Posted on 05/26/2012 8:12:52 PM PDT by kristinn
Afghanistan's parliament on Saturday ratified a strategic partnership agreement between Kabul and Washington.
The deal was approved in the Walasi Jirga with more than 150 lawmakers turning out for the vote. Only a handful of lawmakers voted against the measure.
The pact covers security, economics and governance, and spells out the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan beyond 2014 when most NATO forces are planning to conclude their combat role. It does not commit the U.S. to any specific troop presence, but pledges U.S. aid for Afghanistan for at least a decade after most foreign combat forces leave.
The agreement also allows the U.S. to keep a reduced number of troops in Afghanistan for the continued training of Afghan forces and targeted operations against al-Qaida.
The U.S. embassy in Kabul welcomed the ratification. Its spokesperson, citing President Barack Obama, told VOA that “the strategic partnership agreement is a clear message from the United States to the Afghan people that, 'As you stand, you will not stand alone.'”
President Obama and his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai, signed the agreement early this month in Kabul.
In another development, NATO says four of its service members died in bomb blasts Saturday in southern Afghanistan.
More election year meme-building. Thanks kristinn.
Yada, yada, yada. We need to get out of that hell hole. No more money and certainly no more American lives.
Why does it take so long to "train" these people? When I was in the army it took about six months to train me. Are these Afghans a bunch of dumb asses? Opps .... I think I just answered my own question.
There is a little known section in this and every “cooperation agreement” that we have with every country we support in any way militarily.
It’s called the “End User” clause.
That clause specifies that in return for accepting any military hardware/ordnance from bullets to radios, the host government agrees that we have the right of recovery or neutralization of any military hardware/ordnance that the host government loses, has stolen, defecting units, etc.
That’s our back door to re-enter the country by military operation.
What is new is that defecting troops, trained by us are now available for degrading also, at anytime during the agreement.
That is how we operate legally in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, etc., and will continue in Afghanistan.
Pakistan is different, our drones operate in territories of Pakistan that are not technically Pakistan. Same with the training of their Frontier Constabulary.
I say again, we are training the future Taliban. We are weapons training the most warlike people on Earth and thinking they will make nice when we’re gone.
Madness.
Based on our casualties in Iraq vs those in Afghanistan, a third party with zero background on any of this would say Iraqis are several times more warlike. I think it's more accurate to say that Afghanistan is so sparsely-endowed in terms of resources that taking stuff by force from other tribes is easier than attempting to harvest the fruits of honest labor. In fact, when you correct for the fact that Iraqis have oil (and are more prosperous, materially-speaking), and therefore fewer reasons to fight, I'd say Arabs are more violent by an order of magnitude (i.e. 10x). Besides, it's not training per se that makes our military lethal - it's the industrial might of the largest economy in the world. We've trained al Qaeda types before - Ali Mohamed, a former US Army Sergeant, allegedly helped train bin Laden's minions. And yet the only significant attack they've managed is 9/11, in which none of that training really came into play.
In a way, what our enemies fear about us is the same thing that Rome’s enemies feared about them - the fact that Rome could send legion after legion without breaking a sweat, whereas they were at the limits of their productive capacity just feeding the conscript army they had mobilized right after the annual harvest.
I should qualify my use of the term warlike.
The Pakhtun are the most warlike regarding their generalized hatred of each other, tribe to tribe.
Evidence of that is their general, historical unwillingness to intermarry between tribes which is the classical method of creating alliances and stability.
Iraqi arabs do so at a high rate in order to secure travel for trade and pilgrimages.
The Pakhtun generally only intermarry between clans. Get in a room full of Pakhtun and see how similar they all look, it’s amazing.
Iraqi arabs have much more diversity genetically. Afghanistan is much more corrosive, far fewer natural resources, particularly of water. There is far more constant warfare in S Afghanistan over water than in Iraq.
Iraqi arabs are more war effective when you are talking about large unit warfare. Tribe against tribe.
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