If Pakistan is behind Taliban,why does the US not declare war on Pakistan

[KGODB]

too much conspiracy

The objective of the war in Vietnam and Iraq was to extract the resources of those countries and the region. Likewise the objective in Afghanistan was to extract the resources of Afghanistan and the region.


However, it didnt turn out like that.

The US is in over 14 trillion dollars in debt and growing. They spend billions a day in Afghanistan.

The EU has collapsed for all practical purposes. Greece has been hit hard the most, and thats where many of the defense companies are.


Truth is China is the emergent superpower. China took down a US spy plane many years ago and imprisoned the crew for weeks.

Havent yet heard if that happened the other way around yet??


Fact: US/NATO has not attacked a nation that has missile technology and an air defense.

Russia never gave Serbia modern air defense at the time of the NATO war there.


The West is finished

period

If America wanted to "extract" resources it could have done so in a much more time and cost effective manner

If America wanted to "extract" resources, why are Indian and Chinese consortiums getting contracts

There is more at play here which I cannot speak on for lack of knowledge

All NATO has to do is mobilize 400,000 soldiers and loosen its code of conduct for engaging in war, and everyone from Gul Khan to Toryalai jan will be running to refugee camps in Pakistan

Dont think a couple IEDs on the road has the greatest military power in history on the ropes

[Shah-i-Kot]

If America wanted to "extract" resources it could have done so in a much more time and cost effective manner

If America wanted to "extract" resources, why are Indian and Chinese consortiums getting contracts

There is more at play here which I cannot speak on for lack of knowledge

All NATO has to do is mobilize 400,000 soldiers and loosen its code of conduct for engaging in war, and everyone from Gul Khan to Toryalai jan will be running to refugee camps in Pakistan

Dont think a couple IEDs on the road has the greatest military power in history on the ropes

Against your hypotheses, lets rest the case with the historical backdrop to the Afghan war. The previous war in Vietnam and Iraq stand as evidence against your suppositions. Horrific crimes and murders were committed in both cases (My Lai Massacre, Haditha), and yet, NATO still lost.

In the last decade, NATO has bombarded Afghanistan from the sky. Just in 2011, over 30,000 air sorties were used by NATO.

I do not even need to mention the Afghan civilian casualties and wounded that have resulted. You speak as if NATO has been kind to the Afghan civilians. You forget kill team and the Panjwai massacre- these are only the incidents that received press coverage. Despite all the airstrikes and night raids, NATO has lost. Period. The NATO summit has made this crystal clear.


An alliance of nearly 50 nations with the most advanced technology and weaponry has failed, and along with failing, have brought irreparable damage to their respective economies- damage that may take decades to reverse if even possible.
Guerrilla wars are always won by the guerrillas. This is a fact that nearly all military historians confirm- a fact etched in stone by the Viet Minh.

In regards to capabilities, Wikileaks again revealed how the public/media have been kept in the dark.

[KGODB]

Against your hypotheses, lets rest the case with the historical backdrop to the Afghan war. The previous war in Vietnam and Iraq stand as evidence against your suppositions. Horrific crimes and murders were committed in both cases (My Lai Massacre, Haditha), and yet, NATO still lost.

In the last decade, NATO has bombarded Afghanistan from the sky. Just in 2011, over 30,000 air sorties were used by NATO.

I do not even need to mention the Afghan civilian casualties and wounded that have resulted. You speak as if NATO has been kind to the Afghan civilians. You forget kill team and the Panjwai massacre- these are only the incidents that received press coverage. Despite all the airstrikes and night raids, NATO has lost. Period. The NATO summit has made this crystal clear.


An alliance of nearly 50 nations with the most advanced technology and weaponry has failed, and along with failing, have brought irreparable damage to their respective economies- damage that may take decades to reverse if even possible.
Guerrilla wars are always won by the guerrillas. This is a fact that nearly all military historians confirm- a fact etched in stone by the Viet Minh.

In regards to capabilities, Wikileaks again revealed how the public/media have been kept in the dark.

