Oh, I know. I’m saying it’s a possibility if we caught the dude out in the middle of nowhere.
US war on terror has killed 500,000 people in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq
- Thread starter MJJ
- Start date
The middle ground was having soldiers from the US, Britain and others on the ground for ~10 years. It didn't work, there were never enough troops on the ground to cover all the gaps between provinces, and they were up against an enemy that follows no code or rules. One minute they're fighting and planting mines, the next they're running away and pretending to be civilians. The overly restrictive rules of engagement meant our soldiers always had one hand tied behind their backs.
Drone and air strikes are a far more effective way of killing the insurgents without risking our own service personnel, but that's only because the insurgents insist on fighting that way.
I don't get how that is relevant. If you are including wounded numbers, it would make sense to include wounded numbers for civilians as well. If you are looking at civilian deaths, like the article in OP is, it would make sense to restrict your numbers to KIA.
It's actually called 'modern warfare'.
US drone strikes target rescuers in Pakistan – and the west stays silent
Glenn Greenwald
Attacking rescuers – a tactic long deemed by the US a hallmark of terrorism – is now routinely used by the Obama administration
absolutely disgusting, scum of the earth
On a related note....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...t-decide-who-they-kill-britain-funds-research
I can see this going really well
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...t-decide-who-they-kill-britain-funds-research
I can see this going really well
Include them. That’s fine with me.
One of the worst decisions by Pakistan was to support the US in the cold war and then get dragged into the war on terror, the leaders have severely let the country down. I really hope they move away from them at start to look for allies elsewhere.
Well according to the original thread title it was about Iran instead of Iraq, for some odd reason.
That would seem to be the case - I would guess the vast majority of unknown perpetrators targeting civilians were anti-coalition militias. This would not surprise anyone who followed the pattern of violence closely from 2003-2008. And yes, coalition partners would include the Iraqi government forces I guess.
But to reiterate, the numbers are very likely wildly inaccurate, but at the same time perhaps the most accurate we can hope for and may come close to portraying the truth proportionally.*
Not that anyone else in this thread seems to care.
Seems the time to repost this:
"You don't seem to distinguish between the anti-Soviet mujahidin, the Taliban, and al Qaeda.
The mujahidin - armed and trained during the 1980s directly by Pakistan with full support of the US, Saudi Arabia, and others. Included an obscure fighter called Muhammad Omar who would go on to found the Taliban in 1993/94, five years after the Soviet withdrawal and subsequent loss of US interest in Afghanistan. Also included guys like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaludin Haqqani (famously described by Charlie Wilson as "goodness personified") who would go on to loosely ally themselves to the Taliban after 9/11. But most mujahidin factions, while certainly Islamist in orientation, fought against the Taliban when they emerged in 1994.
The Taliban - founded by Mullah Omar in the midst of the civil war of the 90s, supported by the ISI as a reliably Pakhtun, anti-Indian force for 'stability', and largely drawn from Deobandi-run, Saudi-funded madrasas along the Af-Pak frontier. Initially the US believed they might be a force for stability in the country, but the US had little interest in them until bin Ladin turned up again nd declared war on them in 1996. For his part, bin Ladin is said to have known nothing about the Taliban when he first returned to Afghanistan, but suspected they might be communists.
Al Qaeda - founded at the tail-end of the anti-Soviet war as a conglomeration of Arab and other foreign volunteers. Never had any significant impact on the conflict but used the space provided by the instability to train for coming wars against their own governments. People like Michael Moore have claimed that the US "created" bin Ladin, but the main studies of al Qaeda by Steve Coll, Jason Burke and Lawrence Wright conclude that bin Ladin worked independently of the US in Pakistan and Afghanistan."
* (Edit): note that the table doesn't include deaths from prolonged episodes lasting more than two days. So presumably excludes the major battles of the opening month of the war and stuff like the battles of Fallujah.
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The three problems with the thread title are:
(a) The US is not directly responsible for all these deaths. In fact, it may be the case that the US is not directly responsible for most of these deaths.
(b) The US is not solely responsible for creating the conditions by which these deaths occurred.
