn’t it? People are going to die and be maimed regardless of what we do. That said, we’re not opening orphanages inside our embassies or distributing aid packages to widows or marching into Afghanistan with civil engineers looking to spread irrigation techniques and engineering skills.
We’re flying unmaned drones over poppy fields and carpet bombing the fuck out of the youngest and poorest folks in the nation. Then beating our chests and claiming we’ve “saved” the country from a ruthless dictatorship by replacing it with a slightly less ruthless, slightly more transparent dictatorship run by the former VP of an old US energy firm.
We’re not helping. We’re just funding the perpetuation of crimes against humanity. And for that we demand high praise and continued political support.
Jay B.
@celticdragonchick:
And you believe that occupying a country, killing innocent people and forcibly instilling American values will make Afghanis feminists.
Cacti
This thread has been quite enlightening.
I had previously thought the Taliban provided a haven for an international terrorist org that launched an attack responsible for the deaths of 3,000 US citizens.
I have learned today, however, that they are actually heroic patriots engaged in a liberation struggle with evil American interlopers, and that their rule was a positive thing for Afghanistan, because it brought order.
Zifnab
@celticdragonchick:
And when we start doing that, CelticDragonChick, you let me know. As far as I can tell, we’re handing out lots of bribes and firing lots of bullets to make sure our misogynistic, totalitarian government trumps their misogynistic, totalitarian insurgency.
No one is helping. This is not an aid mission. Not unless you consider the guys selling the US Government tanks, bullets, and bombs candidates in need of federal aid.
fasteddie9318
@Cacti:
And I, for one, have learned that America is the world’s policeman, charged with rooting out injustice wherever it finds itself, although all the other injustices going on everywhere else and most of the ones actually going on wherever we are really can’t be helped. But we should definitely keep bombing people in case one of those bombs helps stop a little injustice somehow.
celticdragonchick
@fasteddie9318:
You seem to be a product of the nu and impruved No Child Left Behind Bush school legacy.
Congratulations.
We do constitute most of the De Facto law enforcement in Afghanistan at this time, which was my contention.
We are in Afghanistan. We are not in Sudan or The Democratic Republic of The Congo.
If we were, and had assumed responsibility for building civic institutions in those countries, I would expect us as a nation to honor our obligations.
If you need additional explanation, or if the notion of actually standing by ones’ agreements and stated responsibilities is onerous to you, I advise you to see this as a teachable moment and learn about it in greater detail from people who have a better grasp of history and ethics then you seem to have.
Jay B.
@Cacti:
And I’ve learned that people dishonestly take things out of context by ignorantly conflating a rationale with a personal belief. It’s clear that wilfred was pointing out that the Taliban were seen by a large segment of the population as helpful initially because they were living in a lawless society after the Civil War we helped prolong and longed to have some basic civil authority. They quickly became unpopular, as many (but certainly not all) Afghanis discovered they were too radical for them. Similarly, the Russians were happy to have Leninism in the days after 1919 because they hoped it would unify the country — and then many found totalitarianism to be intolerable once it became clear what communism was going to mean.
By pointing this out, I am interpreting history not condoning it.
You might want to figure out how that works, champ.
Cacti
@fasteddie9318:
No, I agree with you.
We must leave at once so the Pashtun George Washingtons of the Taliban can restore order.
celticdragonchick
@Silver:
We killed some people in an inarguably horrible and unjust…and accidental…fashion.
Therefore, we need to leave and let all those people go back to being killed, enslaved, raped, burned with acid, hacked etc under a fanatical religious crackpot tyranny,deliberately…because we cannot help them in an absolutely morally perfect and pure fashion.
Gotcha.
What fucking planet do you live on?
Jay B.
@celticdragonchick:
And we will have to be, until basically forever, or until a largely rural, conservative and religious population adopts a wholly foreign notion of feminism. It’s clear we’re killing too few Afghanis.
Perry Como
@celticdragonchick: I’d be happy if we’d build some civic institutions stateside first. We have to cut food stamps, but hey, no problem funding Freedom Bombs! The cat food commission <3s you.
fasteddie9318
@celticdragonchick:
Well that contention and what you wrote really aren’t even in the same ballpark, let alone reflecting the same sentiment. But since you’re getting frustrated, feel free to resort to as much name-calling and spitting as you need to cheer yourself up.
By “history,” would you be referring in any way to the history of conquering powers that have tried to establish order in the region we now call Afghanistan? Because that is an instructive bit of history to study. As for ethics, you’ll have to enlighten me on what the classical philosophers had to say about the ethics of drone attacks on civilians in order to magically bring about freedom and order.
Jay B.
@celticdragonchick:
Why do you think the Taliban will rule Afghanistan when we leave?
