The War in Afghanistan

[Ckrisz]

Still feel that way?

Why do you think it would take 3 million dead Afghans?

The Soviets pursued a policy based on the purposeful depopulation of entire swathes of territory. When the U.S. did it to much smaller populations of Native Americans, it was rightfully called genocide. They killed nearly a million Afghans and generated over 3 million refugees. Since the U.S. has fought in Afghanistan, we've been there for nearly as long but the number of Afghans killed numbers in the thousands, not the hundred thousands, and far more Afghan refugees have returned home than left - indeed, there are no significant Afghan refugee flows at all (in marked contrast with Iraq).

[sologdin]

my understanding is that the US invasion generated almost 8 million afghan refugees, about 75% of whom have by now repatriated. not bad, i suppose, though that leaves a substantial number of displaced persons.

the casualties caused by the soviets would hardly have happened had the US simply allowed the 20th century governance of the PDPA to progress normally, in lieu of the medievalists preferred by the gulf monarchs and the CIA. for that reason, the death toll from the soviet invasion is reasonably shared with the US in a joint venture of cold war stupidity.

[Lord O' Bones]

the death toll...is reasonably shared with the US in a joint venture of cold war stupidity.

Agreed +/- 5 years. But we should have and probably did know by then.

[Tormund Ukrainesbane]

Why do you think it would take 3 million dead Afghans?

Over a space of 50 years? Its not an unreasonable number. It is a generally accepted figure for the number killed in Vietnam IIRC.

[Ckrisz]

Over a space of 50 years? Its not an unreasonable number. It is a generally accepted figure for the number killed in Vietnam IIRC.

What makes you think that the current conflict would last 50 years?

my understanding is that the US invasion generated almost 8 million afghan refugees, about 75% of whom have by now repatriated. not bad, i suppose, though that leaves a substantial number of displaced persons.

That sounds enormously high, considering that the Soviet war generated far fewer. From my understanding over 4.5m Afghan refugees have returned to Afghanistan since 2001, though this is likely a combination of better opportunities in Afghanistan combined with some form of inducement or coercion by both Iran and Pakistan, who took the vast majority of the refugees.

Nchink!

Regarding body count: I've heard that the Taliban kill more from the US Gubmint, but I don't think there's been a really rigorous independent body count in Afghanistan. I don't think it'd really be possible either, given how rural that country really is.

The last report on this was done by the UN, not the U.S. Probably not as complete as it should be, but the best possible data given the circumstances:

Tactics of the Taliban and other Anti-Government Elements (AGEs) are behind a 31 per cent increase in conflict-related Afghan civilian casualties in the first six months of 2010 compared with the same period in 2009, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said today in releasing its 2010 Mid-Year Report on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict.Among those killed or injured by the Taliban and other AGEs were 55 per cent more children than in 2009, along with six per cent more women. Casualties attributed to Pro-Government Forces (PGF) fell 30 per cent during the same period, driven by a 64 per cent decline in deaths and injuries caused by aerial attacks.

Regarding your argument that the civil war will reignite: I do think that a rebalancing war would break out almost immediately after the Karzai faux-autocracy fell, but saying that is worse than the current occupation and our 50 year mission there [i think] is an oversimplification of the pain and suffering of the Afghan people from outside influence. They have suffered from intervention for decades, and we all know it was the ISI, in large part trained and equipped by a sympathetic America and CIA, that put the Taliban in place. Honestly, I don't see how self-determination for ALL the people of Afghanistan (not just the urban dwellers, which is the current US "strategy") would be a bad thing, even if it began in bloodshed. All I see is bloodshed anyway.

The amount of bloodshed matters, don't you think? Extending the war to the urban areas would make it enormously bloody. Rather than under 4,000 Afghan civilians dying every year, we could see tens of thousands killed every year - not to mention the maimed and the expelled, or the deaths from disease and displacement.

Our intel services did not stop Faisal Shazad, a Pakistani immigrant (IIRC) who had a round trip plane ticket to the goddamn FATA, did they? It was luck and decent police work that made sure he didn't set off a bomb in Times Square.