(c) Related to (b) - it is problematic to label all these conflicts under the "US War on Terror" as each has its own unique history and dynamic which has a certain logic independent of US involvement.
If we can keep all this in mind and try to avoid the petty point-scoring then a much more sober and realistic account of US responsibility in each conflict should be possible.
(a) The US is not directly responsible for all these deaths. In fact, it may be the case that the US is not directly responsible for most of these deaths.
(b) The US is not solely responsible for creating the conditions by which these deaths occurred.
(c) Related to (b) - it is problematic to label all these conflicts under the "US War on Terror" as each has its own unique history and dynamic which has a certain logic independent of US involvement.
If we can keep all this in mind and try to avoid the petty point-scoring then a much more sober and realistic account of US responsibility in each conflict should be possible.
Which one of the conflicts do you feel are independent of the war on terror and US involvement?
All told, between 480,000 and 507,000 people have been killed in the United States’ post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. This tally of the counts and estimates of direct deaths caused by war violence does not include the more than 500,000 deaths from the war in Syria, raging since 2011, which the US joined in August 2014.
This is the opening of the report so not sure why you feel that the US is not directly responsible for most of these deaths when that is what the report is measuring.
None of them are fully explainable independent of US involvement - but each has a dynamic in which US responsibility is unclear and other factors deserve primary attention. For example, when a Sunni jihadist blows himself up among a crowd of Shi'i pilgrims in southern Iraq, how are we to understand US responsibility? Or when the Pakistani military kills villagers in Waziristan? In neither case is the US directly responsible. But we can agree that the US bears at least partial responsibility for creating the conditions in which the deaths occurred. However, the extent of this responsibility will be different in each case, and needs to be measured against other factors - e.g. in the Iraq case, the role of Saddam in stoking Sunni-Shi'i tensions there over decades, the roles of Saudi Arabia, Iran and others in doing the same globally, local factors unique to southern Iraq, etc. Or in the case of Pakistan, the long history of tension regarding central government involvement in the tribal areas and related issues going back at least to the 19th century.
These are not "what about" questions - if you read the reports I posted on page 2 of the thread you'll find anti-coalition forces and sectarian death squads in Iraq are likely directly responsible for the majority of deaths there.
MJJ said:
From the actual report, which as far as I can see you haven't linked to in this thread:
"Most direct war deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria have been caused by militants, but the US and its coalition partners have also killed civilians."
Page 2 - https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2018/Human Costs, Nov 8 2018 CoW.pdf
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Yeah the report is easy enough to find for somebody who wants to do and if people actually search for it they can go on the cost of war page which has a lot of useful information.
While I do agree with some of what you have posted, I disagree that they are not directly responsible for the current mess. All of this is a fallout of US meddling in local politics and fighting a war, it itself created, with little regards for the resultant damage to countries and civilians.
I’m sorry, but this is like saying Britain and France started WW2.
Al Qaeda started the war.
Don’t try and call me out for “defending Murica” then say stuff like that.
I think we have different definitions of ''directly responsible."
I think we can all agree that US meddling is a massive factor that cannot be ignored in any of these conflicts. Beyond that there is a lot of scope for discussion - but headlines like these don't particularly help that discussion move in a fruitful direction.
Who funded and armed Al qaeda? You guys are making the same mistakes with the Saudis that you made in the 70s with al qaeda btw.
Fair enough, that is also an interesting discussion to be had. Regarding the first point, I disagree. Some of the posters here are adamantly denying America's role in creating this mess.
AQ flew planes into our WTC and our Pentagon and our field in Pennsylvania, not the other way around.
It’s one thing to say we contributed to it, but to say we created it? No. Not having it.
Please see my post above - al Qaeda didn't exist until the late 80s and there's no evidence they were directly funded, armed or trained by the US.
He’s talking about the “Afghan Arabs” and equating them to Al Qaeda.
@2cents
Doesn't the same differentiation (between the Taliban and al Qaeda)become relevant when considering the rationale for invading Afghanistan in the first place?
Doesn't the same differentiation (between the Taliban and al Qaeda)become relevant when considering the rationale for invading Afghanistan in the first place?
