(VERSUS) ...Afganistan
What. The. Fuck.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/11/world/...html?hpt=hp_t1 Quote:
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Dude. What makes you think Versus would know? There's a shit load of commands out there.
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Offchance.
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That's the first I've heard of it. You have to remember that I don't typically pay attention to the news because it stresses me out.
Something else that kind of bothered me, though: Quote:
Very interesting. I wonder why that is? |
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Those men's sacrifice deserves to be honoured not dismissed. It's a tragedy that the people were killed, that families lost their loved ones, but it's also a tragedy that the soldier concerned got to that point in his life where he snapped and did what he did. I also feel for his family as they try to pick up the pieces. |
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Part of it is definitely what the media wants out of it. Now that everyone is sick of Afghanistan and wants out, you don't hear so much about how utterly and pathetically grateful they are and how women are throwing their burqas off and getting CEO careers and more about how we're accomplishing nothing and how problematic the whole thing is. I think there's more to it than "look at how brutal we are to an innocent people," its more of a "we probably have no business going in there in the first place, and now look what's happening."
Also, its probably a lot easier now to report this kind of thing than it used to be when the media was more hawkish, and being embedded in the army was the safest way to report. I didn't hear much about the Haditha killings until the soldiers involved were acquitted. |
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I think we also have pretty colonialist attitudes towards the Afghanis. We invaded out of paternalistic sympathy for the poor oppressed Muslim savages, after all, who couldn't save themselves. We don't hold them up to the same morals we hold ourselves to, because they are lesser than. Taliban or ANA attacks are what we expect of them, so its not really news. When soldiers fail to live up to our ideal of the saviours of the world and ambassadors of democracy, of course we're shocked.
People have poor memory when it comes to war. When we do badly in a war, we want to forget. Look at Vietnam, deaths of civilians was ordered by the army and the GIs were very reluctant and eventually revolted, but no one remembers that, we just think Vietnam GIs went crazy and massacred and enjoyed it. No one talks about the war crimes the Allies committed in WWII. We have this desire to believe every time we were in war, we were justified, we were heroes, and we conquered an evil enemy. No one can handle the fact that in prolonged battle, people cannot act rationally. Psychologically, we can't handle modern warfare, so things like this happen despite the best of intentions. |
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Saya, I think it's as simple as saying the guy snapped. people don't need to be in prolonged situations to snap. The guy probably saw one to many shitty horrible things happen and lost it, disconnected and went on autopilot and I bet afterwards, he couldn't come up with a good reason for it either. It's not that easy, once you have snapped to get back to your old self, because somewhere in the mix you lost your old self. This poor bastard is going to have to reinvent himself, because he's never going to be the same man again and to know that there is another person out there, who has to do this, breaks my fucking heart. |
No, the problem is bigger than just one guy snapping. Atrocities happen in war and all sides commit them. But we intentionally forget it or dismiss it because we badly want to believe that our invasion is inherently benevolent.
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So I'm reading Collateral Damage, and the whole book is based on interviews with veterans on how the invasion of Iraq affected civilian Iraqis, and at first they just talk generally about how with insurgency you see the enemy everywhere and you devalue human life, that is for anyone who isn't yourself or your comrades. Different country, I'm well aware, but the same army that's involved, here are some of the orders they received about convoys
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Also: The thing about Iraqis not valuing human life like we do? That's a bit from General Westmoreland who said the exact same thing about the Vietnamese and why killing them was justified, "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner...We value life and human dignity. They don't care about life and human dignity." History is doomed to repeat itself if we don't remember our mistakes. |
Stand by. Long rant coming.
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I can't get too worked up about the convoy thing. Don't stand in front of big fucking machinery. It's not like these things have cloaking devices... Get the fuck out of the road. If the convoys start deviating from their course, swerving specifically to rack up kills like some kind of fucked up Death Race 2000 bullshit then that might be a different story.
I am sorry to hear about versus' platoon mates. That is a terrible thing to have happened. I hope the guy who turned on them is in the ground. It isn't the same thing as a bunch of civilians getting gunned down for whatever reason. Both are awful. Neither should happen. |
The purpose of any military is to win wars, and thousands of years of warfare has shaped military strategy and doctrine. Part of that strategy is to objectively weigh circumstances and to prioritize actions and end-states that contribute to the outcomes that are greater enablers for that singular purpose. To deviate from that mindset is to compromise that purpose. The safety of soldiers cannot be prioritized over the accomplishment of their mission, for example. It's not to say that it's appropriate to send soldiers on suicide missions, but the logic behind that isn't because it's a waste of human life, but because it's a waste of resources and assets in relation to it's potetial success. The success of a mission is not only deteined by it's success, but it's level of success: Resources gained/expended, time taken, end-state posture/readiness, and so on. Even considering that, that's not to say that suicide missions are out of the question, either. Suicide bombers and Kamikaze pilots have met great success under their circumstances.
