• Member Since 28th Aug, 2011
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Cold in Gardez


Stories about ponies are stories about people.

More Blog Posts186

  • 1 week
    A town for the fearful dead

    What is that Gardez up to? Still toiling away at his tabletop world. Presented, for those with interest, the town of Cnoc an Fhomhair.

    Cnoc an Fhomhair (Town)

    Population: Varies – between two and five thousand.
    Industry: Trade.
    Fae Presence: None.

    Read More

    5 comments · 218 views
  • 12 weeks
    The Dragon Game

    You know the one.


    A sheaf of papers, prefaced with a short letter, all written in a sturdy, simple hand.

    Abbot Stillwater,

    Read More

    7 comments · 536 views
  • 31 weeks
    EFN Book Nook!

    Hey folks! I should've done this days ago, apparently, but the awesome Twilight's Book Nook at Everfree Northwest has copies of Completely Safe Stories!

    Read More

    9 comments · 565 views
  • 34 weeks
    A new project, and an explanation!

    Hey folks,

    Alternate title for this blog post: I'm Doing a Thing (and I'm looking for help)

    I don't think anyone is surprised that my pony writing has been on a bit of a hiatus for a while, and my presence on this site is mostly to lurk-and-read rather than finish my long-delayed stories. What you might not know, though, is what I've been doing instead of pony writing.

    Read More

    26 comments · 991 views
  • 79 weeks
    Short Story: The Sculpture

    This is not a story about ponies. No ponies here! Go elsewhere for ponies.

    But this is a story for a D&D adventure I am writing. And I suppose it's also a story about what it means to have purpose, where we get that purpose form, and what happens when that purpose vanishes. People things, in other words.


    The flower turns its face to the sun.

    Read More

    10 comments · 792 views
Jun
5th
2014

On trading five senior Taliban leaders for SGT Bowe Bergdahl · 2:15pm Jun 5th, 2014

Even here in Afghanistan, it's been hard to escape the torrent of news related to SGT Bowe Bergdahl, formerly the sole US soldier in the custody of the Taliban. Earlier this week, things got extremely exciting here when he was released in exchange for five senior Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

There's been a vast amount of misinformed commentary on the subject since then, some of it tragic and hurtful. Since people seem to think I know what I'm doing when it comes to military matters, here's a mixture of fact, informed opinion, and ranting on the subject of Bowe Bergdahl.

If you just read Fox News and Twitter, the exchange doesn't just seem like a bad idea, it seems like actual treason committed by our president in order to strengthen America's enemies. There are real people who are saying that actual thing on television. Here are the five arguments they most often advance, and some thoughts on them:

1. We gave the Taliban back their 'dream team.' These are the five most dangerous members of the movement.

The five who were released were senior, certainly, but that doesn't make them the most dangerous. War isn't like a video game, where you get to the final boss, who is also the leader of the bad guys, and he's the strongest one with the best attacks. These five were political leaders who were captured extremely early in the war, and are most notorious for what they did before the American invasion -- basically, they were bad people who did bad things. They are not ninjas, or super-mujahedeen. They don't have special IED designs in their brains, waiting to share. They don't come with 1,000 jihadis each. They've been off the battlefield for 12 years, and in that time Afghanistan and the Taliban have moved on without them.

All these five have is their name and their reputation. That's it. And they had those when they were in prison.

2. Bowe Bergdahl was a deserter and traitor.

That's possibly true. According to quite a few reports, Bowe Bergdahl grew disillusioned with the war in Afghanistan and wandered off his post, and was promptly captured by the Taliban. Not the smartest move, but those same reports paint a picture of a young soldier who was, at best, extremely naive. He joined the Army thinking it would be like a video game, that he'd be in combat killing America's enemies every day.

War isn't like that, though. Especially not war in Afghanistan, where most combat comes when you least expect it, in the form of an IED exploding in front of your HMMWV. When Bowe didn't get what he expected, he did what he'd done for his entire life -- tried to move on to the next thing.

