Afghanistan

Off-Topic Off Topic - Militaria
#1

Jerome Starkey

THEY are on the front line of the war on terror, but German pilots facing the Taliban are insisting they stop at tea time every day to comply with health and safety regulations.

The helicopter pilots, who provide medical back-up to Nato ground troops, set off for their base by mid-afternoon so they can be grounded by sundown.

Their refusal to fly in the dark is hampering Operation Desert Eagle, an allied offensive, which involves 500 Nato-led troops plus 1,000 Afghan troops and police.

Although Germany has sent 3,200 troops to Afghanistan, they operate under restrictive rules of engagement.

They spend much of their time in an enormous base, complete with beer halls and nightclubs, in Mazar-e-Sharif, a 90-minute flight from the fighting. They also have a base at Kunduz.

Germany, which has lost 25 soldiers in Afghanistan to suicide attacks and roadside bombs, commands the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in the north. But its men are not allowed to travel more than two hours from a “role two medical facility” - a hospital equipped for emergency surgery.

The restrictions have fuelled tensions among allied troops. Norwegian soldiers, who were fighting to stem a growing Taliban insurgency in this remote stretch of Afghanistan’s northwest frontier, were forced to desert their Afghan comrades midway through a firefight when German medical evacuation helicopters withdrew.

The Germans contribute unmanned surveillance planes, an electronic warfare team and a hospital to the operation.

One Norwegian cavalry officer, who was engaged in a day-long fight with more than 40 Taliban near Jari Siya in Badghis, said: “It’s hopeless. We were attacking the bad guys, then [at] three or four o’clock, the helicopters are leaving.

“We had to go back to base. We should have had Norwegian helicopters. At least they can fly at night.”

Abandoned by their western allies, the 600 men from the Afghan army’s 209 Corps were forced to retreat until a convoy of American Humvees arrived the next day to reinforce them.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2890985.ece

#2

Uh, you do realise this story was published in November 2007, and hotly disputed by the Germans at the time, don’t you?

#3

No, I did not.Sorry about that, I just found the article so fascinating , and wondered why you didn’t put it originally in this forum, compared to that other forum you put it in. I find your work so interesting PDF. Your comments and threads in World Affairs and Alternative History and even computer forum’s are so well articulated around the Web. I have a newfound respect for you! :mrgreen:

#4

How cute. I’ve got my very own cyberstalker :smiley:

#5

LOL You’ve never even had certifiably psychotic females, banned from some of the most liberal (Van Halen) forums on the internet, call your girlfriend/wife and tell her she’s having an affair with you yet! :slight_smile:

#6

Nick, I’m still trying to figure out how and why you were banned from Armchair General?..I mean, your an upstanding member of this forum so I think you were framed!..You should go back to them and appeal. I will support you if you need references!:wink:

Romanes Eunt Domus

#7

Um, speaking of cyberstalkers…

Why are you following me around on the 'net…

And I got banned from Armchair General because one of the webbies there, “Admiral,” is a censorship-pansy that can’t take any sort of debate, even via private message. And no profanity was used…

I “insulted” him because I called him “biased” via PM, which is pretty weak, and reveals a deep insecurity on his part. The really funny part is that board, while it has many good posters, really is run by “armchair generals,” as most of the mod staff have a bunch of excuses as to why they never served in the military, yet have a profound interest in stopping “Islamofascism.”