One could make the argument just as well that Faisal Shahzad would have learned to make a much better bomb if we weren't killing large numbers of al-Qaeda leadership and trainers in FATA with our drones. The FATA strikes depend on intel gathered and analyzed at bases in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

If we give terrorists as much credit as you are giving them, and Pakistan started to crack down on the FATA (which is impossible at this point with all the internally displaced from the flooding), these shadowy terrorists would go hang out with the Uyghur separatists in S China or go to Malaysia to hang out with those insurgents, or head some other place that I havent' thought of yet.

Not sure how comparing the very different situations and relationships that OBL and the AQ high command has with the Pashtun tribes of the FATA vs elsewhere in the world is giving them credit. And my main point is that, in fact, they would not run off to Western China or anywhere else because they would not be able to --- they would, assuming they escaped, come under the control of those groups precisely because they lack the sort of fortified relationships that they built up over years in Pakistan. The history of AQ tells us this - how long did bin Laden last in Sudan once the U.S., in a much less prioritized global situation before 9/11, began applying pressure? As for China or Malaysia - the strength of these states ensures that they would not have any secure ground there. Note that AQ only manages to exist in those places without strong states - the Sahel, the FATA, Somalia, Yemen. Once you get down to it, there really aren't that many ungoverned spaces that would be AQ-friendly left. I would say a key piece of American foreign policy should be to decrease such spaces, not increase them.

Someone compared the relationship between terrorism, geography and nation-state asylum to a balloon. You force one part, and they go some place else. It's not worth fighting massive wars to combat terrorism. It's using a hammer to solve an issue that would be better solved by changing motherfucking foreign policy, just like the 9/11 Commission said.

The 9/11 Commission didn't really make recommendations in foreign policy, much less argued to stop fighting foreign wars. It wasn't built to do that. Terrorism really isn't like drug trafficking, which is the most oft-argued analogy for balloons and squeezing and such. Terrorism against sovereign states really isn't a profitable activity like drug trafficking - it is, in fact, very risky and dangerous and generally speaking tough to do well. Jihadist terrorism in Algeria, Syria, the Caucasus, and Egypt was crushed by strong, powerful state security and military apparatus - it has not reappeared magically in the Sahara, at least not in anywhere near similar strength. The same occurred to a large extent in Iraq. Terrorism depends on small, motivated groups of people backed by funding who, like anyone else, need a physical location to train, to rest, to refine their techniques and recruit new followers. Not allowing them any space to do so hurts their organization.

[Tormund Ukrainesbane]

What makes you think that the current conflict would last 50 years?

Reread the post. That is the timeline set out by the person I was responding to.

[Ckrisz]

The danger of a war breaking out tomorrow when we leave rather than 30 years from now when we leave is the virtually same, IMO. Leaving them alone might cause war, but they are already in a constant state of warfare. Self-determination has a price, and we are not, as I said, Captain Planet. We are assuredly not going to change the attitude of Afghans toward each other by staying in the country longer. Iraq certainly has not benefited from us being there.

I don't think the natural state of Afghanistan is perpetual war. For most of the 20th century Afghanistan was more or less at peace while most of Asia and South America were ripping themselves apart. If we can establish a minimally successful state and keep Pakistan from messing about too much, there is no reason why it cannot be that way again.

While Iraq certainly did not benefit overall from the war, I think it was far better for us to leave in 2010 than in 2006, when there was a vicious and ongoing civil war.

If you want to argue that the drone attacks are effective, then why are we occupying a positively massive country like Afghanistan?

Because the bases in Afghanistan allow us the launching sites and the intelligence collection points to effectively target AQ in the border regions.

Either way, our intel services have proven that they cannot handle the data that they have already.

I don't think that WaPo story said what you think it did. Sprawling bureaucracies in Washington are not a good argument for shutting down intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Your argument, as I understand it, is to establish a large foothold in any space that is "ungovernable", ie, the Sahara desert, the Hindu Kush mountains, Antarctica, Colombian jungle, in order to prevent "bases" from being built, bases that would be shut down by more draconian governments, rather than a sympathetic government that would be presumably lending them the space, correct?