Silver
@celticdragonchick:
So, you don’t want to take responsibility for the kids you’ve maimed and murdered from an air conditioned control room back here in the US?
I wouldn’t want to either, if I was you.
maus
@celticdragonchick:
I fail to see how we have the ability to help in Afghanistan,and how we’re “responsible” diplomatically enough to handle the recovery process. There’s no plan and without a plan, no follow-through is possible.
@Jay B.: I’m more interested in why they should trust us, considering our diplomatic meddlings have absolutely fuck-all to do with feminism and the “plight” of the people under the Taliban.
fasteddie9318
@Cacti:
I can’t offer any response to this better than what Jay B. wrote.
Cacti
@Jay B.:
And I’ve learned that “I was taken out of context” is a favorite skirt to hide behind for whatever dreck comes out of someone’s filthy sewer.
Kyle
Since Thiessen is advocating the international kidnapping and torture of an individual, in violation of numerous UN declarations and treaties, I authorize the UN, with their vast powers and ubiquitous black helicopters and commandos that Thiessen imagines they have, to arrest and remove him from society before he can do any further harm.
fasteddie9318
@Cacti:
Right, that excuse is never valid.
Cacti
@fasteddie9318:
I for one, think “Stop Murdering the Heroic Taliban” should be part of the 2012 Party Platform.
wilfred
@Jay B.:
The Muslims locate this phenomenon in the nafs-i-ammara, the commanding self; the source of righteous indignation and “Oh!, Oh! the villains!” pontificating that usually crops up when buttons are pushed. The veil of light, in other words; an Afghani would understand in a minute.
Interestingly enough, I’m preparing a chapter on the Black Muslims, a group that sparks the same reaction in a lot of people. Of course, understanding the socio-historical context that they emerged from makes one a lot more sympathetic to their ideology, even if it is more satisfying to denounce them out of hand.
To understand the ideology of Taliban is to understand the devastation of the Catastrophe, the pathetic loss and despair of a great and gallant people.
celticdragonchick
@Jay B.:
It’s worth revisiting some of his statements regarding that.
@wilfred:
Yep, those misunderstood Taliban would have just mellowed right out in a couple more years. Youbetcha.
@wilfred:
I’m trying to square that with the first quote, but it isn’t really working…
Either they were teh solution and would have worked out all those niggling details about mass executions, chattel slavery, torture, chopping off limbs, denial of medical treatment to half the population and so on…or they were not teh solution and people didn’t know what they in for.
Right.
Maybe you are the one deliberately mis-reading Wilfred, Jay.
Svensker
@celticdragonchick:
So our plan is to kill off all the religious fanatics in Afghanistan, then leave? That should work out well for everyone.
celticdragonchick
@Silver:
Where in the hell did you get the weed to dream that up?
I want some. My back is killing me tonight.
gocart mozart
@cervantes:
cough . . . Noriega . . . cough, cough.
Perry Como
Come on people, you just don’t understand. If we stay just a few more Friedman Units and embrace the Afghan people with our Freedom Bombs, rainbow shitting unicorns will be galloping through the
poppyhappy fields and everyone will sing songs of love and peace. Just a few more Friedman Units, I swear…wilfred
@celticdragonchick:
You’re just pathetically stupid, really. I give up.
celticdragonchick
@Cacti:
It’s this kind of bullshit that the GOP wurlitzer loves to point out on the Left to discredit anything else being talked about. You know the drill.
“The cheese eating Taliban coddling surrender monkey machine is at it again…”
celticdragonchick
@wilfred:
Amazing. Based on your expert analysis, I somehow feel compelled to surrender my grades at Guilford College and demand that I get failing marks instead.
///
Perry Como
A Jeffersonian democracy in Afghanistan is just around the corner!
Jay B.
@Cacti:
I said you took things out of context because everything you wrote in that blockquote is misleading to the extreme or just dishonest.
Here’s the “positive thing” for the people because it brought order:
So, you are either lying, you can’t read or decided to clip a little out of there to bolster your bullshit point conveniently ignoring the “No one knew at the time what they would do later” explanation. It says NOTHING about “American interlopers” and nothing about liberation. It was the way they saw the situation at the time. In fact, the clear inference is that they were wrong to think that as things played out subsequently.
More “at the time” rationale about the Taliban takeover from a aid worker who said he was there:
Again, where do they sound heroic? They sound like a chiper that people imposed their hopes on. But please, continue to purposely distort it.
This is the part I was most uncomfortable with:
But only because here they actually showed their hand, albeit to a corrupt communist dictator. That said, it’s clear that no one is condoning how the Taliban turned out or even championing them in any way, but rather actually telling a first-hand report of what it was like in those days before their true character came out.
I just think you are being totally dishonest here.
