What they said about Afghanistan...

We are now left to assume that after being dead wrong on all counts the media has now learned from their mistakes in Afghanistan and now have everything exactly correct.

snooker

Hartford Courant 9/15/2001

KABUL, Afghanistan - The ruling Taliban threatened revenge Friday if the United States attacks Afghanistan for shielding suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.

But foreigners and relief workers continued to stream out of the country in anticipation of U.S. military retaliation over twin attacks Tuesday on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"If a country or group violates our country, we will not forget our revenge," Taliban spokesman Abdul Hai Muttmain said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

He would not say how the militia would retaliate.

I like big guns.

A bit of history from Afghanistan

The Rout of Doubt
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Tuesday, December 11, 2001, at 3:24 PM PT

Experts are usually careful not to make forecasts that can be quickly proved wrong. But catching up on back issues of the New York Review of Books, I came across an exception to that rule, an article titled "Afghanistan: The Moving Target" by the foreign policy writer William Pfaff. This short piece now stands as a nearly comprehensive catalog of the pessimistic clichés that dominated public discussion of the war just six weeks ago.

What this suggests to me is a new noun, pfaff, for warrantless doom-saying about American military and foreign policy. Through the early weeks of the war, the papers and the networks were full of it. Another sorry example was R.W. Apple's front-page news analysis piece in the New York Times of Oct. 31. Headlined "Afghanistan as Vietnam," it painted a similar picture of looming debacle, exactly three days and two weeks into the conflict. "Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word 'quagmire' has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad," Apple wrote.

At the time, my colleague William Saletan shrewdly dissected the way this kind of weasely language expresses a defeatist viewpoint while simultaneously attributing it elsewhere. In Apple's analysis of the war, signs of progress were "sparse." The war was going "less smoothly than many had hoped." Two weeks later, when the signs of progress were plentiful and the war was going more smoothly than many predicted, Apple wrote another analysis deriding "the naysayers and the what-iffers," "the armchair Clausewitzes," and "the pessimistic prophets" who once thought the war was going badly. Wonder who he could have been thinking about.

Can anyone tell me what our maximum manpower deployment on the ground in Afghanistan was?

lets not get too carried away. I fully expect to win, if for no other reason we will fight until we do win.

But lets not gloat like rush limbaugh and ann coulter did over the stock market last week. "biggest gain in 20 years" and now its lost all that and more throuhgout the week.

Peace through superior fire power. ;)

Can you post the entire Strategypage article? I know they were hardly pessimists over Afghanistan (I read it every day) but it's very difficult to search their site.)

I suspect you've taken that quote out of context.

BBC News 10/7/01

The Afghan opposition Northern Alliance says the United States could launch air strikes against the Taleban "very soon". Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said that unspecified American sources had told the anti-Taleban opposition to ground their aircraft and he warned residents of the capital Kabul to stay away from military bases.

We will never bow down to American forces and will fight till the last breath Taleban Defence Ministry ...

...The Taleban says it has sent 8,000 extra troops to Afghanistan's border with Uzbekistan, which has given American forces access to an air base for the US anti-terrorism campaign. "We have deployed our forces in all important areas because this is a question of our honour and prestige," a defence ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press. "We will never bow down to American forces and will fight till the last breath," he added. ...

Islamweb 10/9/01

Afghanistan has been invaded numerous times since the days of Alexander the Great. But as the West prepares for military intervention, it is perhaps worth remembering that a war never ends here; it merely evolves and mutates. Here we trace the tangled and violent history of the land that, yet again, has become the focus of world attention.

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains And the women come out to cut up what remains Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. Rudyard Kipling

Hey, thanks for this article. Sometimes I'd swear that the Western media is determined that American troops be defeated.

AP 10/16/01

The terrorism campaign is harder to define because U.S. authorities are still trying to determine the sources of threats.

``Who would have thought that a couple of guys on an airplane with knives would turn those things into bombs that took down the World Trade Center?'' said Harland Ullman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ``How do you deal with that? There's no order of battle.''

Ullman called the liberal use of the word ``war'' by politicians and the media misleading because ``this is not a war.''

``A war is between entities that have some sort of confirmed aims and objectives and prevention is not really an objective that you can ultimately declare victory,'' he said.

``The problem here is that because it is not a war, and it is an ongoing campaign, there may never be an exit strategy. It's like war against cancer and disease. You just keep plowing through it.''

AP 10/20/2001

SAN'A Yemen (AP) - Shouting anti-American slogans, about 20,000 people streamed through a Yemeni town Saturday to protest the U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, officials said. The rally in Omran, 30 miles north of San'a, was led by the regional head of the ruling People's Conference Party of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The official, Hussein Abdullah al-Ahmer, is also the son of the speaker of parliament.

Protesters carried pictures of terror suspect Osama bin Laden and signs saying "America is a great Satan" and "Bush is a killer." They also called for jihad, or holy war, officials said.

No one was arrested.

Yemen has condemned the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States but says any anti-terror campaign should be led by the United Nations. (Gee, then too huh?)

AP 10/27/2001

TEMERGARAH, Pakistan (AP) -- In buses and trucks, pickups and vans, more than 5,000 people rolled out of a northeastern Pakistan village Saturday morning, bound for the Afghan frontier and vowing to fight a holy war against the United States.

Thousands of Pakistani men, young and old, had massed in Temergarah on Friday night with assault rifles, machine guns, even rocket launchers. A few even carried axes and swords.