None of that excuses walking off the FOB, which is essentially desertion. Now, in America was have this thing called the presumption of innocence, which means we need to give Bowe a trial before we sentence him or condemn him to rot in captivity.

And yet, that's exactly what many opponents of the trade are saying -- Bowe walked off the FOB, so he gets what he deserved. In fact, he gets worse -- if they had their way, Bowe would still be a prisoner of the Taliban, and would be forever, I guess.

That's a pretty steep price to pay for being a young idiot.

3. Bowe got other soldiers killed searching for him.

Many media outlets have been claiming that six soldiers died searching for Bowe after he deserted. What they don't tell you is how they got that number -- basically, it's every soldier who died in Paktika province (a huge province, mind you) in the four months after he disappeared.

The search was called off eight days after Bowe vanished, when it was clear that he was in Pakistan with the Haqqanis. No soldiers died during that period.

Using this logic, we could say that every soldier who has died in Afghanistan since 2009 was Bowe's fault -- after all, we've been searching for him this whole time.

Those soldiers died because they were in a war. That's tragic, and I feel for their families, especially now when they're being told that their loved ones died for a 'traitor' and 'deserter.' I also feel great contempt for the people telling those lies to the families, for it serves no purpose other than political gain, and causes them only anguish.

4. We negotiated with terrorists! The US doesn't negotiate with terrorists!

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether the Taliban are truly terrorists, the fact is the US does negotiate with terrorists when it suits our purposes. After the Iranians overran the US embassy in Tehran and kept our diplomatic personnel hostage, President Reagan negotiated extensively with them, and eventually unfroze billions of dollars of Iranian assets. There was also this thing called the "Iran-Contra Scandal," in which missiles were actually traded for hostages.

Beyond that, we negotiated with various armed groups in Iraq during that war, when they had some of our citizens hostage. Virtually every president has had to negotiate with 'terrorists' at some point.

The alternative to not negotiating with the Taliban is to accept the status quo -- that is, to be forever at war with them. The Taliban are not leaving Afghanistan; it is their home and they quite willing to wait us out. If we, or the Afghan government, don't negotiate a peace deal with them, then the war goes on forever.

This isn't like WWII, where we beat the bad guys, kill Hitler, and win because there's no one left to fight. There will always be people willing to fight us here.

5. This deal puts a price on all our soldiers' heads! Now the Taliban will try to kidnap them!

This is probably the most aggravating thing to read in the media. Seriously, what do you think the Taliban have been trying to do? They have always wanted to kidnap Americans -- we're just very hard to kidnap. The only reason Bowe was kidnapped was because he walked off the FOB at night with no weapon. That doesn't happen very often.

Americans, especially American servicemembers, have always had targets on their heads. This deal doesn't make us any more of a target.

Final thoughts.

Bowe Bergdahl was a naive young man who made mistakes. That said, he was also a soldier, and he volunteered to participate in America's wars, something 99% of Americans do not do. We shipped him to Afghanistan and put him in a situation he wasn't able to deal with. That is mostly his fault, but our role in it cannot be ignored.

We tell our soldiers that we never leave a fallen comrade behind. We don't qualify that with "unless it's hard," or "unless he's not a very good soldier." Everyone means everyone.

President Obama had to make a hard decision. In the end, it wasn't a good deal -- but it was the best deal we could get. That's how wars end in the 21st Century, and we'd better start getting used to it.

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Comments ( 106 )

How do American soldiers feel about the American media effectively putting things in their mouths? As a British guy, I really do think your media needs sorting out (not that ours is much better, mind you). I'd rather hear stories from the soldiers themselves, even if that might be inconvenient for news outlets.

Thank you for taking the time to write this. I'm glad to know what an actual soldier thinks of the "scandal," and how it fits into your perception of things. There's been a lot of cherry-picking of quotes from servicemen over here on the news, to the point that I've started tuning it out because most of the quotes are obviously pulled or taken out of context.

Convenient as it would be to have a nice and simple narrative, the one you've painted seems more realistic. Was he a good solider? No. Was he a traitor? Maybe. But that doesn't mean we can leave him behind.