If America unleashed its planes on every thing that walked from Kunduz to Quetta then there would be no insurgency

If Khyber to Orakzai to Balochistan was carpet bombed there would be no sanctuary for insurgents

America likes low scale managable conflicts

[Shah-i-Kot]

If America unleashed its planes on every thing that walked from Kunduz to Quetta then there would be no insurgency

If Khyber to Orakzai to Balochistan was carpet bombed there would be no sanctuary for insurgents

America likes low scale managable conflicts

Well as I mentioned before, that claim of yours is refuted again by the historical record, especially in regards to Vietnam where cross border air raids against Viet Minh safe havens in Laos occurred, and the Vietnamese still won. Carpet bombing was the norm in Vietnam and Iraq (Shock and Awe)

It is a historical fact that Vietnam was subject to constant carpet bombing throughout the Vietnam war as well as the use of agent orange and napalm. Iraq too was subject to carpet bombing in 1998 and 2003 and onwards.


Iran has the capability to react- and thats the main reason why there is so much hesitation on the part of NATO to go about "regime change".

[KGODB]

Well as I mentioned before, that claim of yours is refuted again by the historical record, especially in regards to Vietnam where cross border air raids against Viet Minh safe havens in Laos occurred, and the Vietnamese still won. Carpet bombing was the norm in Vietnam and Iraq (Shock and Awe)

It is a historical fact that Vietnam was subject to constant carpet bombing throughout the Vietnam war as well as the use of agent orange and napalm. Iraq too was subject to carpet bombing in 1998 and 2003 and onwards.


Iran has the capability to react- and thats the main reason why there is so much hesitation on the part of NATO to go about "regime change".

Please dont disrespect the Vietnamese by comparing them to the Taliban.

The resistance in Vietnam was much greater than todays Taliban insurgency

[Shah-i-Kot]

Please dont disrespect the Vietnamese by comparing them to the Taliban.

The resistance in Vietnam was much greater than todays Taliban insurgency

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr...etnam-20120424

Tet '68, Kabul '12: We still don't get it

Op-Ed


More than 40 years after the Vietnam War's Tet offensive and after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, the U.S. military still doesn't get guerrilla warfare.


April 24, 2012|By Nick Turse


Recently, after Afghan militants unleashed sophisticated, synchronized attacks across Afghanistan, including in the capital, Kabul, the Pentagon was quick to emphasize what hadn't happened.
"I'm not minimizing the seriousness of this, but this was in no way akin to the Tet offensive," said George Little, the Pentagon's top spokesman. "We are looking at suicide bombers, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade], mortar fire, etc. This was not a large-scale offensive sweeping into Kabul or other parts of the country."




Defense Secretary Leon Panetta weighed in similarly.
"There were," he insisted, "no tactical gains here. These are isolated attacks that are done for symbolic purposes, and they have not regained any territory."
Even granting the need to spin the assaults as failures, the official American reaction to the coordinated attacks reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of guerrilla warfare in general and of the type waged by the Haqqani network in particular. It's a lesson the United States should have learned decades ago.
But more than 40 years after the Vietnam War's Tet offensive, after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, theU.S. military still doesn't get it.
When Vietnamese revolutionary forces launched the 1968 Tet offensive, attacking the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon as well as four other major cities and nearly 150 other sites, they were hoping to spark a general uprising. What they did instead was give the lie to months of optimistic talk by American officials about tremendous strategic gains and a foreseeable victory.
Just months before Tet, the top U.S. commander in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, had claimed there was a successful end in sight for America's war. So how, then, were the Viet Cong able to launch such a widespread assault?
In the course of the offensive, some 58,000 revolutionary fighters were killed, and their advance was beaten back. But guerrillas the world over grasped the lesson of Tet: It is crucial in a guerrilla war to highlight your enemy's vulnerabilities, its helplessness to stop you — and it doesn't have to take 58,000 lives to do that.
The Haqqanis lost only 39 in their recent attacks. And they demonstrated conclusively that they are living in 2012, in global war-making terms, while the Pentagon, in a sense, is still stuck in the mind-set of Saigon, 1968.
Panetta noted that the Haqqani fighters had not taken territory. But that wasn't the point. What territory, after all, could the Haqqani militants have been out to regain by attacking Kabul's heavily defended diplomatic quarter? The German Embassy? And then what would they have done? While Panetta at least granted that the attacks were geared toward symbolic effect, he remained strangely focused on their tactical significance.
As in Vietnam, theU.S. militaryin Afghanistan regularly attempts to prove that it's winning via metrics. We get reports of enemy captures and body counts, as if the conflict can be won on points, like a boxing match.




