Unless the Yanks are prepared to Nuke Afghanistan like they nuked Japan, they have no future there. They had to nuke Japan, or spend another million lives defeating men who were not afraid to die for what they believed in, just as the Vietnamese did, and many Iraqi's.

The hardest man to defeat is the man who is not afraid to die. These men are not afraid of death, and suicide bombers will continue to blow up people, as long as Christians try to dominate them.

We all know that nucluear is not an option,so its out. Obama should face reality there, and give Pakistan all the help he can, so it will act as a counterweight to Iran. Iran would probably take over Afghanistan, and stop the opium farming, and probably negotiate pipelines for oil, so everyone would be happier, if not totally happy.

rpg, did you *seriously* call William Calley a "poor bastard"?

"Dozens of people were herded into an irrigation ditch and other locations and killed with automatic weapons. A large group of about 70 to 80 villagers, rounded up by the 1st Platoon in the center of the village, were killed personally by Calley and by soldiers he had ordered to fire. Calley also shot two other large groups of civilians with a weapon taken from a soldier who had refused to do any further killing."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai

maracas1, what sort of decisions do you think the military are making? They did not decide to be in Afghanisatan, nor do they decide on the numbers, that's up to the Australian government. Sorry, I'm not trying to be facetious, just curious as to your reasoning there i.e. did I miss something?

PtB - I agree with you that the only way to suppress this area, and the borders are really arbitrary let's face it, is to wipe it off the face of the planet. A mite excessive possibly, but strategically a good move, tactically it also stops tons of opium poppies ending up eventually killing kids.

Pakistan was drawn across several regions that probably should not have been divided, Kashmir and the Punjab, this has led to endless problems.

I would put forward that Pakistan is lost though, I cannot see the Pakistani government being organised enough to end the fractured nature of its command to be effective against the Taliban. They lack political will as well, and cannot divorce themselves from playing silly games with India.

It may well be that India nukes Pakistan to end the possibility of Taliban ending up with nukes.

Australia in Afghanistan, well we have to be there as the US have told us to be there, we can't not go where they ask us to otherwise we will have to fund our own defence. That would effectively be many more billions than the trivial amounts we spend now, considering our geographic position.

Clownfish, I say he was a "poor bastard" because his own government treated him as a political football. I don't condone the killing, but his defense was that he did it under orders, the Major who gave them denied it but later, after his trial, admitted he had lied. Calley was sentenced to Life, which was converted to 20 years in military prison, which was reduced to 3 years of house arrest - such was the commitment of the US Military who knew one of their own had been stitched up.

Have a read of Lt Calley's autobiography if you want to get Lt Calley's reasons of why he thought he was doing the right thing, and like many others, following orders. (Wiki is interesting, but often only has one side of accounts where clearly several viewpoints exist, much is reported in the daily news that is corrected the next day).

This was just after the Tet offensive, where the US got a kicking and people were not only trigger happy, they were expecting trouble everywhere and maybe went looking for it.

Many people are charged with crimes and get off due to following orders (Nazis in WWII war crimes), or were really drunk at the time or were provoked, a defense still available in most states of Australia. (I believe this is true?)

Did you know the survivors of the My Lai incident were wiped out "accidently" by the South Vietnamese Army in an artillery barrage? No one was charged. People die in war, so it goes.

The invasion of Afghanistan is a criminal piece of idiocy, and quite apart from the fact it has no ethical justification, it has zero chance of success.

This war has little or nothing to do with the defence of Australia and is an offensive aggression by the Australian state against bewildered goatherds and hill-dwellers who have never done us any harm. In any event, the Taliban as a political force is entirely an artefact of the USA’s dopey imperial foreign policy in the first place.

What is the USA doing there? Indulging the welfare/warfare state’s usual dream of dominating people and forcing them to obey – for their own good, of course.

What is Australia doing there? Crawling up the USA’s arse, as usual.

In my view we should get out of Afghanistan .

The value of the lives of our boys eclipses the value of the entire Afghan population .

Afghans and Tali ban are heathens of the finest order .

If they move outside their borders use nuclear power .