Wait, you are apart of the military? :rainbowderp:

Nice to see some sense about all this.

Damn near fed up with my family taking everything FOX says as the 'truth'.

~Skeeter The Lurker

Well said, brother. While I am loathe to allow enemy combatants back into the wild, "I will never leave a fallen comrade" is a part of our way of life. Every soldier, even the worst amongst us, is precious, and five dickbags is a small price to pay for getting him back safe.

I'm glad I was able to hear your thoughts on the matter. It's helped me answer some questions I had about the situation.

This isn't like WWII, where we beat the bad guys, kill Hitler, and win because there's no one left to fight. There will always be people willing to fight us here.

This does raise the question in my mind: What made the difference? World War II was, at first glance, the same: The Nazis lived there, and there is no obvious reason why they didn't wait us out in the same way as the Taliban.

Comment posted by Derpmind deleted Jun 6th, 2014
Yip

Well said.

Nicely put, man.

I think most of the shaming to this guy comes from media outrage.

Now I'm not a soldier, but I have friends who have served and are serving. I have a lot of pride and respect for them. But when I heard about this trade, I thought to myself as to what kind of soldier he was. I think he was a kid who cracked under the pressure, and if my soldier buddies are right he probably wasn't a good soldier in the first place.

But we've all buckled under pressure before. We've had those Seinfeld moments where one mistake can grow into a huge problem. Although I don't think Seinfeld had the Taliban in it. But they did have Nazis that one time.

I'm not the expert here, but I think he was a soldier who tried and couldn't take the pressures of war. Now he's part of a much bigger mess.

2177396 That's probably why we occupied the country for a couple of decades.

Also shameful is the portrayal of the family as Taliban sympathizers.
If anything, this story should be a wake-up call for better psychological screening of soldiers at risk. We put them through hell for wars that are difficult to justify even to ourselves and the mental health care of the men and women we force to fight them is dubious.

Slight correction: it was Carter who negotiated the release in Iran, not Reagan.

Strange. Whenever I hear American politicians talk about geopolitics I end up inventing new swear-words on the fly. Whenever I hear American soldiers talk about geopolitics, it all seams very sober and reasoned. I'm reminded, obliquely, of Blake[1]. "They said this mystery never shall cease the priest promotes war, and the soldier peace."

[1] I think it's from the Gnomic Verses. Rossetti manuscript, I think. My Blake is under a mountain of other books and I'm too lazy to look it up. The internet isn't helping either.

2177396
If I had to guess, I'd say it's a fact that in Afghanistan it isn't a war with a state you can defeat. It's a war with a set of beliefs and cultural norms. The Nazi state was top down and once you destroyed its mechanisms of coercion and control its people were powerless to organize in any effective way[1]. The way society functions in the non-urbanized areas of Afghanistan, there isn't much of a centralized authority. People look out for one another, they help out, and are bound by a complex welter of interpersonal bonds that are utterly opaque to an outsider[2].

This means there's no Mr. Big to go fight (if you are at war with such a society) nor any to negotiate with, really. There's a thousand Mr. Bigs which may change at no notice and due to reasons you can't grasp because you didn't spend the entirety of your life soaked in, say, Pashtun tribal politics. This is why the war is so damned difficult.

Incidentally, 'tribal' used above doesn't mean bad. Plenty of countries still have elements of tribal organizations. I know of, and have been in at least one perfectly modern and agreeable European country which has a fully-functioning tribal assembly.

That all said, obviously, I know very, very little about Afghanistan and am merely indulging in my sovereign right to baseless, irresponsible speculation. Presumably our gracious host will say more? If he can? I'm not sure what policy the military forces of the United States have on geopolitical policy blogs by servicemen. Even less sure what that policy is if the blog is, ostensibly, about pastel pony fiction.

[1] Also likely to be disinclined to do so due to extreme war weariness and to the fact that there weren't that many Naizi fanatics, as such.
[2] Not because they are weird of course. Go to any family reunion of a large family and you'll see similarly opaque bonds between kin.