Cacti
@Jay B.:
Yes *cough* misleading and dishonest:
Let’s see: the Taliban are conservative Muslims in their own country, Afghanistan. For some reason, our government thinks it’s OK to murder them. Afghans, in their own country. THEIR country, not ours.
I just don’t understanding the proper contextification for this double plus, super enlightened take on the Taliban.
tech98
We have devoted plenty of resources, but after nine years of ineffectual clusterfuck, I’d say our ability, influence and power in Afghanistan are highly questionable. Wishing and wanting, self-righteous moralizing and Wolverines chest-thumping don’t change the fact that given the structure of their society, our ability to help them particularly with the primary USgov resource in-country, the US military, is very limited. That’s not a moral abdication, that’s a sad reality.
gocart mozart
Our mistake in Afganistan after the defeat of the Taliban was not that we didn’t install a large occupying force but rather that we didn’t fund a massive rebuilding effort, a mini-Marshal plan if you will. Instead our policy seems to have been to leave several thousand troops there to shoot at remnants of the Taliban and Al Quida forces and from time to time accidently blow up a wedding party. Surprisingly, this tactic was unsuccessful.
If once the anti-Taliban government took over, we had given the Karzai leadership, thru the U.N., 10 billion together with perhaps 5-10 bil. more from other countries. Given it funds to stabilise the country, build infrastructure etc, we and they wouldn’t be in this mess.
I know what everyone is thinking: CORRUPTION! True, there would be corruption, there is corruption now. I would rather have a Boss Tweed, government contract, patronage style corruption than kickbacks and bribes from the poppy industry like we have now. Tribal leaders would be more loyal to the central government because they would want a piece of the action and many average Afganis would put down their guns in order to get a paycheck building roads, schools, de-mining etc.
Shorter gocart: For 1/10th the money we spent on blowing shit up, we could have built stuff and gotten a much better result.
Jay B.
Maybe, maybe not. I tend to think that wilfred might be wrong that “things would have worked themselves out”.
But you know what bombing them for 10 years without destroying them did to the Taliban? Gave them even more legitimacy. And they are still around. And they are still mutilating people.
You know how this gets solved? Not with more bombs. But by the Afghanis themselves.
celticdragonchick
@Perry Como:
No. We were idiots to even contemplate free elections in a country as ravaged as Afghanistan and with no history of liberal democracy.
What is needed is a Hobbesian ‘benevolent’ despot somewhat akin to Mushariff in Pakistan. If you need to know what the term “Hobbesian Despot” means, go look it up yourself. A minimum of a generation would be needed to build the educational and economic infrastructure needed to support a workable democracy. In the rebuilding of Japan, Douglas MacArthur functioned as such a ‘despot’ in the creation of civic structures and a constitution for several years, and Japan was far less damaged and had near universal education.
Afghanistan will not function in Friedman units, and your attempts to paint me as saying it will is strawman nonsense.
What we would need to do is, I’m afraid, appoint somebody who is acceptable to most of the warlords and can use the army and police to keep the religious wackos at bay while building educational access, infrastructure and basic living ammenities for men and women.
Democracy can work in Afghanistan, but it will need long term planning to get there, and that means thinking several generations down the road.
wilfred
@Jay B.:
What? If you can distinguish between what orthodox Sunni Islam looked like in in Khost Afghanistan in 1993 and what Kabu looked like in late 1998 show me. There is little difference between deeply traditional, conservative pre-Catastrophe Islam in Pashtun areas and the Taliban. What we saw was the manifestation of an ideology that nobody could have foreseen at the end of the Civil War. If you have evidence, i.e. proof of what the Taliban would do when they had power, show me. You don’t.
The people had lost everything. In Pakistan, the madrassas taught that this was a result of the people straying from the straight path of Islam. It was offered as salvation to a people that had lost the very fabric of their society.
Who’s saying they were heroic? They didn’t even fight in the war against the Russians – they didn’t even exist. They didn’t even fight to take over Af; everyone was exhausted from the fighting; most of their successes came from hudna or bribes, They brought a kind of order to a place completely destroyed – and unless you have been in such a place don’t question how desirable that is. Of course, feel free to now explain exactly how the fuck they seem to be gaining in support. At your leisure.
To an Afghan, Najibullah was a scumbag traitor. End of story. No one mourned him. I don’t think they ‘showed their hand’; rather they hanged a symbol of the despair that came with the Russian invasion.
wilfred
Oh, dear. You need to read a little bit. Taliban did not exist in 1993. I spent 5 weeks there traveling about a post-Mujahadeen victory Af divided amongst the 14 groups that had beaten the Russians. The Civil War was just beginning.
celticdragonchick
@gocart mozart:
This.
