Do you support the war in Afghanistan?

[LBJDemocrat]

Why or why not?

As casualties are rising to match those in Iraq, I would like for us to have a discussion on the subject.

[shadowknows69]

1. We can't "win" it any more than we can Iraq

Just ask the Russian Army about that one. We trained the Taliban to beat people like us and they have been essentially since we got there. I had one soldier tell me that the country is almost completely in ruins save for the major cities and that hatred of americans is rampant. Of course it is.

[Flabbergasted]

5. Actually ask the British. They fared no better. Afghan's are tough in a tough land they know well.

It's classic guerrilla warfare. Hard to beat.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

26. Or, the Greeks, Romans, or Russians.

[jeanruss]

10. no war

I don't support the concept of war at all. The fact that we still have humans killing other humans is a testament to our continued role as barbarians. Just because some of the world has more gadgets and a more comfortable life does not mean we have evolved any more than the people of ancient times. Actually, we are barbarians with even more destructive power. We can now kill millions with the flip of a switch. The main product of the USA is weapons. That makes us a culture of death. We profit from the killing of humans. I would rather die than kill someone, or have someone killed in my name, with these wars. It is sad to imagine the incredible world we could develop, if our resources were spent lifting mankind up instead of tearing it down. I wonder how many geniuses have been killed because they couldn't grow up? If, as many believe, a Savior is coming, how do they know he hasn't already been killed? In past human history, the most profound humans came from very modest backgrounds and this is where most of the wars are taking place. Until mankind realizes that our greatest resource is ourselves, we will not progress. We are barely out of the jungle .

[medeak]

16. read my post #4

regiment I hear from are being welcomed.

But I fear that there will be hell to pay when Prime Minister's term is over end of year.

[noamnety]

2. No.

Perhaps someone could refresh me on what our objectives are there, though. :)

[Mike Nelson]

3. No, the Commander in Chief was inept

I did originally

[medeak]

4. friend there right now

telling stories of dreading going into villages they have bombed...ironically they were greeted with affection. As villagers are telling them their homes were taken by Taliban and then bombed to the ground two days later. Villagers found karma in it all. The feds are having the troops hand out money for repatriation. Troops fed up with govt however as running war with duct tape ect... Iraq gets all the supplies (gee... wonder why? duh)

Currently looking for cooling wear as it's 145 degrees today and our troops are truly suffering with zilch.

[NNN0LHI]

23. 145 degrees today. Someone is exaggerating a little bit I think?

http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/businesstraveler/local/AFXX0003?from=search

79 Degrees in Kabul today with 13% Humidity

[medeak]

35. that's the current temp (nighttime) 104 degrees high in Kabul

and I can't post what province he's in....but not close to Kabul

[NNN0LHI]

36. Hottest temperature recorded on earth was 110°F and that wasn't near Afghanistan

http://www.ems.psu.edu/WeatherWorld/features/extremes.html

[medeak]

38. It's been hotter than that at my parent's house

outside Las Vegas. (airport temp does not reflect the entire valley) I don't know what your beef is but find it truly disturbing that you are questioning a soldier on his 3rd tour of duty in the middle east. I have the blog from his unit and unable to post. Your site is temps of towns..not in the middle of nowhere.

[NNN0LHI]

40. Not in the last seven days it hasn't been hotter anywhere else

[tburnsten]

39. I have a hard time questioning

every single soldier and marine I have ever met who have been to either Iraq and Afghanistan, when they say the nighttime temperature is about 100 degrees and they are shivering from it I believe them that temps get to the 130s.

[NNN0LHI]

42. Believe what you want but the highest recorded temperature ever on earth was 136 degrees

http://ask.yahoo.com/20050712.html

Dear Mr. Heatmiser:

Summer's not hot enough where you live? You must not be from Libya or Death Valley, California. Those are the sites of the two hottest temperatures ever recorded on the planet.

The biggest scorcher ever noted was on September 13, 1922, in El Azizia (also known as Al 'Aziziyah), Libya, when the mercury hit 136 degrees Fahrenheit. El Azizia is near the Sahara desert, so it's no wonder the place gets so hot. Temperatures have likely gotten even hotter in the actual desert, but weather stations aren't there to record it.