Comment posted by ymom2 deleted Jun 6th, 2014

Damn right! I don't like Obama at all, but this was the right decision. One American for five old geezers that are likely too long out of it to be much use? Hell yeah! Fox News (and most big media outlets) is full of hypocritical ass holes that wave the flag singing "My Country Tis' of Thee" while pissing on the values our forefathers fought and died for.

2177396 For one thing, we're still occupying Germany, technically, so the long game would be pretty long. Also, Having the USSR as a bad cop on the eastern border is a pretty good pacification strategy.

It must have been a pretty rattling experience for him. Hopefully that slapped some sense into him, at the very least.

It aggravates me that the military fights to protect everyone here, and some people repay them with slander. How does a person even get that conceited? Thanks for this.

Your well-balanced thoughts from the battlefield are always interesting reads.

The alternative to not negotiating with the Taliban is to accept the status quo -- that is, to be forever at war with them. The Taliban are not leaving Afghanistan; it is their home and they quite willing to wait us out. If we, or the Afghan government, don't negotiate a peace deal with them, then the war goes on forever.

This assumes an infinite supply of Taliban -- or to be more precise, that they can recruit and reorganize faster than we can kill and disrupt them. While this may well be effectively the case given the size of our current commitment to the war, this is not mandated by Nature, but something America has chosen for itself by Politics. We can make a different choice.

The Taliban need not "leave" Afghanistan -- it works just fine if they stay thereforever, slowly degrading back to nourish the soil. Wars are winnable -- it's just that we haven't really at the grand strategic level really tried to win this war. In particular, we've allowed our enemies to frame the political lens through which the war is viewed. We didn't make that mistake in WWII.

As Bad Horse pointed out, everything you said about the Taliban in Afghanistan could also have been said about the Nazis in Germany, 1945. The difference is that the Germans knew that if they had tried to secretly support the Nazis after their surrender in 1945, and then smirk at us about "cultural differences," we would have razed whole cities going after the Werwolf organizations. And if we hadn't, the Soviets would have done far worse (they did do far worse, and to unresisting civilians).

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether the Taliban are truly terrorists, the fact is the US does negotiate with terrorists when it suits our purposes. After the Iranians overran the US embassy in Tehran and kept our diplomatic personnel hostage, President Reagan negotiated extensively with them, and eventually unfroze billions of dollars of Iranian assets. There was also this thing called the "Iran-Contra Scandal," in which missiles were actually traded for hostages.

Beyond that, we negotiated with various armed groups in Iraq during that war, when they had some of our citizens hostage.

The basic problem with negotiating with terrorists is that terrorists are almost by definition dishonorable and fanatical, which means they will not keep their word save in the very short run and only when breaking it would bring immediate bad consequences to themselves. Past that very short run, they will betray us. And because they are fanatics, they will betray us before the point that it will make logical sense for them to do so (the one silver lining of the situation, since it's why they usually lose.

One problem with your list, aside from the fact that in every instance on it the terrorists betrayed us, is that you are accepting the category "hostage." No. In war there are POW's, Criminals and Civilian Internees. The foe in all those cases should have been held responsible for the propert treatment of their prisoners, and then punished if they failed to treat said prisoners properly.

Would this result in dead "hostages?" Yes, the first couple of times we did it. Afterward, it would result in no "hostage" taking -- the foe would either treat their prisoners properly or take no prisoners. We GIVE our enemies the "hostage" strategy by our response to their maltreatment of prisoners, and what is worse we give them an incentive to maltreat their prisoners.

As for Bergdahl, it's pretty obvious that he at best deserted on the field of battle, and at worst was an out-and-out traitor. The logic of yielding to "hostage" takers is bad enough as it is when the "hostages" are good people -- when they're deserters or traitors, it's an even dumber thing to do.

All the Taliban needs to do now is to infiltrate more of their moles into our military, wait until some of them are sent to Afghanistan (if there aren't already some there already), "capture" them and then demand the release of more of their leaders. We have done a seriously stupid thing, and both our own country and (even more so) Afghanistan are going to suffer for this. Badly.