No, certainly not. Very expensive and messy way to do business. But since they are already there, and they offer us a unique vantage point to target a unique set of targets (AQ Central in the Pakistani borderlands), I don't see a reason to abandon them now.

I'm going to try to respond to these assumptions:

1. Terrorist groups need an extensive base camp

I respond: out of the original 5000 AQ members, how many were effective in bringing about terrorist attacks? I think you are overestimating the importance of a base camp in carrying out a successful terrorist attack. The 9/11 hijackers did not use their bomb training learned in Afghanistan, AFAIK. They trained to fly planes one way in the USA. They used box cutters bought at American schools. 9/11 was an incredible set of circumstances that ended with what appears to be a lucky terrorist strike.

Agree that 9/11 is unlikely to happen again and they got very lucky. Agree that unsophisticated attacks do not require significant training facilities. Best, however, to ensure that significant training facilities do not develop rather than ignore the ungoverned spaces. No significant insurgent or terrorist group can exist without safe havens - best thing to do is ensure that safe havens do not develop or remain inhospitable.

2. A draconian government will probably shut down a terrorist group training in governable areas of its country

I respond: At what price? The Ikhwayn in Egypt is as powerful as it is now because of Western intervention. If we're supporting dictatorships to prevent terrorism, we spawn more terrorism. See how that works?

A counter example would be that Libya, after the monarchy fell, had a number of terrorist groups operating within and without its borders. Remember the Polisario Front? Today, Libya does not engage in those kinds of activities and is off the state-sponsored terrorism listserv; there was no (overt) military action against Libya resulting in this action. The Libyan government quelled terrorism themselves. As I've said upthread, we don't need to be invading these places and occupying them to stop terrorist groups from operating. You need to encourage foreign governments to police their own borders.

The Polisario Front is, IIRC, the independence movement of Western Sahara vs the Kingdom of Morocco and stil exists. I don't think we need to invade places to stop terror groups, but where there is no strong state in place to prevent such groups from operating a safe haven then we need to look at our options.

Also not sure why you invoke Libya as a good counter-example vis a vis Egypt, because Libya is a far more oppressive and brutal dictatorship than Egypt on its worst day. Also I don't think the Ikhwan exists because of Western intervention - that was its original raison d'etre but I think you would have seen a significant Islamist movement there even without British intervention there.

I think it'd be arguable that the reason the Afghan People let AQ exist was because they saw the international community as unresponsive to their needs. Pakistan was playing with their governance with the support of the US. Carrots and sticks. We never use carrots.

More like it is very difficult to find clean hands to put carrots in, no?

See my answer upthread. First of all, let's not take tips from the Bouteflika government in Algeria and the Mubarak regime in Egypt. I lived in Egypt and I saw the emergency laws. Not fun stuff to live under. It spawns terrorism of its own, and then you're back in the same fucking cycle as before.

But why do you use Qaddafi's regime as a counterexample? Moreover I never argued that Egypt is either a great place to live or that its police state constitutes the best possible situation for Egyptians. However you cannot argue that Egypt or Algeria did not win their wars against Islamist terrorism. I would also argue that oppression != terrorism. When the state is strong enough, terrorism never develops into a significant enough problem no matter how much the regime is hated. Notice how terrorism is not a problem in most dictatorships - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Libya as you note, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, etc. etc. Terrorism and insurgency becomes a problem when weak states exist, or when state breakdown occurs. Democracy and the relative justice of states is quite a different problem.

[Ckrisz]

I would argue differently in regard to Iraq. I think the evidence points to "peace" coming from ethnic cleansing more than anything else.

I think you're right about a large part of this, but I don't think you can deny that the Surge in 2008 and the smashing of much of the Sunni power base had a lot to do with it. Part of this was us taking out a lot of the AQ leadership, an even bigger part of it was us clearing the belts around Baghdad in a series of very violent and ugly battles in 2008, the biggest part of all was the decision by lots of Sunni insurgent mid-level leaders to flip to the Awakening/SOI side --- which was spurred on by both US military pressure, the ethnic cleansing/slaughterfest led by the MoI and the Mahdi Army (basically, Shia victory in the civil war in Baghdad), and the very Bolshevik-style refusal of AQI to countenance independent operators in the insurgency.

