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Relentlessboredomm posted:Related question. Can anyone relay to me a vision for what Afghanistan is supposed to look like when we finally pull out? Perpetual war between Kabul and the Taliban is I think Washington's ideal scenario at this point and has been for years.
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Oct 7, 2015 03:27
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Relentlessboredomm posted:Related question. Can anyone relay to me a vision for what Afghanistan is supposed to look like when we finally pull out?
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Oct 7, 2015 03:27
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Relentlessboredomm posted:or at this point end it as quickly as possible... Can anyone relay to me a vision for what Afghanistan is supposed to look like when we finally pull out? We've been at war in Afghanistan for half my life. Its been an insane amount of time.
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Oct 7, 2015 03:27
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Sharkie posted:Oh please, don't try to fishmech here, or pretend you don't know how language works. Care to walk back your implication that the military only had 30 minutes to process the information that it was a hospital? Why would I? You haven't provided any evidence to demonstrate that MSF's own web page is wrong.
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Oct 7, 2015 03:28
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Relentlessboredomm posted:Related question. Can anyone relay to me a vision for what Afghanistan is supposed to look like when we finally pull out? But since this isn't a perfect world it'll probably look exactly the same as when we went in, except the insurgents will be armed with American weapons captured from government troops instead of Russian weapons captured from government troops.
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Oct 7, 2015 03:29
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RaySmuckles posted:We've been at war in Afghanistan for half my life. Its been an insane amount of time. I'm looking forward to when my two year old nephew is ten or eleven and I can tell him stories about when we weren't perpetually at war in Afghanistan.
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Oct 7, 2015 03:31
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Stereotype posted:"Overworked, underpaid 20 year old thousands of miles from home in war a torn country sentenced to life in jail for fifteen murders because he was lazy with checking coordinates in the middle of the night" We shouldn't hold people who have other peoples lives in their hands to a standard, because it's rough for are boys sitting in an air conditioned TOC all day.
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Oct 7, 2015 03:31
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Nostalgia4Infinity posted:Probably the best post in pages. Is emptyquoting allowed? I'm assuming not.  Relentlessboredomm posted:The only real solution to the military loving up and occasionally killing innocents is to not go to war in the first loving place or at this point end it as quickly as possible. They can jail some idiot NCO and rework the process but it'll happen again. Supposed to? A glorious, successful, democratic country for some people would be a success to some people. An country with eternal war, maybe, for others. The first definition of success is probably impossible at this point. I don't even know how we can extricate ourselves well at this point. We can pack up and just say gently caress All Y'all but yeah it's gonna be a shitshow.
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Oct 7, 2015 03:32
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Mavric posted:Nope. Much like we have so many levels of bureaucracy that a huge financial meltdown based on widespread fraud can result in zero charges, as long as there are enough people between the bomb and the go ahead it turns out no one is at fault! Look, they made mistakes—oops, “well-intentioned judgments which, with the benefit of hindsight, might regrettably have been, in some respects, in error”—but these mostly occurred, it appeared, while correcting “fundamental systemic errors.” No one was sorry for anything, because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometrical otherworld, and “were to be regretted.” Now I miss Terry Pratchett again, you bastard. 
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Oct 7, 2015 03:35
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You can bash the war as much as you want but at least we got Bin Laden. In Pakistan
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Oct 7, 2015 03:36
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Relentlessboredomm posted:Related question. Can anyone relay to me a vision for what Afghanistan is supposed to look like when we finally pull out? If you can come up with a good answer to that question, there's a really nice job lined up for you at the Pentagon. There's been a lot of rhetoric about "nation-building" in Afghanistan and preventing the country from becoming a bastion for terrorism, but how these goals are supposed to be accomplished has changed between administrations, departments, and even individual reports. The closest thing to consensus is that Afghanistan should probably be democratic, as functioning democratic institutions seem to be the best at delegitimizing insurgencies.
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Oct 7, 2015 03:37
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Relentlessboredomm posted:Related question. Can anyone relay to me a vision for what Afghanistan is supposed to look like when we finally pull out? Pregnant with the ideals and values of Democracy and American Freedom.
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Oct 7, 2015 03:38
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Everyone should be happy, they've found someone to throw under the bus!quote:The American commander in Afghanistan now thinks that United States troops who called in an airstrike that decimated a Doctors Without Borders hospital probably did not follow rules that allow for the use of air power only in dire situations, according to American officials with knowledge of the general’s thinking.
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Oct 7, 2015 03:45
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Wales Grey posted:Pregnant with the ideals and values of Democracy and American Freedom. But only the american ideals and values which don't involve bombing civilians thousands of miles away from your borders. So, pregnant with a specific subset of the ideals and values of Democracy and American Freedom.
