Pakistan Crisis

[Vermillion_Hawk]

That depends - did you take someone else's spot in the class halfway through, and did you at least try to avert failure? Or did you basically just half ass it and throw up your hands when it all went to ****?

Oh, I get it. You think the current U.S. president took over when the wars were halfway through.

This only makes sense if the length of the war is preordained by some authority that cannot be challenged, or the president is a helpless pawn in the great scheme of things. I have noticed that the helpless pawn theory is very popular among those who defend him no matter what he does.

The president is not a helpless pawn but he's certainly not all-powerful enough to end a war at a single word, especially since the White House doesn't have as much authority as earlier with the head having been cut off the proverbial neo-con snake.

 

[Mage246]

Ending a war with a stroke of a pen doesn't actually end anything. It also doesn't even begin to address or resolve the issues that led to war or its aftermath. This idea that a President can end a war just because he wants to is the domain of the naive and the foolish. Ignoring problems does not cause them to go away.

 

[Sir Saladin]

When the problems aren't yours to worry about in the first place they are much easier to ignore, but if you never have any of your own problems to solve then worry away, I guess.

You must be the most intelligent ****ing genius the Earth has ever been blessed with Mage, the way you like to call everyone who disagrees with you a naive fool, moron or idiot. I know it's hard to be patient with all of us inferior beings who grossly outnumber you, but you should try anyway.

By the way, I didn't write anything about stroking pens. 

 

[Bromden]

Ending a war with a stroke of a pen doesn't actually end anything. It also doesn't even begin to address or resolve the issues that led to war or its aftermath. This idea that a President can end a war just because he wants to is the domain of the naive and the foolish. Ignoring problems does not cause them to go away.

Some hard effort or a bit of visible achievement would have been nice before he got his prize. But then, Gandhi didn't get one so the requirements for it might be a tad bit different than what one would think.

 

[Vermillion_Hawk]

When the problems aren't yours to worry about in the first place they are much easier to ignore, but if you never have any of your own problems to solve then worry away, I guess.

You must be the most intelligent ******** genius the Earth has ever been blessed with Mage, the way you like to call everyone who disagrees with you a naive fool, moron or idiot. I know it's hard to be patient with all of us inferior beings who grossly outnumber you, but you should try anyway.

By the way, I didn't write anything about stroking pens.

Because the Monroe Doctrine and isolationism (or at least their equivalents) have worked so well for other countries in the past.

 

[Mage246]

Or why not point to the giant man-eating elephant gone amuk in the room and mention policy towards Afghanistan during and after the Soviet invasion. People can have such short memories.

 

[Sir Saladin]

Oh you poor, bamboozled World Police guys. It's all for the good of mankind, right? Yeesh.

I remember the Soviet Union wasting a lot of effort in Afghanistan for nothing and the U.S. supporting the Taliban. I don't remember Afghanistan ever becoming important enough for the U.S. to wage a war over there for a dozen years though. They could keep telling me Afghanistan was a huge threat and the Taliban was going to take over the whole world but that didn't mean I had to believe it. Invading Iraq as some sort of baker's dozen deal never made any sense either. Now the super powerful Al Quaida actually is in Iraq when it wasn't before.

So who will be granted the honor of being helped to death next?

 

[Mage246]

Right, so if you go in for the wrong reason I guess it makes perfect sense to abandon the whole ****ing thing, even though it means that things will be as bad or worse than before. This is 2014. You understand this, yes? Stop refighting the same battles from 10 years ago.

 

[Kobrag]

You can't win wars against nouns and adjectives.
And they can't station forces in Afghanistan like they do in the Philippines or Korea, since it is both an active extra-national conflict and civil conflict zone and thus is far more expensive.
It dosen't help that Karzai has been double dealing since his insertion as president.

 

[Bromden]

It's understandable; everyone needs their poppy.

 

[Kobrag]

Huh, can you make morphine without opium?
I have always wondered why the coalition troops always only made token efforts to destroy the poppy crops.

 

[Bromden]

Because there's no oil there, and poppy makes that war worth it. Afghanistan is the source of 90% of the worlds heroin and co.

 

[Vermillion_Hawk]

Oh you poor, bamboozled World Police guys. It's all for the good of mankind, right? Yeesh.

I remember the Soviet Union wasting a lot of effort in Afghanistan for nothing and the U.S. supporting the Taliban. I don't remember Afghanistan ever becoming important enough for the U.S. to wage a war over there for a dozen years though. They could keep telling me Afghanistan was a huge threat and the Taliban was going to take over the whole world but that didn't mean I had to believe it. Invading Iraq as some sort of baker's dozen deal never made any sense either. Now the super powerful Al Quaida actually is in Iraq when it wasn't before.

So who will be granted the honor of being helped to death next?

I wasn't saying anything about the reasons for them going in in the first place. That's another story. What I was saying was that America can't just become a closed country again, and regardless of their reasons for entering, ending the conflict immediately makes the loss of men and equipment even worse than normal. It would, essentially, be Vietnam to the letter.

 

[Mage246]

Poppy eradication pisses off the locals.

 

[Sir Saladin]

It has something to do with the soil in Afghanistan being too poor for most regular food crops or maybe it's the climate, I'm not sure now, but opium does very well there.

 

[Bromden]

Poppy eradication pisses off the locals.

The feelings of the locals being more important than the war on drugs must be a new concept.

 

[Mage246]

One of the advantages of the war on drugs is that we didn't have to care about the feelings of the locals. Eradicating drug crops doesn't create more drug crop farmers.

 

[Bromden]

And why the sudden caring now?

 

[Kobrag]

One of the advantages of the war on drugs is that we didn't have to care about the feelings of the locals. Eradicating drug crops doesn't create more drug crop farmers.

Makes more terrorists though, as for many people the poppies are a large source of the farmers bread basket.

 

[Vermillion_Hawk]

Assuming, of course, that all the poppy farming operations were totally independent. Which I highly doubt.