I think your "if" statement is really stretching it. Asking Pakistan not to mess around in the affairs of their much weaker neighbor is not going to work. There's too much at stake for them to simply by. I think we've ruined the situation.

I didn't really envision "asking" - I'm one of those who believes that Pakistan's military needs to be brought along much more forcefully.

Not an argument for an invasion and occupation, IMO. More an argument for police action than anything else.

I know why you're saying this, but I'm trying to make a connection. The WaPo article said that the massive intel bureaucracy in DC is ineffective. Surely part of that structure is our intel gathering in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We didn't spot Faisal Shahzad, so how do we expect to stop anyone? I maintain that our intel services are grossly mismanaged.

Grossly mismanaged - I doubt anyone would argue that. But shutting down one of the few effective programs we have - no. Babies and bathwater, and so on.

I am not going to do my usual "negotiate with terrorists" thing and I'll try to meet you in the middle.

Do you acknowledge that occupying other countries militarily can cause more terrorism to exist?

Do you feel that this risk to future generations is much less important than our immediate situation?

Or do you feel that we can do differently than anyone else in the history of terrorism v empire?

We may just have to agree to disagree on this.

Occupation almost always sparks resistance, because there are always some losers any time a major power struggle is resolved. The trick is to either meet opposition with overwhelming force or to find a way to co-opt opposition so that people can accomodate the loss peacefully.

I'm of the opinion that a certain level of terrorism is inevitable because technology allows smaller and smaller groups of people access to more powerful ways to raise funds, get effective tools of violence, and spread their message. The

Libya - maybe it was more brutal, but my point was that Libya was also the site for many, many more international terrorist groups than Egypt was (though Egypt had its fair share, certainly, and some credit the brotherhood with the eventual creation of AQ [i forget the guy's name]) and did not require Western intervention in order to push those groups out; see what I mean?

That was because the Libyan regime chose to sponsor those groups as a means of international leverage. The West did not invade but it did intervene, through airstrikes and sanctions. These groups were not insurgents, they were in effect Libyan state allies, not opponents. I don't think they really fit into the same criteria as groups like Egyptian Islamic Jihad or the GIA.

Anyway, re: Egypt, I think Israel has exacerbated the original movement. The brotherhood is now more opposed to US support of Israel than anything else (at least from my understanding). But I really do think that the brotherhood has always thrived off of Western imperialism (including the creation of Israel). That's been a very large part of their platform over the years, right?

Well, only time will tell. It will be interesting to see what Egypt does when Gamal gets into power. The Ikhwayn has become more moderate, and I wonder what their say in the future of Egypt will be.

Me too, but I think the Ikhwan has moderated its message to remain viable in the face of Egyptian state power. Repeated attempts at violent takeover have failed.

I've seen this theory before, and I think it's very interesting because I take a very different view.

What do you think of the increasing amount of internal tension in the US, ie, the Hutauri and other terrorist groups arising now during the recent economic recession, versus in the 90's and the anger over the outsourcing of blue collar jobs? How does an increase in domestic terrorism in the US relate to the "weak state" theory?

I've always maintained that while there are always going to be lunatics out there, terrorism doesn't arise from a lack of a security apparatus, but instead when economic opportunity and political voice is not provided or allowed to certain groups.

But I spent an entire semester discussing the finer points of opportunity versus weak security, so we might not get this resolved in this thread :laugh:

I don't think we have seen a major increase in domestic terrorism.

I'm going to differentiate domestic terrorism into two different categories: organized vs disorganized terrorism. Disorganized terrorism I would say are lone-wolf style attacks, i.e. Ft Hood shootings, recruiter shootings in Little Rock that are planned by individuals or very small groups without any genuine backing or support. Disorganized terrorism is tough to fight before it happens. Organized terrorism is run by active groups with a command structure of some type and generally some sort of support. They are generally more dangerous but also more vulnerable to being targeted by state security services. I think organized terrorism in the U.S., especially of the domestic variety, is not a real danger. Disorganized terror, OTOH, probably is. But disorganized terror in general doesn't pose much of a threat to a strong state.