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Oct 7, 2015 03:45
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Dead Reckoning posted:So you're using some esoteric personal definition of "broadcast" then? Okay I'll indulge your pedantry: quote:verb (used with object), broadcast or broadcasted, broadcasting. quote:broadcast Also, show me where I said MSF's webpage was wrong. The fact the location of the hospital had been made known for months, not minutes, as you implied with your selective quoting.
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Oct 7, 2015 03:45
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Sharkie posted:Okay I'll indulge your pedantry: There's a difference between someone, somewhere knowing that there was a hospital in the area and the aircrew specifically knowing that the target they were shooting at was a hospital.
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Oct 7, 2015 03:51
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Acebuckeye13 posted:There's a difference between someone, somewhere knowing that there was a hospital in the area and the aircrew specifically knowing that the target they were shooting at was a hospital. if providing the military with a dated list of coordinates labeled DO NOT BOMB isn't sufficient to prevent the military from bombing you then i can only conclude that incompetence or apathy are the cause i mean it's not like we've been pissing blood and money fruitlessly down the drain in afghanistan since the soldiers currently fighting there were in elementary school or anything but i'd hope that after 14 years they might manage to get at least one thing right
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Oct 7, 2015 03:58
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I don't see what all the fuss is about. This reminds me of all the hoopla about the "Collateral Murder" video. Sure the Apache pilots murdered a whole bunch of completely innocent people, including children; but, that was a group of military aged males walking around together in a war zone! What did they think would happen!? And then you drive a van up to try to "rescue the victims?" Those people were stupid. Now they're dead, and that's kinda sad, but also totally ok cuz war is hell. These things happen. What was MSF doing in a war zone anyway? Don't they know its dangerous? Don't they know literally anything goes? edit: also "D&D debates whether bombing a hospital is a war crime" is a pretty interesting read. Just the idea that they could have been shooting at the right kind of Afghans legitimizes the whole enterprise. RaySmuckles fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Oct 7, 2015 |
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Oct 7, 2015 03:58
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Trabisnikof posted:Everyone should be happy, they've found someone to throw under the bus! Okay what the gently caress shouldn't this whole Not Following RoE thing have come out much earlier?
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Oct 7, 2015 04:01
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Relentlessboredomm posted:Related question. Can anyone relay to me a vision for what Afghanistan is supposed to look like when we finally pull out? free of turrists (muslims)
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Oct 7, 2015 04:02
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Relentlessboredomm posted:Related question. Can anyone relay to me a vision for what Afghanistan is supposed to look like when we finally pull out? Four words: World's. Biggest. Tire. Fire.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:04
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Oh poo poo! Looks like it's time for part 2 of "we killed somebody" theater. Now instead of talking about how it was lawful and the correct thing to do, we can talk about how even the regulations we have are impossible to comply within the fog of war.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:05
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Relentlessboredomm posted:The only real solution to the military loving up and occasionally killing innocents is to not go to war in the first loving place or at this point end it as quickly as possible. They can jail some idiot NCO and rework the process but it'll happen again. same as everything that gets pulled out of, completely hosed but with nothing left to make us feel like we have any responsibility to call the next day.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:06
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SedanChair posted:Oh poo poo! Looks like it's time for part 2 of "we killed somebody" theater. Now instead of talking about how it was lawful and the correct thing to do, we can talk about how even the regulations we have are impossible to comply within the fog of war. Cue people with obnoxious accents talking about how it isn't fair that the tairists don't follow the Geneva Conventions.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:11
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Sharkie posted:Okay I'll indulge your pedantry:  Right, you meant "broadcasting to anyone who would listen" figuratively and weren't in any way referring to communications on the night in question. Good thing you didn't make Condiv's mistake of using the unambiguous term "radioing" when he claimed the same thing yesterday.If you're claiming that the U.S. should have stopped bombing earlier because they knew it was a hospital already, I guess that would just be illogical rather than dishonest.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:11
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Spaceman Future! posted:same as everything that gets pulled out of, completely hosed but with nothing left to make us feel like we have any responsibility to call the next day. 
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Oct 7, 2015 04:11
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In related news...Nuclear Smugglers Shopped Radioactive Materials To ISIS And Other Terrorists posted:CHISINAU, Moldova (AP) — In the backwaters of Eastern Europe, authorities working with the FBI have interrupted four attempts in the past five years by gangs with suspected Russian connections that sought to sell radioactive material to Middle Eastern extremists, The Associated Press has learned. The latest known case came in February this year, when a smuggler offered a huge cache of deadly cesium — enough to contaminate several city blocks — and specifically sought a buyer from the Islamic State group.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:14
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The best way to ensure we don't ever hit a bad target is to not go to war, then do the math and try to figure out whether going to war and occasionally killing the wrong people is better than just going "Noooope" and staying out of everything all the time, regardless of how bad poo poo is and how much potential to do good there is. Somewhere in the middle of that is some weirdo area where we maximize good and minimize bad on a razor's edge and you'd basically have to be a supernatural god-figure to find that point. At least the US has the decency to admit a bad thing happened and we own the call Remember when Russia either enabled or literally shot down a civilian airliner full of AIDS researchers, then just made really lovely photoshops to try to claim it wasn't them?