California's Death Valley had the second-highest temperature. This desert area hit 134 degrees Fahrenheit in 1913. Like the Libyan city, Death Valley is in a mid or low latitude, which gets far more direct sun than the areas above 45 degrees north or south.

Death Valley also has the lowest elevation in the Western Hemisphere, which contributes to the heat. The place with the highest average temperature is Dakol, Ethiopia, at 94 degrees Fahrenheit. This spot is in a geographic depression, similar to Death Valley. Air warms up as it gets lower and cools as it rises.

So if you want to beat the heat, we recommend avoiding El Azizia,

[medeak]

43. winters there are so brutal

incredible extremes. Person posting must not be factoring temps inside military vehicles.

in the 7 yrs have been here used ignore option today for the first time. ;-)

[tburnsten]

48. 10-4 Good buddy! Heat is ridiculous there. N?T

[Ian David]

6. It seemed like a good idea at the time...

Unless you'd seen:

Rambo III (1988)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095956/

Or:


The Beast (1988 film)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_(1988_film)

[Aviation Pro]

7. I support catching UBL and bringing him to justice.....

...but that's in Pakistan.

[EFerrari]

8. No. Bombing Afghanistan will not make us safer -- on the contrary.

I support helping Afghanistan rebuild its infrastructure which will never happen while we're bombing people. You can build a school but you can't build the teachers who have fled the bombing.

[heidler1]

9. To me it is another unsuccessful attempt to create peace with war.

Their main source of cash is growing and selling opium. If we can't encourage growing a better crop we're wasting our time, lives and money.

[leftofthedial]

11. no

it's every bit the smokescreen that Iraq has been

all they want is their pipeline, an environment ripe for corruption and theft and a military distraction to cover their crimes at home.

[Fumesucker]

12. I thought it was an idiotic idea at the time..

I see that I was an optimist then though.

Afghanistan has ground up every army ever sent there, it's on the other side of the freakin' world and Americans just don't do other cultures worth diddly.

[jwirr]

13. Well LBJ the only thing I remember Barry Goldwater saying was

that he had been stationed there and we should never go to war in those mountains. I think he may have been right. Why don't we send law enforcement out to chase UBL and bring our troops home? We are not going to accomplish anything the way we are going.

[JeffR]

14. We have about 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, IIRC,

and 47,000 in Japan and 37,000 in Korea, and another 30,000 on Okinawa.

All of which begs the question of how seriously the Bush misAdministration and the Pentagon really take this so-called war. More smoke and mirrors.

[Disturbed]

15. After seven years the US & NATO Forces cannot defeat

the Taliban. Sen. Biden had an idea that was logical but most people that responded to it were negative to his concept.

Does anyone remember what that idea was?

[medeak]

17. Biden's plan is necessary imo

http://www.reuters.com/article/featuredCrisis/idUSN25373448


and what we should have been doing all these years. Totally support him

[EFerrari]

24. If they were really serious about a military "solution", they should have

gone after Pakistan in the first damn place -- that's where most of the command and control is.

But, they weren't. They just needed the parade to distract us while they went down their real list of goals.

[medeak]

41. Biden calls for wells, roads, power ect

NEW YORK, Feb 25 (Reuters) - The United States must focus on securing and rebuilding Afghanistan because if it fails then neighboring Pakistan could follow, U.S. Sen. Joe Biden said on Monday after returning from a tour of both countries.

Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said more troops are needed in Afghanistan and called for greater focus on basics like roads and power plus giving the military cash for quick projects like digging wells.

He also urged a rebuilding plan similar to the Marshall Plan under which the United States aided Europe's shattered economies after World War Two.

"Afghanistan's fate and Pakistan's future are joined and America's security is tied to both," Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations. "If Afghanistan fails, Pakistan could follow, because extremists will set their sights on the bigger prize to the east."

[JeffR]

20. The Biden-Lantos amendment?

[merh]

18. I was okay with it at first, I mean we were going after Bin Laden

But now I know that we were offered Bin Laden at least 3 times in 2001 and we rejected the offers. Just like we rejected Saddam's offers to go into exile. It wasn't about OBL anymore that Iraq was about Saddam and WMDs. Afghanistan was about that gas pipeline.

How much oil and gas and energy and how many lives have they wasted going after their gold?

