Re:Where Are the Brave Military Voices Against the Forever War?
by notahacker on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @02:39PM
(#15296914)
> Why not deliberatively and carefully provide this evidence to the world instead of rushing into a war? What's the strategic value there?
Alternate view: what was to be gained by deliberatively and carefully providing further details on their intelligence sources for general explanations they'd already offered, when it was palpably obvious the Afghan government had no intention of changing the position they'd held for the last three years that there was no way they were going to betray Bin Laden to Libya, never mind the United States? Where was the advantage to engaging in a war of rhetoric with an government committed to protecting somebody that openly called upon his fellow Muslims to bomb the US, a government whose leader compared the notion of giving up Bin Laden to "the end of Islam" and was obviously going to dismiss any evidence presented as insufficient. (even more obvious with the hindsight of what happened a couple of years later when flimsy presentations of evidence harmed the US case for war in Iraq even before it became clear most of the evidence wasn't true)
It's difficult to argue the US action in Afghanistan solved much (though there are certainly people who have benefited as well as those who have suffered as a result) but it's even more difficult to argue they were in a position where they could show that fatwas against the US and series' of attacks culminating in flying jetliners into buildings didn't have any consequences if you weren't a government but had the tacit support of one.
Alternate view: what was to be gained by deliberatively and carefully providing further details on their intelligence sources for general explanations they'd already offered, when it was palpably obvious the Afghan government had no intention of changing the position they'd held for the last three years that there was no way they were going to betray Bin Laden to Libya, never mind the United States? Where was the advantage to engaging in a war of rhetoric with an government committed to protecting somebody that openly called upon his fellow Muslims to bomb the US, a government whose leader compared the notion of giving up Bin Laden to "the end of Islam" and was obviously going to dismiss any evidence presented as insufficient. (even more obvious with the hindsight of what happened a couple of years later when flimsy presentations of evidence harmed the US case for war in Iraq even before it became clear most of the evidence wasn't true)
It's difficult to argue the US action in Afghanistan solved much (though there are certainly people who have benefited as well as those who have suffered as a result) but it's even more difficult to argue they were in a position where they could show that fatwas against the US and series' of attacks culminating in flying jetliners into buildings didn't have any consequences if you weren't a government but had the tacit support of one.