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Oct 7, 2015 04:16
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Cesium, so, the Russians raided the cancer treatment wing of a recently closed hospital.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:17
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Sharkie posted:Okay I'll indulge your pedantry: You guys are talking past each other. You're stating broadcast in the sense that they had made their location previously known. We've covered that pages ago and you're not saying anything new and we've moved past that. Dead Reckoning is talking broadcast in a form more common in the military, a wide area comms transmission. When you say they're broadcasting their location it has the implication that they're going out over a radio frequency that the aircraft is monitoring and stating "SOS" over and over, which isn't true. In any case, General Campbell's latest testimony is certainly more damning for the USAF, however, considering both Democrats and Republicans on the panel seemed to not really be interested does not bode well. Boon fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Oct 7, 2015 |
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Oct 7, 2015 04:21
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mlmp08 posted:At least the US has the decency to admit a bad thing happened and we own the call The Tillman's feel the same way. It is good that the US always admits to and owns its mistakes.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:23
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Dead Reckoning posted:
Uh, yeah? Like in the usage cited in dictionaries? Dead Reckoning posted:If you're claiming that the U.S. should have stopped bombing earlier because they knew it was a hospital already Again, the US had the information it was a hospital, unless you think MSF was lying about telling the US that months ago.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:23
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RaySmuckles posted:The Tillman's feel the same way. It is good that the US always admits to and owns its mistakes. lol I never said always, I'm not totally stupid. Sharkie posted:Again, the US had the information it was a hospital, unless you think MSF was lying about telling the US that months ago. Hey, I didn't know "the US" was a hivemind with instantaneous thought-communication. Now that I do, I agree that the USA intentionally said "gently caress you, MSF" and decided to blow the gently caress out of their hospital. They probably only stopped when out of fuel or ammo.* *last part may actually be true.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:24
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mlmp08 posted:lol I never said always, I'm not totally stupid. Nah, I hear you. This whole incident is just a lot more "US military accidentally attacks organization with more credibility than them, are forced to admit mistake" and a lot less "Military comes forth with admission of responsibility."
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Oct 7, 2015 04:27
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Sharkie posted:Uh, yeah? Like in the usage cited in dictionaries? The definition you're using is #4 and the one they're using was #1 in the dictionary quoted, so I wouldn't get so defensive that people thought "broadcasting" meant using a radio.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:30
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RaySmuckles posted:Nah, I hear you. This whole incident is just a lot more "US military accidentally attacks organization with more credibility than them, are forced to admit mistake" and a lot less "Military comes forth with admission of responsibility." Oh, sure. If the bad target hit was an equal number of lives, but just random people, they'd have far less leverage and voice to make this a big deal, so even if the US did admit culpability, it would be on the back page of the paper.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:30
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mlmp08 posted:Hey, I didn't know "the US" was a hivemind with instantaneous thought-communication. Now that I do, I agree that the USA intentionally said "gently caress you, MSF" and decided to blow the gently caress out of their hospital. They probably only stopped when out of fuel or ammo.* If you're referring to my posts this is the biggest strawman since Ray Bolger.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:32
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Also, I just heard the direct quote of both yesterday's report and today's report by General Campbell. There isn't any changing of the story, his statements today further clarified how the call was made. He did take responsibility for the attack, again, no idea where that goes because Congress apparently doesn't care.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:33
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mlmp08 posted:lol I never said always, I'm not totally stupid. yeah, we totes dont have any type of zero delay centralized communication infastructure that shares data instantaneously that can be used as an intermediary between military wings to pass data that has been provided to them between eachother. some sort of... net of communication. Wish it existed. or were you stating that the military wings are bloated incompetent red tape bureaucratic hellholes that cant share information no matter how convenient the infrastructure to do so is? Because the fact that their internal policing and structure dont allow them to actually share that information does not excuse that it was provided to them SOOOOOOOO
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Oct 7, 2015 04:33
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Sharkie posted:If you're referring to my posts this is the biggest strawman since Ray Bolger.  considering your claim that "the US" knowing about a hospital's location is the same as every US military member knowing where a hospital is.Spaceman Future! posted:yeah, we totes dont have any type of zero delay centralized communication infastructure that shares data instantaneously that can be used as an intermediary between military wings to pass data that has been provided to them between eachother. some sort of... net of communication. Wish it existed. Every signalier just felt a disturbance in the force.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:35
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