[shadowbinding shoe]

No, it's not. How can a Christian country promote moderate Islam by invading Muslim countries, deposing governments we don't like and promoting certain cultural/ethnic groups at the expense of others?

That's probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

So you're saying I'm right about this being one of the main reasons for the occupation of Afghanistan but that you don't think their current methods for fighting it will work? While Taliban is certainly not beaten as of now and from what I heard gets a lot of the carrots you talk about from the USA (money paid for safe passage of convoys for one) it's certainly isn't in as strong a position as it was in the past. It's in the countryside functioning as the local goons.

Hard to say if it would be possible to effectively marginalize it out of Afghan and Pakistan society. Not impossible I'd say. But for the carrots to reach their targets you need to drive away the killer rabbits that don't let anyone else enjoy them.

[shadowbinding shoe]

Anyway, re: Egypt, I think Israel has exacerbated the original movement. The brotherhood is now more opposed to US support of Israel than anything else (at least from my understanding). But I really do think that the brotherhood has always thrived off of Western imperialism (including the creation of Israel). That's been a very large part of their platform over the years, right?

Or could it be that attacking Israel is seen as a safe channel to express criticism while criticizing the regime and its policies regarding Egypt is dangerous?

[litechick]

Tormund, to the best of my understanding of your value system you don't care how many people die in Afghanistan so long as the US isn't doing it and your tax money isn't funding it so why make an argument based on Afghan casualties?

FFS, please go read some Ahmed Rashid or something before you start citing Tom Hanks movies like they have something to offer to the debate.

Coco, this could be a teachable moment. The next time the subject of anti-intellectualism comes up, remember that I acknowledged my ignorance and made an attempt to understand something and you slapped me down by essentially telling me to butt out of the conversation instead of making any attempt to enlighten me.

An intellectual worthy of respect would say "Nation building after the Afghan/Russian war would not have been helpful because of A, B and C."

[Horza]

Having read the book... I'd love to turn you o-o-o-o-onnn that's Charlie's regret, but I think the deeper mistake in that particular story was the fact that he (and by extension Reagan, the NeoCons etc) never really got the place - he and everyone else who pushed for an intervention beyond handing out surplus .303s to shepherds thought of the conflict either in NeoCon moral crusade language or in 'realist' "Here's yer Vietnam, Ivan!" terms. There was a huge effort to funnel money and arms but the actual people firing them were thought of in vague sentimental terms (Charlie) or not at all.

Having never really thought about the place for itself, let alone the region and having willfully leapt into bed with the likes of Zia it only followed that the US would turn away - as after all the US was at peace and there was hardly any public cognisance of their role in the conflict let alone any sense of responsibility toward the Afghans. It was after all an arms length, deniable proxy war and that was sorta the point.

[Horza]

Nothing particularly satisfying comes to mind (though I have been awake for 28hrs straight and it's been a while since I read up on this stuff) - what springs to mind is that Operation Cyclone and the rest of it was by neccessity run through Pakistan which means General Zia and the ISI get their stamp on the direction of any aid and that stamp is a proto-Taliban-y stamp.

It's the classic conundrum of dependence on local actors with their own agendas and this particular agenda was (and still is) Pakistan's fear of encirclement by India. This is what motivated the ISI to aid the mujahadeen and later create the Taliban and aid groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba and Tehrek-i-Taliban Pakistan today.

Had the US been more aware of the sort of people they were getting into bed with and their motives they might have pushed back harder against the ISI and tried to incorporate Indo-Pakistani reconciliation as a condition of the assistance but who knows if that would have worked.

[alguien]

Coco,

Have you ever read My Forbidden Face by Latifa? An eye-witness account of how life changed in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over by a girl whose mother was a doctor.

Its pretty interesting (and sad) stuff. We use an excerpt from it as the last chapter in our human rights anthology Citizens of the World. If you had read it, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

[Ckrisz]

How would you do this?

Increasingly we are doing it.

Some measure of intel services should operate there, but I think we need to temper this with our current knowledge of the idiocy of DC's mission to get intel on everything happening everywhere right now.

Difficult to operate there if we surrendered the countryside to the Taliban.