Welcome to propaganda and misinformation 101. Check your western privilege at the door and grab your complementary bag of disillusionment and regret.

I've completely missed everything about this guy. Sad to say I don't care - not about the war machine, at least. The people are different. I care about the people. The people fighting over there aren't doing it for muh freedoms, they're fighting in a war built on a lie, funded by avarice and bankrolled by deceit. Every death there is futile and I wish the war hadn't started. Failing that I just want it to be over. The whole country is a shithole and has been for centuries, and probably will be for years to come because it's caught in the middle between western expansionist ideals and middle eastern religious hatred.

2177571 Spoken like someone who has never seen what war does. I was in the Navy so I never actually saw combat, but I've seen the aftermath. What you're saying (intended or not) is that we should continue to send our soldiers to die. Peace is ALWAYS preferable to war. Sometimes it's not possible, but when it is it should be sought after, even if it's only short term.

2177396
America didn't want to get involved in WWII because it was too busy selling arms and materiel to both sides in the conflict. It was only when Japan went culturally insane that the USA was forced into the conflict.

Germany was busy actually invading other countries and actively trying to exterminate millions of people in a systematic program of genocide. The current situation in Afghanistan ("the anvil of nations") is a prolonged reaction to a) america's meddling after WWII b) Russia's meddling during WWII c) Britain's meddling pre-WWII and d) the whole middle-eastern situation which is a result of centuries of tit-for-tat genocide from muslims, jews and christians alike in a religiously-fuelled pogrom from all sides in the equation against all the others, depending on which ethnic group was deemed to be the great satan of the day...

Don't confuse the lies that got the west into Afghanistan with the situation which flared on in the 1930's in Europe.

Let's leave the furor in comments by the way side and just say: your thoughts are illuminating. Thanks for sharing. Non-FOX outlets I read aren't doing much to push back against the FOX narrative and without you I might not have gotten a perspective outside it.

I only have one problem with this. The fact no one will truly hear this. We read and we understand perfectly, but try to throw out to the public and no one cares. It's just like the Charlie Brooker BBC video. It perfectly explains what is wrong with the situation, and no one cares. The media just keeps going on with their crap.

Anyway, great sum up of the whole situation and good luck out there.

2177547 No. The occupation ended in 1990, where full sovereignty was transferred to the reunited Germany. USA does retain some military installations in Germany, many of which are scheduled for closure by next year, but those are not occupation bases, they are training bases where US and German troops train together and support bases in case of Russian aggression.
As an European, I find the notion that Americans would think us still under occupation, even just technically, rather appalling.

I am sorry if this sounded excessively sour. My head aches, and I am bad communication writing feel.

Let's be honest: If Obama said that he thought bunny rabbits were cute, Fox News would try to make a scandal out of it.

I've seen nothing on this, so I'll give reactions.

1 The knee jerk headline reaction: WTF is wrong with them?
2 The I've had 5 seconds to think reaction: It's the right thing though, right?
3 The I've read CiG's rant reaction: I need to think about this but right now I agree with most of this rant.


The problem in mainstream media is that they're focused on #1, they don't want people to think. They ant sensationalism and passion because that's what sells. Give them a few weeks and they'll either run a smear campaign saying the states bought back someone who's now a taliban spy or a sob story about the things the poor Sgt. has suffered... Dependant on news agency.

Whatever happened to news being news rather than news being a dictation of what your opinion should be?

Hopefully the good sergeant is in good shape both physically and mentally... I'm hoping he gets better treatment here when he gets home than he did there because if the media is demonizing him that bad....

that 'naieve' and 'combat killing...everyday' were seperated by just one little period terrifies me.

I've been at this five minutes, and I'm still trying to come to terms with the fact that this is this and that is that.

Oh, how do I put it to words...

That a guy with colourful ponies writes such sombre clarity just because he can while huge, entrenched and far-reaching disseminators of 'information' are at best moronically incomptent and at worst maliciously derisive. How many layers of irony can there be?