#8

I wasn’t following you around, I merely was trying to find other websites related to war and everywhere I go, I run into you guys.I can’t help it if your so popular—one of those things you have to live with I guess…So, I read up, and learn. I’m not that interested in your Van Halen or U2 threads …thier so boring…so I only look up war stuff, so I can learn and be as smart as you guys.:D…sorry you were BANNED though…at least I feel happier knowing I was not the only one that ever got BANNED for their opinions. Your like a regular bloke, now that I know this…it almost puts a tear to my eye…

Anyways back to Aghanistan, if i may redirect this thread…as you know the Canadian government has taken a lead in the Afghanistan mission. Lately there has been a lot of scrutiny over the cost (like the USA),todays ctv news blerb came out as follows:
On the eve of a parliamentary report on the financial cost of the Afghanistan mission for Canada, an independent group has released their own answer on the subject: $28 billion.
The Rideau Institute, an advocacy group and think tank that largely opposes Canada’s military participation in Afghanistan, said the mission will cost the government $20.7 billion by 2011.
In addition, the Institute said the direct and indirect costs to the Canadian economy due to soldiers’ deaths and injuries will be about $7.6 billion.
Parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page will release his report Thursday morning at 11 a.m. ET. The report was due to be released last month, but concerns of interfering with the election led Page to delay the release – although Canadians will head to the polls on Tuesday.
The Conservatives have pegged the cost of the Afghanistan mission from 2002 to 2008 at about $8 billion. A significantly higher cost could be a political problem for Harper.
Support for the mission is lowest in Quebec, where the Tories are struggling to gain seats in the election.
Steven Staples, president of the Rideau Institute and co-author of the report, said he may be taking it a step further than Page’s estimate, but obviously won’t know until Thursday.
“We took it a second step further by also looking at the loss to the economy of the wounded and killed soldiers,” he told CTV.ca.
He said he based his estimate on some American studies that looked at the financial cost of the Iraq war, and included the price to health care. One such study was authored by Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. In 2006, he suggested the Iraq war had cost the U.S. $2 trillion, about 10 times the amount previously thought.
Staples said the war in Afghanistan has also come at the cost of Canada’s contribution to UN peacekeeping missions.
“We’ve given up so much in this war, not just in terms of government costs but also the lost contributions of all these young men and women that have died, and also internationally – we’re contributing a lot less to UN peacekeeping where we used to do a lot more,” Staples said.

“We used to be Number One in the early 1990s. We had more than 1,000 troops involved in UN peacekeeping. Now we’re down to something like 160. In fact, we send more police for UN peacekeeping than soldiers, so when you count the number of soldiers involved it’s roughly 50 or 60.”
Another report on the cost of the Afghan mission by David Perry, a former deputy director of Dalhousie University’s Centre for Foreign Policy Studies pegged the bill at $22 billion.
In light of the global economic downturn and a diminishing budget surplus, Staples suggested the Afghanistan mission could put significant stress on government coffers.

“It’s clear that the government’s budgetary and foreign policy hands will be tied if it intends to keep our troops in Afghanistan through December 2011,” Staples said earlier Wednesday in a news release.
There are about 2,000 Canadian soldiers based in Afghanistan’s volatile Kandahar province.
Since the mission began in 2002, 97 Canadian solders and one diplomat have been killed in Afghanistan.

Romanes Eunt Domus

#9

I don’t know how you guys, but USA has spent close to a TRILLION dollars for the war in Iraq. Canada has spent 18 Billion in Aghanistan,…and WE are complaining?? The Toronto Star Newspaper today has headlines as follows:

The Conservative government deliberately misled Canadians about the mounting cost of Canada’s Afghan mission, federal New Democrats said after a new report pegged the price tag at up to $18.1 billion before it ends in 2011
“They have tried to hide the real cost,” NDP Leader Jack Layton said yesterday after the parliamentary budget officer released a report that tallied the cost of the war – and also said that successive Liberal and Conservative governments were not upfront with Canadians.

“Those numbers show the costs of the war are dramatically higher than the (Stephen) Harper government has been telling Canadians. The costs are billions of dollars more. And whether it was the Liberals that took us into the war, the Conservatives who extended the war with the help of the Liberals, they haven’t been straight up with Canadians about the cost,” said Layton.
The Conservative government has pegged the cost of the war at up to $8 billion, not including related, long-term costs.