In the Vietnam years, Westmoreland and other top U.S. officials were forever seeking an elusive "crossover point" — the moment when their Vietnamese foes would be losing more fighters than they could replace and so would have to capitulate. America would win by fighting a war of attrition.
But that didn't work in Vietnam, and it's not working in Afghanistan. More than a decade after U.S. forces swept into Kabul, what began as a ragtag remnant insurgency has grown stronger and continues to vex the most destructively powerful, best-funded military on the planet. All of America's tactical gains and captured territory, especially in the Taliban heartland of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, haven't brought the country anywhere near victory.
As the Haqqanis clearly meant to underscore with their recent coordinated attacks, America's trillion-dollar military, in conjunction with hundreds of thousands of allied Afghan security forces, still is incapable of fully securing even a small "green zone" in the heart of the Afghan capital, much less the rest of the country.
The conflict in Afghanistan began with its American commander declaring, "We don't do body counts," but a quick glance at recent U.S. military press releases touting supposed high-value kills or large insurgent body counts indicates otherwise.
As in Vietnam, the United States is once again betting on a war of attrition. But the enemy hasn't bought in. Instead of slugging it out toe to toe, in large suicidal offensives, the Haqqanis and their allies have planned a savvy, conservative campaign meant to save fighters and resources while sending an unmistakable message to the Afghan population and the American public.
The attrition of U.S. support for the war is unmistakable. As late as 2009, according to a poll by ABC News and the Washington Post, 56% of Americans believed the Afghan war was still worth fighting. Just days before the Haqqanis' coordinated attacks, that number had dropped to 35%. Over the same span, the number of Americans who are convinced the war is not worth fighting jumped from 41% to 60%. The latest Haqqani offensive is likely to reinforce these trends.
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com where a longer version of this piece appears.

Apr 26, 2012

A technical knockout in Afghanistan
By Nick Turse

Recently, after insurgents unleashed sophisticated, synchronized attacks across Afghanistan involving dozens of fighters armed with suicide vests, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms, as well as car bombs, the Pentagon was quick to emphasize what hadn't happened.

"I'm not minimizing the seriousness of this, but this was in no way akin to the Tet Offensive," said George Little, the Pentagon's top spokesman. "We are looking at suicide bombers, RPG [rocket propelled grenade], mortar fire, etcetera. This was not a large-scale offensive sweeping into Kabul or other parts of the country."

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta weighed in similarly. "There were," he insisted, "no tactical gains here. These are isolated attacks that are done for symbolic purposes, and they have not



regained any territory." Such sentiments were echoed by many in the media, who emphasized that the attacks "didn't accomplish much" or were "unsuccessful".

Even granting the need to spin the assaults as failures, the official American reaction to the coordinated attacks in Kabul, the Afghan capital, as well as at Jalalabad air base, and in Paktika and Logar provinces, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of guerrilla warfare and, in particular, of the type being waged by the Haqqani network, a crime syndicate transformed by the conflict into a leading insurgent group.

Here's the "lede" that should have run in every newspaper in America: More than 40 years after the Vietnam War's Tet Offensive, after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, even after reviving counter-insurgency doctrine (only to see it crash-and-burn in short order), the US military still doesn't get it.

Think of this as a remarkably unblemished record of "failure to understand" stretching from the 1960s to 2012, and undoubtedly beyond.

The lessons of Tet
When Vietnamese revolutionary forces launched the 1968 Tet Offensive, attacking Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, as well as four other major cities, 35 of 44 provincial capitals, 64 district seats and 50 other hamlets nationwide, they were hoping to spark a general uprising. What they did instead was spotlight the fact that months of optimistic talk by American officials about tremendous strategic gains and a foreseeable victory had been farcical in the extreme.