2177571

This assumes an infinite supply of Taliban -- or to be more precise, that they can recruit and reorganize faster than we can kill and disrupt them. While this may well be effectively the case given the size of our current commitment to the war, this is not mandated by Nature, but something America has chosen for itself by Politics. We can make a different choice.

The Taliban need not "leave" Afghanistan -- it works just fine if they stay thereforever, slowly degrading back to nourish the soil. Wars are winnable -- it's just that we haven't really at the grand strategic level really tried to win this war. In particular, we've allowed our enemies to frame the political lens through which the war is viewed. We didn't make that mistake in WWII.

As Bad Horse pointed out, everything you said about the Taliban in Afghanistan could also have been said about the Nazis in Germany, 1945. The difference is that the Germans knew that if they had tried to secretly support the Nazis after their surrender in 1945, and then smirk at us about "cultural differences," we would have razed whole cities going after the Werwolf organizations.

Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say that trading five forgotten has-been prisoners (who would have been released by default next year anyway) for the last man left behind was the better call over a strategic doctrine of nation-scale scorched earth genocide.

The UN conventions and Articles of War exist for very good, very harshly learned reasons. Not least among them is this little bit: 'as soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy'.

(Sources vary as to whether that was Locke or Dawson, but it still speaks for itself.)

Yet another reason why I consider you to be one of the finest amongst us.

No One Left Behind isn't negotiable. Period.

Thank you for speaking up.

2177632 OBAMA SUPPORTS BUNNY COMMUNISM NEWS AT 11.

(sorry, I had to do it.)

2177632
OBAMA ASSOCIATES WITH KNOWN MASS-MURDERER

i.imgur.com/rxmUwG4.gif

2177396 Because the Nazis actually ran the government and engaged in an honest to shit war against their neighbors. They had a centralized leader that ran Germany.

The Taliban, by contrast, is a group of political dissidents, engaging in terrorist and guerilla bullshit, separate from any useful central authority with power structures we can just blow up.

SPark #37 · Jun 5th, 2014 · · 1 ·

I saw a collection of tweets that somebody had put together from individuals who, a few years ago, were all yelling about how Obama was failing because he wasn't "bringing our boys home" and had abandoned SGT Bergdahl. Most of them were forwarding a petition asking Obama to get him free at any price. They were presented next to tweets from those SAME individuals calling Obama a failure for bringing home a criminal and negotiating with terrorists.

The common thread isn't Bergdahl, it's Obama. Their opinions have absolutely nothing to do with anything overseas. They don't care about Bergdahl, they don't care about the Taliban, they don't care about any of that, all they actually care about his their hatred for Obama.

I suspect that's about 95% of what's behind the fuss here.

2177612
I don't think Bad Horse's question was meant to be an apologia for the war, merely a theoretical question. Both wars are a part of reality, the motivations of the United States, sordid or otherwise, nonwithstanding, and it is interesting to see how they differ.

2177661
Hear, hear!

2177571
I don't mean to argue, but reading what you wrote I was inexorably reminded of a rather famous quote. It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.

Food for thought?

Upvote for blogpost.

2177612
Not sure I'd call that culturally insane. It was a deliberate effort to cripple US Pacific power projection, because they had already made moves against our allies and interests. Really, we would have gone to war with them eventually for geopolitical dominance, so they just took a logical first step. Sadly for them, our carrier fleets were more than up to the task.

They did underestimate our will and capacity, so chalk it up to misreading their opponent more than anything. They would have been better served cutting a deal to divide up Asia.

The GOP and the various right-wing media organs are mad about this because Obama did it. Many of the same people used to bitch about Obama leaving Bergdahl in Taliban hands and not doing enough to free him.

Let's face it: no matter what Obama, and to a slightly lesser extent, the rest of the Democrats, does or does not do, the Republicans are going to be outraged and complain bitterly about it even if it's something they've demanded of him, or have themselves suggested earlier.

2177629 You're absolutely right, I'm sorry for implying that. Obviously if the troops are there with the permission of the host government, it's not occupation.
That said, keeping America in and Russia out quickly became a high priority for all of western Europe, including west Germany, and that led to Nato and all the rest.