Yesterday’s independent report thrust the issue of the Afghan conflict into the political arena in the final days of the campaign for Tuesday’s election.

Off the record, I really really don’t know what the hell Afghanistan does to benefit the world. It has No oil, No exports, ugly people and there all either dirt poor or dam stupid and illiterate. Why should MY taxes go up so some dirt farmer can learn to read and write? You can’t save the entire world? Let the Saudi’s spend their god dam money on Afghanistan. They are Muslim aren’t they? They are closer aren’t they? They helped hide Idi Amyn and gave him seven virgins every night of his 23 yrs in exile, so why the hell is Canada spending money to protect this stupid useless country that nobody cares about or even heard about?. The Saudi’s are so generous to help and hide and fund terrorists so why can’t they help and fund these poor poor helpless MUSLIM Afghani’s? We let half a million Rwandans slaughter each other when CANADIAN peace keepers were over in Rwanda, but we don’t do spit about that. We let the dam Afghani’s grow their Opium which accounts for 90% of the heroin in the USA, which costs USA Taxpayers billions in health care costs, not to mention the crime that subsequently arises from the habitual drug user who resorts to this to spoof his fix. Why don’t we burn all the dam opium crops and put an end to it? Oh, because some stupid farmer might not get the money from the crops to feed his 15 stupid children because he don’t use protection, while I can only afford 1 child because my taxes have to pay for his 15 children who get money from the opium he supplies my country and we are to sensitive and compassionate to harm the Afghani ‘s by burning their crops?. Give me a break!

#10

The same can be said of a lot of countries.

The same may well be said by some of America within fifty to one hundred years if things continue on their current path. There are grounds for starting to say it now in the minds of some people.

Because that’s how most Western tax systems already work, and not always with much success, domestically? If it’s a good idea at home, why is it a bad idea for other people?

  1. Because if Saudi Arabia, from whence bin Laden sprang although even he was too visibly radical for and hostile to them, was funding Afghanistan it would be Saudi Arabia on steriods without the restraint; without the intellect; and without having much to lose by a resurgence of the Taliban at their worst in sponsoring al Qaeda etc because it doesn’t have oil or anything else that legitimately backs major currencies or economies. It would be a junk yard dog off the chain and leaping fences again.

  2. Because the Afghanis are human beings with the usual range of good, bad and indifferent. Before the Taliban took over, Kabul was a reasonably sophisticated city with a reasonably sophisiticated population. Bombing the country back to the stone age will ensure the survival of the least sophisticated elements because they are the most numerous and least concentrated, when, at least from the West’s viewpoint, the road to anything approaching success is paved with support for the more sophisticated elements in Afghan society and politics.

  3. Because in places like Afghanistan which have none of the social security benefits expected in the West, your children are your social security and superannuation. Not unlike Western agrarian societies almost within living memory when there wasn’t any state sponsored social security.

  4. Because the invasion of Afghanistan was justified to eradicate the likes of bin Laden, but it should have been a raid with promises of more to come if they reverted to their past ways rather than a doomed attempt to try to achieve the impossible of converting the nation into neutrality at worst and alliance with the West at best.

  5. So, yeah, we should have invaded Afghanistan but we were stupid to stay there and think we could achieve what no other foreign colonial power has managed, but Bush & Co were sufficiently ignorant and arrogant to think they could, and still sufficiently stupid to lack the ability to see that it’s not about pride in refusing to leave a bad situation but wise to get out intact and let Afghanistan know that if it goes back to its old Taliban ways, so far as they allow the likes of al Qaeda to operate, there will be another devastating raid. From the skies, where America is supreme, rather than bogging down on the ground where, like Vietnam, Iraq, and even France in WWII, the foreign power will usually be unable to control a determined insurgency.

#11

Excellent!.Thank You RS, I enjoyed reading that.

