I don't recall anyone posting being against the US invasion of Afganistan but was there? With the Taliban openly allowing Al Quada to operate within their borders they were in the position to turn Bin Laden over or to expel him from their country.

Without considering the overall effectivness to date of the war there did anyone disagree with our invasion or the reasons for it?
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03-25-04, 08:07 PM
AMoore

quote:Originally posted by gatman:
I don't recall anyone posting being against the US invasion of Afganistan but was there? With the Taliban openly allowing Al Quada to operate within their borders they were in the position to turn Bin Laden over or to expel him from their country.

Without considering the overall effectivness to date of the war there did anyone disagree with our invasion or the reasons for it?



I wouldn't say that I disagreed with the invasion, but I did feel that it was premature, and that more could have been done to secure the co-operation of the Taliban in getting rid of or constraining alQaeda, and I felt that more should have been done to prepare the groundwork to help us apprehend the criminals, rather than merely driving them underground and into the countryside.

As it is, I think we did ourselves more harm than good. The Taliban is still active in Afghanistan, alQaeda is still active, and has managed to diversify and disperse its command structure, which will make it much harder to deal with. We have troops tied down there, who seem to be accomplishing very little, and the country is back in the drug business, which the Taliban had put a stop to.

Alan Moore

03-25-04, 08:24 PM
notinmyname
I was impressed with the administrations restraint and this seemed like a realistic target. I supported the administration at that time, although I disagreed with the tax cuts and econ policies. My suppport for the Bush adminstration ceased when they invaded Iraq.

03-28-04, 03:19 PM
gatman
hmmmm....29 views and no one was against it. Premature is the worst to be said for it?

03-28-04, 03:47 PM
Sarai
I think I was my usual flip-flopping self, emotionally opposed to war but intellectually in favor of it one day and then intellectually opposed and emotionally in favor the next. Eek

However, I do remember quite clearly that our most leftist members (QuertyMac is the only one whose name I clearly remember, although he wasn't alone here) argued that the war in Afghanistan was unjustifiable because we should have been treating terrorism as a criminal problem, not an act of war. They also argued that it was a war for oil, and that terror was only an excuse. Then there were the conspiracy theorists who argued that Bush was behind the attacks on Sept. 11th for this very reason.

03-28-04, 04:46 PM
AMoore

quote:Originally posted by gatman:
hmmmm....29 views and no one was against it. Premature is the worst to be said for it?



I'd say that about sums it up. There were critics at the time. I recall some discussions about oil pipelines to connect Central Asian oilfields with the coast, but not so much lately. If that had been _the_ motivation, we'd have had to keep a lot more troops there, a lot longer. So far, no pipeline construction has begun. In fact, we're having trouble keeping the roads open, and keeping our choice government in power even throughout Kabul. So far the only real beneficiaries of our Afghan campaign seem to have been the drug dealers, who have been able to increase opium production.

Alan Moore

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