Trust me, I’ve read everything you’ve written here. Solid posts.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jan/17/yemen.islam
It takes a specific kind of agenda thinking to suggest that the US did not create or heavily contribute if you want to be generous to the rise of Taliban.
Should add the Yemenis to that count too, that’s also blood on their hands.
Oh ffs, first of all Mujahidin (e.g. Hezb-i-Islami) does not equal the Taliban does not equal al Qaeda. Hezb-i-Islami spent years fighting against the Taliban in the 90s.
Second, speaking of agendas, why did you deliberately omit this part of the article - it is placed directly between two of the paragraphs you quoted:
"Despite reports that bin Laden was effectively funded by the Americans, it is impossible to gauge how much American aid he received. He was not a major figure in the Afghan war. Most American weapons, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, were channelled by the Pakistanis to the Hezb-i-Islami faction of the mujahideen led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar."
Because it wasn't relevant to the point I was making and says that it is impossible to gauge rather than making a statement one way or the other.
I also left out this part which was placed directly between the two paragraphs I quoted for the same reason.
So Taliban doesn't equal Hezb-i-Islami but Bin Laden served under a Hezb-i-Islami commander, received US cash and used the same guerilla tactics as them. Most of the "reports" distancing US from taliban came after 9/11 and not before. There is a reason for that.
Do you understand that bin Laden was not a member of the Taliban? That al Qaeda was created at the end of the 80s at the very end of the Afghan-Soviet war? And that the Taliban was formed in the early 90s when bin Laden was in Sudan?
Why am I even bothering here, a few posts ago you were claiming al Qaeda was created in the 70s.
I dont see much difference between the three, all of them are basic evolutions of the same serpent. So we have stopped denying that bin laden received US cash and support?
Yep.
How about reacting in a proportionate manner rather than killing hundreds of thousands of people?
Also let's not paint US as some kind of heroes when they intervened in Iraq during Saddam's regime.
Look mate. I enjoy a good back-and-forth on here as much as anyone, and I like your posts on Pakistan generally. But if you're going to argue on the basis that distinct terms and groups are meaningless to you, then there is no basis for further discussion.
I said there was no evidence al Qaeda received direct US support. Here is Jason Burke, author of the article you posted, who I also referenced in my original post on this topic:
"The CIA did not create al-Qaida...Total myth that CIA created OBL. just not true. CIA had no direct dealings with him in 80s, had barely heard of him, dealt just with Pakistanis who dealt with the Afghans not the international brigade (whose military contribution was negligible anyway). How do I know this? lots and lots of footwork in Peshawar and in the US. Absolutely no one - American officials, Pakistanis, former Mujahideen, no one - accepts the whole "blowback" thesis."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/03/osama-bin-laden-al-qaida
Bin Laden operated in Afghanistan for years before al Qaeda was created. Whether or not he received direct US support in these years is a subject of intense debate among journalists and scholars who write on this issue.
If you actually read and understood what I wrote above about the distinction between the Mujahidin, the Taliban, and al Qaeda, instead of assuming an agenda on my part, you'd see that I very much acknowledged the US role in the rise of the Taliban and al Qaeda, and you might see why I believe the distinction between these groups is important.
Fair enough, I will take that back. That wasn't fair of me.
On the subject of AQ and Taliban(and I would even lump ISIS into this) I tend to think of them as one due to the groups using militarizing Islam for their own needs and using the same guerrilla tactics, to me all three are scum thus I don't bother looking deeply into the distinctions between the three. Now that might be wrong as it does provide insight into how the group rose to power and does lead to stupid statements from times to times
but the feeling of hate is too strong atm. Maybe in the future I would be able to study them with less emotional involvement.So they killed some of the 500,000? Still blood on their hands.
they hadn't heard of the son of a wealthy saudi family who was leading anti-soviet forces and had exposure in western media?
In the 80s he wasn't known in Western media at all, and he was never a leading player in the anti-Soviet forces.
also of course the people involved won't accept a blowback thesis, the americans want no responsibility and the militias need to adhere to a holy warrior narrative to motivate recruits
This is why I don't trust any "report" after 9/11 distancing USA from obl.
That’s not what the report says.