The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #38851 Message #548497
Posted By: Justa Picker
12-Sep-01 - 08:13 PM
Thread Name: The price of freedom ??
Subject: RE: The price of freedom ??
(Keep fiddling, Nero.....oops I mean Little Hawk.)
I don't know. Regardless of the response, and rest assured there will be one, it cannot be allowed to trigger WW III.
If, it turns out to be Bin Laden, and his henchmen, then every conceivable form of pressure short of military action must be put upon the Taliban to extradite him to the U.S. To go into Afghanistan militarily will be a colossal failure with extremely high casulties on the U.S. side.
Remember, the Soviets fought a war with these fanatics for 8 or 9 years, and at the time were pretty much matched with the U.S. in terms of overall weaponry and military capability, and they got their asses kicked, didn't win, and withdrew with their military in shambles and completely demoralized.
Fanatics will fight to the death and to every last man, woman and child old enough to fire a gun, or throw a stone.
It is also for this very reason that A-Bombs were dropped on Japan to end the war. It had nothing to do with all the speculative hperbole being tossed around on Mudcat lately. It first and foremost to save American lives.
There was a whole show about this on TLC a few weeks ago, about what would have happened if the U.S. had launched a full scale air, sea and ground invasion of Japan instead of using the A-Bomb, and they estimated that it would have taken 1 - 2 years to succeed at the cost in excess of 100,000 U.S. servicemen's lives.
That statistic, is what finally convinced Truman to order the A-Bombing. In retrospect, it was the right decision at the time, hard as it was/is to swallow. And I guess it was major payback for Pearl Harbor. But it was WAR!!!
Assuming the Taliban will not extradite Bin Laden, a complete Nato Blockade of the country and sanctions might be another option. But we already know that sanctions don't work as witnessed by Iraq. And the problem with implementing the blockade, is that Afghanistan borders on Turknmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, Pakistan, and, Iran. Not exactly tight little bed buddies with the U.S....willing to allow Nato and U.S. Troops on their soil.
Without the backing of China and Pakistan at the very least it could become a horrible mess, and could easily lead to a major world war as these countries would not want to be seen capitulating to the U.S. because of their own interests and stature in that region.
The country of Afghanistan is already pretty isolated from the world, and very mountainous making any sort of a ground battle, comparable to fighting the North Vietnamese. The Taliban know the terrain. The U.S. and Nato don't, and they'd get whipped, and humliated.
Problem with the U.S....and this has been an ongoing problem for years and years, is that they have put too much of their military intelligence money into hi tech spying via satellites, Awacks, etc.....and practically zero money into intelligence on the ground, including moles, infiltrators, and other ground intelligence apparatus. And they've been paying the price for it, which has resulted in patheticly sad lack of accurate and credible real-time intelligence within these rogue and enemy countries. This is why they're clueless about Iran, China, North Korea, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, (and the list goes on), except on the most general levels of intelligence that their hi tech spy satellites and cellular/microwave interceptors, can provide.
I am absolutely horrified and appalled with what happened yesterday, but at the risk of sounding momentarily dispassionate about it, I am frankly surprised that something on this scale did not happen sooner in the U.S. The country has never been any good at looking at the long range picture. They tend to plan things within the range of the next 5 - 10 years, instead of taking this, and adding another 20 or 30 years, onto the scenarios.
All the dooms day planners in the Pentagon, CIA, National Security, and Military were either in denial about the plausability of this type of an occurance, or it was sheer arrogance on their parts to not have had any elaborate security precautions in place.
The level of security you're now seeing around the country and Washington, as well as the re-deployment of Sky Marshalls aboard commercial aircraft, is something that should have been in place since the attempted WTC bombing in 1993 or at the very least after Oklahoma.
Until they have the precise location of Bin Laden, and assuming like Arafat and Saddam, that he doesn't change locations every 2-3 hours, there's little they can do, without reversing the more or less world wide sympathy they now have. So they'll really need to scramble and use all intelligence from all of their key allies, to coordinate and surgically do whatever they feel must be done.
The downside of all of this, is that to not retailiate is foolhardy and spineless and not the example that the world's only surviving superpower wants to demonstrate on the world stage and to their allies.
To retaliate, invites more terrorist attacks on the U.S. and it Nato alliance countries, as evidenced by what the Israelis having been dealing with. Definitely a big rock, and a big hard place. I don't envy GW, Powell or Cheney right now.
Conversely, if, this should turn out to be some militia groups within the U.S., then marshall should be declared in all counties and areas where their compounds, etc. are, and they should be either arrested, or if they refuse, they should be hunted down and shot like the derranged animals they are.
Justa-Ranter