You do know that “freedom fighter” and “terrorist” are the same thing, right? Only difference is whose side they’re on.

The “Taliban” of today has very little in common with the previous government. That was a dictatorial regime in control of a country, whose actions were generally unpopular and frequently objected to. What we now call “Taliban” is just our government’s label for the various tribal groups who have always fought foreign occupation in the past, and are continuing to do so now – anybody who is holding a weapon and shooting at the occupying forces is called “Taliban”, regardless of why they are doing that. While the leaders of the old government are still unaccounted for, there’s been no actual evidence that they have anything to do with the resistance effort.

Given how terribly unpopular the old government was, and the fact that they got there with funding and supplies provided by the US (which won’t happen again), I can’t really see them getting back into power. We’ve just been trying to use their name to demonise people – who are fighting primarily to be free from us, and our policy of burning their crops. So far, our government’s propaganda campaign on this issue seems to be working, given how often the bogeyman of women’s rights pops up unchallenged.

(Personal opinion, unsupported by hard evidence: I’d expect a lot of the women to be less interested in their “rights” than they are in their husbands and children not getting shot for being Muslim near soldiers. Nobody has any rights when there are still bullets flying)

Ordinary Afghans do not want to be suborned to a vicious theocracy, but at current lack the civil society, rule of law, infrastructure etc. of their own. We should drive towards helping them come into their own.

The sheer presumption of those who say “well, you know, it’s their country, etc” is shown when you consider that the Taliban couldn’t care less what the Afghan public think, & care solely for their own position. They are to my mind the equivalent of those who wish to turn British Muslims over to sharia regardless of the fact that most of them want no such thing.

All liberals who truly believe in the faith should be really excited by the fact that thousands upon thousands of young girls are getting the education that we take for granted here. Their human rights are not worth less than our own.

After several hundreds of years of waging wars, it should be obvious to the most dim witted, that although they are the ones who instigate our involvement in said wars, politicians should be kept out of the running of war, for they invariably cost us many thousands of extra lives, by prolonging the war and always but always quadruple the cost.
To win in Afghanistan will take all the country’s of NATO to combine and squash the Taliban.

Once the Taliban is squashed we will then have to look for the next terrorist group to attack.

Of course there is a train of thought that says, by attacking these groups, we are in fact making them a lot more important than they would otherwise be.

Exactly right. It’s a sort of liberal blackmail, the argument that if we pull out of Afghanistan now we’re responsible for every oppressive act that Afghan women are subject to hereafter. There are ‘soft-power’ things we can do across the world to nudge every society we come have contact with towards treating people better; but the idea that we can go around the world enforcing liberalism at gunpoint is as futile as it is immoral. This is a red herring. Foreign soldiers and helicopters are not the way to bring about social change. The fact that our young men are dying out there just means that it will also be in our interest to withdraw, it doesn’t mean that we’re running away from a worthwhile fight.

(Blackmailing red herrings, that’s something you don’t see every day where I come from.)

If we are going to adopt a policy of global military interventionism in favour of women’s rights, we had better factor in an increase in the defence budget of a few thousand percent …

Gladstone: “Remember the rights of the savage as we call him. Remember that … the sanctity of human life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own. Remember that … mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilisation, that it passes over the whole surface of the earth and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its unmeasured scope.”

Geoffrey might be worries about the cost, but what would be pay to give education to 6 million British girls?

We have no real strategy, we don’t know what ‘victory’ looks like, but we should also acknowledge the horrendousness of what we could lose by leaving Afghanistan.

When has that ever happened throughout history? It’s kinda hard to turn readers of Mill into militias.

Right now it’s less of a war and more an armed occupation of a country and suppression of freedom fighters. It bears a fairly sharp resemblance to the British rule of India.

Is this really something we want to win? What would winning even look like? When everybody who wants to be free from foreign occupation is dead?

(Flaws in usual arguments:

Opium crop: used to be relatively minor, only grew because some twit started a war, creating poor law enforcement and a need for quick, black market cash. We caused that one – and hey, we’re also the primary market.

Preventing Taliban spread to Pakistan: heavy-handed efforts at suppressing the Taliban in Pakistan have already changed the situation to open warfare there. Too late, sorry.

Osama bin Laden: one man isn’t worth a war, and the chaos of all the fighting is not making it easier to find him)

That line should be written in big black letters and pinned to the wall in every office in the MOD, and in Number 10.

Money is necessary to win wars. We have the money; it’s just been spent really badly. Brown appears to be trying to fight a war as though it were a PR exercise; sending 700 troops when 2000 were requested demonstrates that yes, he is doing something, but fighting a war isn’t like running the NHS. Tokenism on NHS reform means longer waiting times, whereas tokenism in war means losing.

Politically, he can’t afford to be seen to lose a war, but at the same time he can’t afford to win it without redirecting spending. My guess is that he’s done the calculation that he’ll get more votes if he keeps the war going while providing ship-building jobs along the Clyde or wherever the carriers and Type 45s are being built. That means we’ll continue to chuck underequipped and insufficient troops into the black hole at least until the next election.

I would argue that the war itself isn’t the problem, rather the government trying to implement it. I’d like to see Labour withdrawn from parliament.