Knowing this, it's completely sound to say that troops are prioritized over civilians. The troops are more important to the purpose. Crushing civilians that are in the way because Haj is using children to stop convoys in the kill zone of an ambush is fucked up, but what are we supposed to do? Let it happen? It's confusing enough when leadership tells you "the security of your unit comes first, but do everything you can to win these people over," but when you start to compromise that objective thinking with personal feelings and force soldiers to fight with their hands tied behind their backs, it gets them killed. If your mission is to delivery supplies, you can't effectively do that if you expose yourself to enemy contact. The most objective and logical reasoning is that it's inevitable that they will stop doing it because it stopped working. It makes sense because even insurgents are are following towards the same purpose and will accordingly adjust their tactics. There is literally nothing that can change that. Believe me, we don't want to run over kids. But we do. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnAnp...e_gdata_player I've indirectly spoken about my personal experience with dehumanizing civilians. It makes sense for it to develop naturally, even amongst soldiers in leadership and command positions. In COIN operations and asymmetric warfare without front lines and a uniformed enemy, you have to look at everyone like they're a potential threat. To do otherwise is to create an atmosphere of complacency and a lapse in security. Even today, I have a habit of looking for indicators in other cars or people on the street. It's just something you do. Then you have the guys who have to cope with hurting human beings. The very nature of it conflicts with what we understand about ourselves and it forces us to find ways to rationalize our actions. It makes sense that troops who are constantly alert to the point of paranoia for months at a time to start to believe other people are something less then human because it justifies what would otherwise be an unjustifiable thing. Between those two facets, it is absolutely unfair to judge soldiers who arvideo ducts of war. You can't say "What were you expecting to happen? Their commanders are evil." I understand that you didn't say that, Saya, but I felt like you implied it. The only people to point fingers at are politicians who don't comprehend everything they're doing. The bottom line is that until everybody who says "Yes, we should mobilize the military" understand exactly what that means, and exactly everything that entails, society will continue to victim blame and I'll continue to throw a fit every time it happens. Quote:
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Damn auto-correct. Means to say "soldiers who are products of war,"
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No, my point wasn't that the commanders themselves are evil (except some individuals Westmoreland, he was a really creepy man), my point was that when you're in that kind of situation where the enemy is everyone and invisible until its too late, terrible things are going to happen and there's no way you can be expected to win over hearts and minds when your job demands the dehumanization of the occupied. By necessity there's a culture of fear and paranoia, and of course that's going to drive some over the edge.
I agree with you that if you want the military to do a job, you have to understand what the military has to do to do that job, and that is never done because no one wants to remember what happens during war. And the book is very clear that its not evil commanders, this is what happens in war. |
My bizzle.
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History shows us that humans have an awesome track record of going into other countries and trying to bend them to the occupying forces way of life. the poor soldiers end up having to run over kids because that's what they are told they must do, because if the soldier stops to play by the rules of common decency, there could be someone out there who isn't, who told the kid to run in front of the truck, to stop it, and then they will blow up the convoy. And so at the end of the day, it's the driver of the truck who has to carry around that trauma for the rest of his days. And no one is going to change it, because we are all too busy running around looking for an enemy to take down, even those not in the armed forces - think corporate world, school playgrounds etc. It happens everywhere, and until we all stand up and say "You know what? This is enough. I'm through with hating people, I'm going to just be kind instead." Then we aren't going to change and things are going to stay the same. |
What are you talking about?
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I'm talking about the cost of war on people's mental health.
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It isn't just that nobody wants to think of the grim realities of what loosing the arrow means. In a lot of cases the awful realities are deliberately hidden from the public. People who try to pierce that veil end up getting super fucked.
The public can handle the idea that bad shit happens. We tend to get upset when it comes to our attention that we have been bullshat. Is it a common thing for people to wander on and off base whenever they feel like it? I have this idea involving fences and gates, can someone hook me up with sweet sweet PMC dollars? |
I don't think so. When we look at the Vietnam War, plenty of veterans were willing to testify to the genocide and war crimes they witnessed, such as with the Winter Soldier Investigation. It was the first televised war, and it was impossible to escape coverage. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans held their own Winter Soldier Investigation as well, plenty of people are trying to get that message out, and there was an outpour of information of HOW THIS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA beginning with Afghanistan but especially with the Iraq War.
Part of it is the government and politicians, yes. They don't want the people to know, but I don't think they maliciously realize that soldiers might be running over kids, the way they talk soldiers were there with flowers and a smile on their face for all of God's children, while heroically battling the evil terrorists, and bringing democracy to a people who would greet them as liberators. At the end of the Iraq War and now with the Afghanistan occupation winding down, and the economy wrecked, now its a lot harder to ignore that they were wrong and living in Lala-land. They're megalomaniacs who believe in the sanctity of American military that can do no harm, except for a few rogue soldiers. Also, if you haven't read it, Regarding The Pain Of Others by Susan Sontag makes a good point that even if you get the horrors of war out there, people can rationalize it away. Ever see the picture of the naked Vietnamese girl running down the road, covered in napalm? When Nixon saw the photo, immediately he said it must be fake. No one wants to believe that we can be the bad guys sometimes, and we sent people to do some really terrible things because our generation had no working memory of Vietnam, and those who remembered chose to remember it differently than it had happened. It's taken thirty years for America to justify a decade long war again. I think Iraq is generally written off by most people as a mistake, But in ten, twenty, thirty years, will we remember it correctly? Or will we just remember what we see in movies that will be made since? So will we remember this time, or will we forget it and do this all over again? |
Also, looks like Karzai wants Americans to now be limited to their bases, and the Taliban has called off peace talks:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/wo...ransition.html Quote:
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