The taliban and their ideology need wiping of the face of the earth.If Afghanistan goes back into there hands it will effect Europe again .Terrorism.drugs,and refugees so unfortunately we need to fix Afghanistan
i am not sure if we are doing the right thing ,but,the west abandoned it after they beat the USSR and that turned out to be a mistake so guess we're stuck with it.
I'm sure we would all agree, but we cannot force the Afghan people to abandon them at gunpoint. This will only mean a conflict lasting for 30 years.
The only way to defeat them is to provide a strong democratic central govt., to provide infrastructure and prosperity, and to make sure that the Afghan people see us as their friend and not their enemy. This is where we are failing, and the result is that the Taliban control many Afghan provinces.
It is too simplistic to say that they simply must be defeated by military means. If we take the Helmand province for example, which is where British forces are most heavily committed, and where there is a very real war going on, we have to consider whether we are taking the right course.
Helmand, more than anywhere is an opium economy. Many of the ordinary Afghan farmers see this as the only viable living they can make. The allies are persuing a policy of stamping out this activity at any cost. The result is that we are completely failing to win the hearts and minds of the ordinary people here. A large part of the Taliban's strength is drawn from being paid and armed by the local warlords to protect their product. Thus we are creating an alliance between the ordinary Afghan's, the warlords and drug barons, and the Taliban. The other result is that the Afghan central govt. is weakened, its authority in many areas outside of Kabul is non-existent.
A more sensible policy would be to simply buy the product ourselves. Opium can be used to create medicinal morphine, which there is a huge worldwide shortage of. If we bought or liscensed this growing, using the Afghan govt. to do so, their authority would be restored, we would stop alienating the Afghan people, and the Taliban would be greatly weakened. It would also be beneficial for ourselves. Our soldiers are dying and the mission has cost something like a billion a year.
The current policy is only going to lead to failiure. Bloody minded determination to 'wipe the Taliban off the face of the Earth' is too simplistic, and is not getting us anywhere. I know you do question whether we are going about it in the right way, but I have to say we clearly are not. What are we fighting for, acording to MP Paul Flynn:
'Prominent members of the Karsai Government are making fortunes from drug trafficking. Now the regime that we have spilled blood for is about to execute a man for reading literature about female equality.
The Karsai Government has members who are profiting richly from the drugs trade. One is a relative of the president. The Karsai-appointed provincial governors and police bosses include warlords, former Taliban, drug barons and other criminals. The lubricant that moves the Karsai Government is the dollar bribery from NATO countries. Their ethos is corruption.
Pressure from Karsai forced the expulsion of the two Pashtun speaking diplomats. They had proud records of winning hearts and minds. This was foolish and counterproductive.
The best hope for a negotiation that could avoid 30 more years of slaughter and futile military activity was Paddy Ashdown. He succeeded brilliantly in the Balkans in another impossible situation.
How many more British lives must be sacrificed to serve Karsai’s foolish, venal ingrates?'
We are also bombing ordinary Afghan people very heavily. These figures from the Washington Post look at both the escalation, and the comparitive amount of airstrikes between Iraq and Afghanistan:
US Boosts its use of Airstrikes in Iraq
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/16/AR2008011604148.html
‘The U.S.-led coalition dropped 1,447 bombs on Iraq last year, an average of nearly four a day, compared with 229 bombs, or about four each week, in 2006.
…In Afghanistan, where U.S. and NATO bombings picked up in the middle of 2006, coalition airstrikes reached 3,572 last year, more than double the total for 2006 and more than 20 times the number in 2005. Many of the strikes have targeted the Taliban and other extremists in Helmand province, and military officials said they have been able to use air power to support small Special Forces units that engage the enemy in remote locations.
Human rights groups estimate that Afghan civilian casualties caused by airstrikes tripled to more than 300 in 2007, fueling fears that such aggressive bombardment could be catastrophic for the innocent.‘
3572 airstrikes last year! Double that in 2006 and 20 times as many as in 2005. And a far higher amount of airstrikes than in Iraq. Yet the title of the article mentions Iraq and not Afghanistan.