Their mission, they said: to enter Afghanistan's Kunar province and help the country's ruling Taliban defend against any ground incursions by American troops.

LA Times 11/2/2001

The destruction of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network and the destabilization of Afghanistan's extremist Taliban regime will be difficult enough to achieve. Recently, though, Secretary of State Colin Powell and others have begun to hint at another objective: influencing the composition of a post-Taliban government.

There are reports that U.S. leaders have slowed the pace of the U.S. military campaign lest the Taliban collapse before an alternative regime is ready. Such a flirtation with nation-building is both unwise and unnecessary. One might hope that the U.S. had learned from the disastrous experiments in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia. Despite years of work and billions of dollars, the efforts failed big-time in all three cases.

Mainichi 9/15/01

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- As Washington prepares to launch retaliatory attack on Afghanistan for harboring the alleged ringleader of Tuesday's attacks, Osama Bin Laden, some Muslim people are questioning the "self-righteous" justice the United States is seeking. "I wanted to show the image of the World Trade Center collapsing to my long-suffering fellow countrymen," Hayatou Ullar, an Afghan working at a top Islamabad hotel said.

The 38-year-old Afghan said he deplores the attack on innocent people in New York's World Trade Center, but admitted that he was delighted to see the image of America's symbol of power and riches crumbling into dust. "The United States does not really care about the sufferings of Islamic people around the world," he said. "Innocent Muslims are being killed every day in Kashmir, Palestinian territories and other places and the U.S. doesn't show any sympathy. And they call themselves the only superpower on Earth."

At your request, the entire article....

November 5, 2001; Still More Myths about the War in Afghanistan;

American Ground Troops Are Needed to Win- Up to a point. But there are two problems with this. For one, there is logistics. There are no railroads in Afghanistan, so all supplies must move by truck over a poor road network. The Russians ran into this problem and, as a result, were never able to maintain more than 300,000 troops in the country. American soldiers require more supplies per man, thus even fewer (perhaps 200,000) troops can be supplied. But that's not the worst problem. If a lot of American troops enter Afghanistan, more Afghans will resist. That's a national custom we don't want to trigger. Many Pushtuns are dodging service in the Taliban armed forces. This would change if most of the soldiers on the other side were American.

The Taliban Has an Army- Sort of. But most of the best Taliban troops are foreigners (about 14,000 Pakistanis, mostly Pushtuns, and 6,000 bin Laden troops, who are largely Arabs.) The Taliban Afghan troops are reluctant warriors, weary from twenty years of war. There is resentment among Afghans against the foreign troops. As long as the enemy on the ground is Northern Alliance Afghans, more Taliban Afghans will be tempted to switch sides. Eventually, nearly all of the Taliban army will be foreigners. Afghans traditionally fight fiercely against foreigners.

The Northern Alliance has an Army- Not an army in the traditional sense. The Northern Alliance is truly an alliance. But the various factions contribute bands of warriors, not soldiers. American special forces troops can train some Northern Alliance warriors as soldiers. But American generals have to get used to working with warriors rather than better disciplined and more reliable soldiers. Moreover, the Afghan way of war puts great emphasis on fighting that produces low casualties. If they are in the mood, warriors can be fierce. But you can't order them around like soldiers. So the Northern Alliance has what can best be called a feudal levy. American commanders had best brush up on how medieval warlords used their troops.

This is a Military Operation. In part, the war in Afghanistan is military, but mostly it's diplomatic. The road to victory is marked by the number of Taliban tribes can be convinced to switch sides. This involves a lot of talk and well placed gifts. Some of the booty can be cash, but a lot of the loot desired is political and, more immediately, things like food and weapons. A place in a future government, assurances of future support (as we have already offered to Uzbekistan) and maybe a few green cards. There's also the Information War. Crafting a convincing message about why we are there and what we are doing goes a long way towards attracting popular, political and military support. We're Fighting Afghanistan- We’re actually fighting one faction of a nine year old civil war. Much of Afghanistan is inclined to be on our side. Winning more of that support is not a traditional war, but victory comes to whoever ends up with the support of the most Afghans.

A Northern Alliance Victory Will End Terrorism in Afghanistan- This is not guaranteed. A Northern Alliance victory will probably leave many parts of Afghanistan out of their control. Moreover, the Pushtuns, who are the main support of the Taliban, have most of their population in Pakistan. Many bin Laden terrorists operate out of Northern Pakistan. If the Taliban lose control of Afghanistan, they will still have a lot of support in Pakistan. Crushing the Taliban in Afghanistan is a plus, but it will not totally eliminate terrorist operations in the region.

Russia Lost the War in Afghanistan- The Russians lost 15,000 troops, while 1.5 million Afghans died. Russia and their pro-Russian Afghan government still controlled most of Afghanistan when the Russians left in 1989. The Russians gave the pro-Russian government some $300 million a year until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. After that, the payments stopped, and the pro-Russian government fell in 1992. The Russians have been supporting the Northern Alliance for the last few years and may end up with another pro-Russian government running Afghanistan.

San Jose Mercury News 10/28/01 Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay

Even as the military confrontation in Afghanistan intensified last week, it was becoming increasingly clear that the quick victory that some had hoped for--but few had expected to achieve--was not about to materialize.

Rather than collapsing under the weight of American bombardment, the Taliban appeared to dig in for a long fight ... Will the United States be able to win a military victory in Afghanistan, or are we headed for another quagmire like Vietnam?