Read De Vitoria, De Vatel, or any book on the laws of warfare written prior to 1945, and you can find all manner of moral and economical ways to defeat insurgencies. All you have to do is not listen to modern “Ethicists”, pacifist PC clerics and Tranzi bureaucrats who want the West to lose, and follow the real rules of just warfare. Or if you don’t want to do that, just do what the Israelis finally did – build a wall, and keep the bastards out…

Corrected comment.

Sorry for the double post, but without a preview option, it is hard sometimes to proofread comments.

Asymmetric warfare. Hard truth is we have nothing to threaten them with.

Let’s also add that we don’t want Moslems to immigrate to Western countries. Why on Earth would we want to import such an alien culture anyway?

Also, in regards to the terrorists camps, it is my impression most of the training was done in Germany and the US. I don’t think they learned to fly and evade airport security in Afghanistan

And yes, all of the crap about Koran burning is so much BS. We need to get the Hell out of there. Osama is dead, and if the Afghans are stupid enough to set up terrorist camps again, we can always go back. This farce about our Afghan :”Allies” is deranged…

When we do have to go into a country, I think we should topple the government and then quickly cordon off a nice big empty chunk of land and establish a large military base, stockpiling supplies and equipment. We then use it as a rotating training base and staging point, like we did with the country of Kuwait.

We pay the new government to lease the base and otherwise ignore the country, never stepping outside the confines of the base. We simply make it clear that if the new government allows terrorists to freely operate in the country we’ll repeat the process.

By the way, the ironic thing about this Koran burning thing is that its pretty evident that the base is overflowing with Korans if large piles of them end up in the trash. It’s sort of like we issued our GIs copies of Mein Kampf in WWII, and then begged the Germans forgiveness every time any soldier mistreated it. Okay, it’s not quite the same, but still it’s ridiculous that we go to such extreme lengths to please them and it just ends up blowing up in our face.

I’m completely down with the people of Afghanistan living their lives according to their own values, beliefs, whatever. Trying to change their culture is an enormous waste of blood and treasure, all the way around.

So long as they don’t harbor terrorist training camps and facilitate terrorist attacks against the West and its allies, then leave them to their pastimes, which is what war there is, to a large extent. But if they insist on positioning themselves as an enemy and facilitating attacks against the US and its citizens, then you drop the pretense that you’re going to surgically remove the few bad apples from their barrel. You may have to tear the barrel apart and then let the people who live there put it back together again. That sounds harsh, and it is, and a lot of innocent people will suffer, as innocent people always do in war. That’s why you shouldn’t wage war based on a lot of optimistic scenarios generated by a think tank.

Neo-cons have been known to reference the adoption of democracy and the rule of law in Germany and Japan after the Second World War. Apart from the fact that those two societies are entirely different from anything found in the Middle East or the Afghan region,they were also decimated during the war. A hell of a lot of Germans starved to death AFTER the war had ended. The ones who survived didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm left for a guerrilla campaign at the end of the day of searching for enough scraps to survive. Like I said, there is, tragically, no nice way to fight a war.