Thursday 18 November 2010

Afghanistan Perpetual War

British Defense Chief Gen. Sir David Richards, has stated that “Nato now needs to plan for a 30 or 40 year role to help the Afghan armed forces hold their country against the militants,” though he “stuck to the government’s plans to withdraw combat troops by 2014 but made clear that thousands of troops will be needed long after that date.”

In an interview on November 14, Richards said, “Everyone is clear that we will have to remains a lot longer than” four to five years. “The plans,” he added, “are now in place to do that” and will be made “rather clearer” at the upcoming NATO summit in Lisbon.

Richards argued that the Taliban and al-Qaeda cannot be defeated militarily and that victory cannot be declared by “marching into another nation’s capital,” as in conventional warfare. They are after all loosely organized, perhaps he has learn something from 9 years of warfare.

It doesn't seem to enter his head that we are never going to win because we are wrong to be there and have the wrong tactics. We have been there for longer than World War 1, World War 2 and Vietnam? We have even been there before, and had a similar result.

Meanwhile the media is obsessed by a wedding, and mostly ignores this disaster.

3 comments:

Jonathan said...

And lots of other people have been there over the past 2000 years or so and had similar results.

Adrian Windisch said...

Indeed. I have written before on this http://greenreading.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-are-we-in-afghanistan.html

http://greenreading.blogspot.com/2010/04/forgotten-war-afghanistan.html

The first Afghan War (1839–1842)
The second Anglo-Afghan war (1878–1880)
The Third Afghan War (1919) saw the Afghans winning independence.
The Soviet War in Afghanistan (1979-1989) .

weggis said...

"If at first you don't succeed..."