#12

I’m not in any U2 threads, maybe a few, but never on a board for very long. And most of my Van Halen stuff is currently, possibly permanently, gone.

http://www.rotharmy.com/forums/index.php?s=

And you weren’t banned for your opinions, neither was I really - just the way I stated them. You were banned for being a trolling buffoon.

Anyways back to Aghanistan, if i may redirect this thread…as you know the Canadian government has taken a lead in the Afghanistan mission. Lately there has been a lot of scrutiny over the cost (like the USA),todays ctv news blerb came out as follows:
On the eve of a parliamentary report on the financial cost of the Afghanistan mission for Canada, an independent group has released their own answer on the subject: $28 billion.
The Rideau Institute, an advocacy group and think tank that largely opposes Canada’s military participation in Afghanistan, said the mission will cost the government $20.7 billion by 2011.
In addition, the Institute said the direct and indirect costs to the Canadian economy due to soldiers’ deaths and injuries will be about $7.6 billion.
Parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page will release his report Thursday morning at 11 a.m. ET. The report was due to be released last month, but concerns of interfering with the election led Page to delay the release – although Canadians will head to the polls on Tuesday.
The Conservatives have pegged the cost of the Afghanistan mission from 2002 to 2008 at about $8 billion. A significantly higher cost could be a political problem for Harper.
Support for the mission is lowest in Quebec, where the Tories are struggling to gain seats in the election.
Steven Staples, president of the Rideau Institute and co-author of the report, said he may be taking it a step further than Page’s estimate, but obviously won’t know until Thursday.
“We took it a second step further by also looking at the loss to the economy of the wounded and killed soldiers,” he told CTV.ca.
He said he based his estimate on some American studies that looked at the financial cost of the Iraq war, and included the price to health care. One such study was authored by Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. In 2006, he suggested the Iraq war had cost the U.S. $2 trillion, about 10 times the amount previously thought.
Staples said the war in Afghanistan has also come at the cost of Canada’s contribution to UN peacekeeping missions.
“We’ve given up so much in this war, not just in terms of government costs but also the lost contributions of all these young men and women that have died, and also internationally – we’re contributing a lot less to UN peacekeeping where we used to do a lot more,” Staples said.

“We used to be Number One in the early 1990s. We had more than 1,000 troops involved in UN peacekeeping. Now we’re down to something like 160. In fact, we send more police for UN peacekeeping than soldiers, so when you count the number of soldiers involved it’s roughly 50 or 60.”
Another report on the cost of the Afghan mission by David Perry, a former deputy director of Dalhousie University’s Centre for Foreign Policy Studies pegged the bill at $22 billion.
In light of the global economic downturn and a diminishing budget surplus, Staples suggested the Afghanistan mission could put significant stress on government coffers.

“It’s clear that the government’s budgetary and foreign policy hands will be tied if it intends to keep our troops in Afghanistan through December 2011,” Staples said earlier Wednesday in a news release.
There are about 2,000 Canadian soldiers based in Afghanistan’s volatile Kandahar province.
Since the mission began in 2002, 97 Canadian solders and one diplomat have been killed in Afghanistan.

Romanes Eunt Domus

There’s probably going to be an intensification of the US mission in Afghanistan in 2009, it’s difficult to predict or speculate what will result…

#13

Probably not much different to the position in 2019 if the West, which doesn’t have the Asiatic stomach for long wars, is still there.

#14

Even Australia is thinking of withdrawing their 1100 troops…I read this in the Arab news:…looks interesting…

WE’RE not going to win this war,” a British commander in Afghanistan, Brig. Mark Carleton-Smith, recently disclosed to the Sunday Times. He suggests the most that can be hoped for is to dampen the insurgency, which he believes will still be active once the foreign armies have left unless efforts are made to negotiate with the Taleban, who, until now, have refused to sit down with “invaders”.

Australia’s Defense Minister Joel Fitzgibbon agrees that a decisive military victory may not be attainable, while NATO’s secretary-general wants to find a diplomatic solution to end the conflict.