However, Rumsfeld at the time said something to the effect that “We don’t do nation building”. Not only did we not rebuild anything, we really didn’t even conduct much in the way of military operations against Al Qaeda and company. We were being told they magically appeared in Iraq, and that is where nearly all our forces went.
Along with military operations, we absolutely should have swarmed the country with rebuilding aid, contractors etc.
Why it didn’t happen can be added to the list of failures of the past President.
Silver
@celticdragonchick:
Nice dodge…something I’d expect from a moral midget who who supports blowing up innocent people via video link and joystick.
Perry Como
@celticdragonchick:
Why not a Lockean despot or a Rousseauean despot? Ooh, a Kantian despot could be fun! The US has such a great track record of installing and supporting benevolent despots, I’m sure nothing could go wrong with your cunning plan!
Brilliant! Let’s see, $87,000,000/year * 25 years…carry the 1… For a mere $2,175,000,000 we can build a democracy in a country that has no history of supporting a democracy. Sounds like a bargain! And it will only take a *minimum* of one generation!
I apologize for confusing you with one of the people who thinks Afghanistan’s problems will be solved in a few more FUs. I see you are going for the long game. We merely need to stay in Afghanistan for another 25 years, give or take, while propping up a benevolent despot and everything will come up roses. All for the low, low price of a couple trillion dollars.
Silly me, what was I thinking? 100 FUs for Afghanistan!
Stillwater
@celticdragonchick: If you need to know what the term “Hobbesian Despot” means, go look it up yourself.
Is it this?
celticdragonchick
@Stillwater:
Nicely done. We all need a laugh after this. :)
Jay B.
@wilfred:
I was defending you and agreed with your points. People were saying that you and others were claiming that Tailban were “heroic”. I disagreed with them.
Which is why I said that other people were deliberately misreading your posts.
maus
@celticdragonchick:
Who installed Musharraf, again?
Perry Como
@maus: Not to mention how the Hobbesian Ubermensch allowed his intelligence service to aid and fund al Qaeda. Oops, I guess I mentioned it.
IM
So we just need a Oliver Cronwell or a Richelieu?
A platonic philosopher king? Caesar, Octavian, Sulla?
Sulla would be cheap. Only a few thousand death.
Wasn’t Karsai already our man in Kabul, the man the war lords liked? What, now is the guy the next Diem or what?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Intent isn’t enough, a proper ethic also thinks about results.
The result is a lot of death, only partly accidental. Half the country is ruled by tyrannous religious fundamentalists called the taliban. The other half is ruled by warlords, the northern alliance masquerading as the government, in other words tyrannous religious fundamentalists.
Yes, our afghan side in this civil war is a bit better. If you understand better as worse than in Iran and better than in Saudi-Arabia. And perhaps the Taliban only rule a third of the country.
Is the western interventions still making things better? If not, it is not the ethical thing to do.
celticdragonchick
@Perry Como:
The ISI does whatever the hell they feel like. Words like “allowed” don’t really apply.
celticdragonchick
@IM:
My vote is for Richelieu, but that, as in many things, is relative.
liberal
@gocart mozart:
Without a large enough occupying force, there couldn’t be a rebuilding effort.
Remember, you need so many occupation soldiers per civilians. And Afghanistan isn’t a small country; it has a greater population, and a much less forgiving terrain, than Iraq.
liberal
@celticdragonchick:
If you tally up the cost of actually pacifying and rebuilding Afghanistan, there’s no way we would have done it (or will do it). The occupying force would have to be in the hundreds of thousands.
liberal
@celticdragonchick:
For someone who pretends to take the long view, I just have to ask: how’d Mushariff work out? Pakistan is getting more and more stable now, right? LOL.
Given how many boots on the ground would be required, you’re talking on the order of a hundred billion $ per year, for decades. Ain’t gonna happen.
Yes, which is why we could never afford to do the same thing in Afghanistan.
And importantly, it would mean order $10^11/year, every year, for roughly 20+ years. We’re not going to pay for that, and “we’re already there” is a thin reed on which to counter the point that we can’t afford, and certainly don’t have the wisdom, to right every wrong everywhere.
If you’re so incensed about the fate of women in Afghanistan, no one here is stopping you from giving up your life and family here and adventuring there to murder Taliban thugs.
Nic
@celticdragonchick The poor mutilated woman on the cover of Time was disfigured by her barbaric husband in 2009. So much for your theory of feminism through carpet bombing.
maus
@liberal: We’re certainly not going to pay to do it “right”, nor are we endorsing a political system that favors women, we’re institutionalizing misogyny. Not that Time cares about that either.
@celticdragonchick: Bring on the Shahs!
maus
@celticdragonchick:
1) When are we planning to nuke Afghanistan?
2) When were the cultures EVER similar? Does Afghanistan have an Emperor I’m not aware of? Did they renounce tribalism suddenly?