2177761 2177472 But the Nazi state was built on tribal affiliation, of race, social class, and culture. Its ideas were popular, and I'd guess the Nazis had broader popular support in Germany than the Taliban do/did in Afghanistan. It was everything that the Taliban is plus a centralized state and a huge store of weapons and money. It isn't obvious to me why the Nazis didn't hide rifles and anti-tank guns under every cottage and apartment building in Germany and keep on fighting a guerrilla war for decades.

Or, perhaps a better example, the Confederacy after the US Civil War.

And what would have happened if the Emperor of Japan had died before surrendering?

2177612 I'm not talking about whether the war was/is just. I'm asking what factors made the outcome in Germany so different.

I'm of mixed opinions on this:
For one, we've set an exchange rate of 5 high-level operatives being equal to one somewhat screwed up US serviceman. I know the administration wants to empty Guantanamo, but this seems like a bit much.
Second, the released prisoners are going to go home and complain about their treatment in a most unusual way "...and then dinner was actually late by ten minutes. Can you imagine that? And there were no carrots left on the salad table by the time we ate."
Thirdly, according to law signed by our current president, releases from Guantanamo are supposed to be preceded by 30 day notice to Congress. Since the negotiations were going on for the last six months or more, there seems to have been no excuse for missing that window by 36 days.

We're probably going to have to wait just over two years for the tell-all books to come out from former staffers before we know just what really happened.

2178039
The societal organization of modern Afghanistan is more decentralized and resilient, I think. Also, they are adapted—as a society—to harsh conditions in a way Germany and the American South weren't. Both of those places had their infrastructure shattered, they hand hunger and disease not to mention terrifying rates of casualties. It all adds up.

Also, you overestimate how much the Germans of the period identified with their country, I think. And the Confederacy did have postwar resistance, hence the KKK and all the attendant nastiness. In fact, if I understand American society correctly, the conflict, symbolically at least, still isn't over.

2177397 Well,

a) If you think today's news media is biased, read some US newspapers from the 19th century. Today, papers at least pretend to be "fair and balanced." Back then, if you'd suggested that news should be impartial, people might have thought you were crazy. Why bother with politics if you didn't have a horse in the race? The idea that people should try to be impartial isn't how democracy was supposed to work.

b) The US Army was very permissive in Vietnam. It let journalists go almost anywhere, and film & photograph most of what they saw. They're a lot more careful now, particularly since journalists can broadcast live to the internet. In the second Iraq war, Geraldo Rivera of FOX news gave the planned time and a picture of the battle plans for a US attack that was broadcast before the attack.

2177826

You may have been thinking of this glorified blog post aimed at shaming some very uneducated and very powerless people.

These are the people who we should be shaming.

Fuck FOX "news".

Also, Thank you for shedding some light.

Perhaps you should also post some of this in other places, such as the comments on Phillip DeFranco's video where he mentions the story?

2178039 The Confederacy did fight back though, just not as effectively as the Taliban because of reasons. The Confederate resistance formed into the KKK. The reason that didn't work as well was the lack of effective improvised explosives.

I'm thinking the difference is this: the Nazi party, once toppled, had essentially failed to deliver on all the promises they had ever made. The Party (and it's important to realize that's what they were) had promised empire and efficiency and dominance. After Berlin fell, exactly none of that remained. (Which isn't to say there weren't neo-nazis, just too few to make a difference for some time)

The Taliban, who are ultimately also a political party, were able to keep most of the promises they had made: nonviolence for those who followed the rules, plenty of cash from opium farming, and minimal corruption (relative to Afghanistan, a low bar but still). The Taliban as a political group never really lost the support of the people, so they're still a going concern. The Nazis lost the support f the people, so they ended.

2178149
I wasn't referring to that. I was referring to the seeming lack of popular consensus about the history of the war and its causes. And the Confederate flag is still quite a popular accoutrement in various strata of society meaning that the association with it still has a certain cachet that overrides association with slavery and racism. I'm a foreigner, obviously, and I could be reading the situation wrong.

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