#15

There’s going to be a shifting away from a national gov’t mentality, as Karzai is ineffective and his gov’t colludes with some bad characters, to a more tribal gov’t. In short, the US is going to do what they’ve done in Iraq and throw their hands up and begin to acknowledge that tribal divisions are real, and begin to payoff tribal leaders - as we have done in Iraq…

I also think that there will be a much more aggressive policy with Pakistan…

#16

Occupation armies rarely defeat insurgencies in other nations. Again, like in Iraq where there is no real “victory” or defeat, it will be more about buying allegiances and turning the tribal chieftains against the Taliban with money, appealing to their nationalism since the Taliban are every bit as much a creation of foreign cultures as the NATO armies are. The Taliban are little more than a bastardized creation of Pakistani intelligence designed to keep Afghanistan either under Paki influence, or terminally weak…

#17

The White House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking, and American officials have repeatedly warned President Karzai that his brother is a political liability. It doesn’t help that the President’s relatives are involved in Drug Smuggling. Is the USA so Stupid…Scratch that, are we so stupid to expect a country like Afghanistan, to EVER be even close to a country like ours. We will waste Billions of dollars into Aid and defence for this country that nobody cares about and what do I personally get out of it?. Bin Laden is yesterday’s news. This bloody war in Iraq and Afghanistan will never end because we are too dam compassionate about the mud hut dwellers. When The Americans captured the rebels in Afghanistan and put them in prison, the special interest groups complained that their beds were not soft enough. These people slept on the dirt floor all their lives and we have to take Bull about their beds not being soft enough?. This whole thing in Afghanistan is a waste of money and the American and the World economy collapse can somehow be connected to this shit country. (maybe I’m wrong but I don’t need to be corrected if I am. What about the health costs associated with CARING for all these American and NATO soldiers who come back mutilated and disfigured or mental in the head?. We always talk about the War in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of how much it costs NOW, but don’t forget that a war disability pension given for the next 20 years multiplied by the tens of thousands of disabled soldiers, costs us as a society for the next generation. Who is counting this?. The physio, the counselling etc…it all cost money too. Thank You fukin Karzi… for all the good you do for this world. Without you, we wouldn’t have your Brothers Opium to get high off and addicted to. Thank You very much.

#18

For those of us from the land of Down Under, I found this info out…
FIGHTING the war on terror has cost Australian taxpayers more than $20 billion since September 2001.

The Federal Government alone has spent or committed more than $11.5 billion on domestic and international counter-terrorism measures, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The rest of the figure covers spending by states, territories and the private sector.

The money is being spent on everything from training special forces to deal with weapons of mass destruction to a $74 million system enabling police and ASIO to tap phone calls.

How can this small island afford it? Globally, this entire war against terror must be in the trillions before its gone. Who would have ever of thought that a towel head from the caves of Afghanistan started this all?. It wasn’t a Hitler with a vast army, nope, it was some funny looking lanky guy named Bin Laden who lived in caves to hide, and probably still is.

#19

The jackal, a replacement vehicle for the ‘Snatch’ Land Rovers in Helmand.

How good are they

Two Marines killed in jackal :

[i]Two Royal Marines whose deaths brought the Afghanistan and Iraq toll to 300 were named today as Robert McKibben and Neil Dunstan.

The pair were on patrol in a new Jackal armoured car when they were hit by a roadside bomb in Garmsir district of Southern Helmand, Afghanistan, on Wednesday afternoon.

The £600,000 vehicle was designed to be mine-resistant and was tested last year by the SAS.
[/i]
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1085324/Royal-Marine-pair-killed-roadside-bomb-Afghanistan-travelling-Armys-new-armoured-vehicle.html?ITO=1490

#20

It’s a WMIK replacement, not a Snatch replacement. Compared to WMIK, it’s apparently brilliant. Just don’t expect it to be bombproof - you couldn’t get the mobility required if it was.