Tet made the top US commander, General William Westmoreland, infamous for having claimed just months earlier that an end to America's war was on the horizon. As he stood before TV cameras on the battle-scarred grounds of the US Embassy compound in Saigon - after a small team of Vietcong sappers breached its walls and shot it out with surprised US forces - pronouncing the offensive a failure, he appeared to Americans at home totally out of touch, if not delusional.

Since that moment, it should have been clear that tactical success, even success in any usual sense, is never the be-all or end-all of insurgent warfare. Guerrillas the world over grasped what had happened in Vietnam. They took its lessons to heart, and even took them a step further. They understood, for instance, that you don't need to lose 58,000 fighters, as the Vietnamese did at Tet, to win important psychological victories. You need only highlight your enemy's vulnerabilities, its helplessness to stop you.

The Haqqanis certainly got it, and so just over a week ago sacrificed 57,961 fewer fighters to make a similar point. Striking a psychological blow while losing only 39 guerrillas, they are distinctly living in the 21st century in global war-making terms. On the other hand, whether its top civilian and military commanders realize it or not, the Pentagon is still stuck in Saigon, 1968.

Case in point: Panetta belittled the Haqqani fighters for not taking "territory". It's a claim that, in its cluelessness, is positively Westmorelandish.

What territory, after all, could a relatively weak and lightly armed force like the Haqqani militants have been out to "regain" by attacking Kabul's heavily defended diplomatic quarter? The German Embassy? And then what would they have done? A la US counter-insurgency doctrine, launch an oil-spot strategy, spreading out slowly from there to secure the American Embassy, the British Embassy, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) headquarters? While Panetta at least granted that the attacks were geared toward symbolic effect, he remained strangely focused on their "tactical" significance.

As was the case in Vietnam, the US military in Afghanistan regularly attempts to prove it's winning via metrics like the number of enemies captured and body counts from "night raids". No less frequently, its spokespeople create rules and measures for its enemies in an effort to prove they're not succeeding.

This Westmoreland-ian mindset was evident last week in those statements that the Haqqanis didn't accomplish much of anything because they didn't take territory, sweep into Kabul en masse, or carry out a sufficiently "large-scale offensive" - as if the Pentagon were the war's ringside judge (as well as one of the fighters) and the conflict could be won on points like a boxing match.

In the Vietnam years, Westmoreland and other top US officials were forever seeking an elusive "crossover point" - the moment when their Vietnamese foes would be losing more fighters than they could replace and so (they were convinced) would have to capitulate. That crossover point was the Pentagon's El Dorado and to achieve it, the US military fought a war of attrition, just as in recent years the Pentagon has been trying to capture and kill its way to victory in Afghanistan through night raids and conventional offensives.

More than a decade after its own forces swept into Kabul, however, what began as a rag-tag, remnant insurgency has grown stronger and continues to vex the most heavily armed, most technologically advanced, best-funded military on the planet. All of America's "tactical gains" and captured territory, especially in the Taliban heartland of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, however, haven't led to anything close to victory, and one after another its highly publicized light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel offensives, like the much-hyped 2010 Marjah campaign, have faded away and been forgotten.

Afghan and American 'green zones'
As the Haqqanis meant to underscore with their coordinated attacks, America's trillion-dollar military and the hundreds of thousands of allied local security forces are still incapable of fully securing a small "green zone" in the heart of the Afghan capital, no less the rest of the country.

The conflict in Afghanistan began with its American commander declaring, "We don't do body counts," but a quick glance at recent US military press releases touting supposed "high-value kills" or large numbers of dead insurgents indicates otherwise.

As in Vietnam, the US is once again waging a war of attrition, even as America's Afghan enemies employ their own very different attrition strategy. Instead of slugging it out toe-to-toe in large suicidal offensives, they've planned a savvy, conservative campaign meant to save fighters and resources while sending an unmistakable message to the Afghan population, and simultaneously exposing the futility of the conflict to the American public.