[undeterred]

19. Senator Feingold supports the war in Afghanistan

as a legitimate war on Al Quaeda. At the same time he has been against the war in Iraq from Day One and done everything he can to try to bring the troops home. Feingold has pretty good judgment on most things and he is on the Senate Intelligence committee. I would like to believe that he knows some good reasons WHY we need to be there and exactly what it is we are accomplishing.

That said, I don't understand why we are there, what the goals are, and why its ok not to have a "timeline" there. I wish he would speak out more on this because a lot of people would like to know what it is we're doing that justifies killing so many civilians.

[NNN0LHI]

29. Senator Russ Feingold supported confirmation of John Ashcroft as Attorney General

Which proves none of us are invincible when it comes to having lapses in judgment.

Don

[undeterred]

32. Different situation entirely.

He has voted for several Bush appointees that we all hate, including John Roberts. Feingold has explained that he did so because he believes the president has the right to choose his appointees, and that rejecting one apppointee does not result in a better one being proposed. There were not enough votes to object to these people anyway, so it would have had no effect.

Supporting the war in Afghanistan over a period of years is an entirely different matter. He has access to information that we do not.

[spanone]

21. i don't support war in the mid-east period...

[glowing]

22. No, bombing that country for a man who is hiding out there is not a smart strategy..

Using some special ops forces and going in and taking him down or bringing him out would have been good enough.. but we all know that going to Afghanistan for Osama was a hoax... otherwise, they would have arrested him before when he was recieving dialysis and the American University Hospital.. for his involvment in the attack of that Navy ship (I forget the name of it at the moment).

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

25. No. War is a dumb way to solve problems.

And, the occupation of Afghanistan is doing a great job of proving it.

[dysfunctional press]

27. nope- 9/11 was a crime, NOT an act of war.

and should have been handled as such.

[TahitiNut]

44. Ditto

[pleah]

28. No! Because both Afghanistan and Iraq were based on a lie,

freedom and terrorism. Both wars had nothing to do with freedom and terrorism. It was about control of the region and oil.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

30. No and Never Have. I am a pacifist. I later found out that we were all lined up to go to war with

Afghanistan before 9/11.

Excellent timeline.

http://www.ringnebula.com/Oil/Timeline.htm

[wildbilln864]

31. Thank you Ommm!

:hi: I agree completely.

[mrs_p]

33. i'm a pacifist

so against all war. the taliban, however, absolutely need to be dealt with and i honestly don't know how that can be done. even before 911, i was following the taliban and the afghani warlords and read about how the afghani people were being jacked around from every angle. do i think americans can be "liberators" no. but do i think that the international community needs to help the oppressed people in afghanistan? absolutely. i feel the same way about darfur. i don't have the answers to these types of problems (thus, i'm a scientist, not a politician), but i know there must be a way for the international community to stand up to oppressive regimes.

[Imagevision]

34. Afganistan was merely an entry vehicle for going to Iraq for oil and

Bushco even blew that one. Rumsfeld; "there are better targets in Iraq"

[Blue_In_AK]

37. No, I don't support war anywhere.

If 9-11 had been treated as a crime rather than an attack on our country, if someone had actually gone after the masterminds and participants at the time (including any "insiders" in the Bush administration), when we had the whole world on our side, then we wouldn't be in this fix. The biggest mistake is calling Iraq/Afghanistan a "war," as if we're fighting against another actual nation with a real army, who actually attacked us. 9-11 wasn't Pearl Harbor, no matter how much they'd like it to be, and we were not attacked by the army of either Iraq or Afghanistan.

[medeak]

45. did you see Charlie Wilson's War?

How we totally fecked it all up not building schools, hospitals ect after arming the remote villages to fight the Russians. Left it all for Bin Laden to come in and repatriate the country.

Biden in my opinion is the best source for true thinking on the mess we have created. Hope Obama makes him sec of state at the very least.

[TwilightGardener]

46. Yes. We must maintain a troop presence there, because we can't abandon the

nation to the Taliban and AQ--our greatest known terrorist threat is there, and especially along the border with a nuclear-armed, not-too-stable Pakistan. We already have bases and logistics set up there, we'd be stupid to leave them now. I say this as the wife of a serviceman.

[Edweird]

47. In its current form. no.

Had we just gone in and gotten OBL and shut down the Taliban, then yeah. But this aberration? No.
But we all know there was zero chance of that happening anyway, since the Bin Ladens and Bushes are close knit family friends.