The attrition of US support for the war is unmistakable. As late as 2009, according to a poll by ABC News and the Washington Post, 56% of Americans believed the Afghan war was still worth fighting. Just days before the Haqqanis' coordinated attacks, that number had sunk to 35%. Over the same span, the number of Americans convinced that the war is not worth fighting jumped from 41% to 60%.

Whatever the Pentagon's spin, the latest Haqqani offensive is likely to contribute to these trends, and Pentagon press releases about enemy dead are powerless to reverse them.

In the era of an all-voluntary military, of the "warrior corporation" and its war zone mercenaries, breaching the "green zone" of American public opinion matters less than in the Vietnam era, but it still makes a difference. The Haqqanis and their Taliban allies may be taking no territory, but in this guerrilla war it turns out that the territory that really matters, on all sides of the battle lines, is the territory inside people's heads - and there the Pentagon is losing.

On April 12, the same day that the ABC News/Washington Post poll was released, US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel James Routt flew his last combat mission in Afghanistan. It was a noteworthy flight. Routt began his career flying B-52 bombers at the end of the Vietnam War, and was even involved in support efforts for Operation Linebacker II, president Richard Nixon's infamous "Christmas bombing" of North Vietnam.

Just a few years after those raids, Nixon was a disgraced ex-president and America's Vietnamese enemies had won the war. Decades later, the US stands on the brink of another, more devastating defeat at the hands of far fewer foes, a minority insurgency with weaker allies (and no great power backers). It's an enemy that has fought far fewer battles and lost far fewer fighters, despite facing off against a far more sophisticated American war machine.

While Routt is hanging up his bomber jacket and walking away from another American defeat in Asia, the Pentagon continues its efforts to conjure up, if not victory then something other than failure, out of a melange of money, dead bodies and rosy press releases. The Haqqanis and their allies, on the other hand, having evidently learned the lessons of the Vietnam War, will undoubtedly continue their carefully controlled war of attrition, while Washington pursues the losing variant it's been clinging to for years.

The Pentagon might have swapped the Vietnam Syndrome for an Afghan one, but its playbook remains mired in the Vietnam era. It seems intent on proving that channeling Westmoreland is the least effective way imaginable to win a war on the Eurasian mainland.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation and regularly at TomDispatch. This article is the latest article in his new series on the changing face of American empire, which is being underwritten by Lannan Foundation. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/ND26Df02.html

[KGODB]

lol study the Vietnam war wrora...there is no comparison, only in sensationalist articles...

[R3SISTANC3]

There is no right or wrong answer to this. Everyone made convincing points. Just like opinion here is divided, it is also divided amongst Americans and Pakistanis on the issue. This is not important though.

The important thing is what is happening to us and our people, and what will happen in the event if Pakistan is attacked or not. Pashtun are like a toddler on the ground, at the mercy of Pakistanis and the Americans. While both the Pakistanis and the Americans are stomping this hopeless child, the child instead of asking to stop is busy thinking who has the softest shoes.

By the time these two decide what to do with each other we would have lost our hands and feet. Lag poey shay, zan tah wagoray and ask what are we doing and can do.

[Afghanistan2010]

The Taj Mahal hotel has over 500 rooms and is like a labyrinth. It was necessary to take care and take time to minimise civilian casualties and prevent the hotel being burned down as it has a lot of timber.

Yes it took longer than desirable at that hotel. That might have been deliberate to focus attention on it as a terror event...The other locations were dealt with fairly quickly.

Special forces,Raid teams have a specific plan and idea how to react to such situations,but both,the pakistani military,security forces and the indians fails.

[Soldat_Amir]

I asked this very same question to a retired American soldier and he said "what if those nukes go into the wrong hands"

Pakistan will not hesitate to blow Afghanistan to kingdom come with nukes if it feels it needs to. You gullible Jihadis under-estimate Pakistan.

Afghanistan2010 obviously your still a young boy and have no knowledge of military strategy, not all wise men would send children to markets to blow themselves up, at times, you need to act with caution.

Pakistan has way over 300 nuclear bombs and Afghanistan has 300 donkeys with suicide vests.

Be smart.