Well, in the co-opt or military force strategy you laid out in my last quoted section, what would this fall under? The sanctions and air strikes obviously did something but weren't overwhelming, but don't you think we co-opted Ghaddafi's desires to become part of the international community?

Gaddafi himself had to come around to giving up on violence, which he eventually did through a combination of sanctions and violent strikes (not just us --- see also the French support for Chad during the Libyan-Chadian 'Toyota War', where Gaddafi's army was brutally defeated by Chadians with French weaponry - estimates are up to 10% of the Libyan Army was destroyed and even more of its armor). So violent coercion was essential in bringing Gaddafi around to the point where he was willing to extend the olive branch. But I agree that the olive branch should not have been refused.

But what would you say about a group like the Tamil Tigers, whose movement lasted through incredible military and economic repression? It was only recently that the state finally killed the leadership, and the Tamils are still pissed and will probably get together again.

The movement has been thoroughly destroyed. However I agree that if the situation of the Tamils does not improve, another Tamil independence movement may come - but it will have to overcome a much stronger Sri Lankan state to even get off the ground.

Another interesting movement was the Sikh Khalistan insurgency in the 1990s in India, which was smashed through very brutal police tactics and the swamping of the Punjab with large numbers of Indian Army checkpoints. See also the Sri Lankan defeat of the JVP in the late 1980s with very similar death-squad tactics (Steve Coll mentions both in passing in On the Grand Trunk Road, while Rohan Gunaratna published a very interesting book on the JVP which established his terror expert bona fides).

I was also thinking about the Arab/Berber insurgency in Morocco and its success against the French colonial presence. Repression and efforts to separate the two ethnic groups completely failed and ended up solidifying Berber/Arab relations long enough to drive out the occupation.

Morocco or Algeria? Because the French never tried to hang onto Tunisia or Morocco for long.

I'm getting it from the Southern Poverty Law Center: the SPLC has said that we're seeing more domestic terrorism now than we did since the 90's, IIRC.

More extremist groups, but I don't think we are seeing more violent attacks.

[Ckrisz]

The drone strikes, however, have enraged Pakistanis to the point where they are (besides special forces) the most hated part of the American occupation. Do you really think there won't be any blowback from that? I also question whether that really puts pressure on the Pakistani military to police its Pashtun population.

I agree, the danger of blowback is very real. However the Pakistani military showed absolutely no inclination to police the FATA before we started doing drone strikes. Given the choice between doing strikes and allowing AQ/Taliban to do whatever they want in the FATA, I would choose drone strikes.

Regarding intel services: I'm still not convinced that having an occupation gives us more and more useful intel. We knew where OBL and AQ was operating when they were in Afghanistan. We even shot cruise missiles at their encampments.

And quite famously missed. Notice, again, how OBL and AQ and Mullah Omar have stayed out of Afghanistan. The presence of American troops on the ground makes a huge difference in how hospitable it is for known terrorists.

As Bob Woodward quotes the President: "We need to make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan," he declared during an Oval Office meeting on Nov. 25, 2009, near the end of the strategy review. The reason to create a secure, self-governing Afghanistan, he said, was "so the cancer doesn't spread there."

I see where you are coming from in terms of military repression of insurgent groups, but I think the long term repercussions of these actions can be severe.

I remembered some of the research Juan Cole quoted in regard to the military response to insurgencies.

I believe this is the study that said when a country claims it is a democracy but is not, its counterinsurgency efforts only succeed 10% of the time. Afghanistan seems to be the best example of this, though I have yet to read the actual RAND report.

That can be true, but again I think the more important factor there is the long-term political situation and treatment of those minority groups rather than the method of suppression. Again, see the Sikhs of the Punjab, the Mayan peasants of Guatemala, the FMLN in El Salvador, etc. etc. for examples of defeated insurgencies that have not resulted in recurrent violence.

As for the Rand study, the whole claiming-to-be-democracy-but-not thing as a factor sounds pretty silly to me - the USSR claimed to be a democracy too, and had great success crushing most of the violent insurgencies it faced. So too the PRC, the ROK under military dictatorship, most of South and Central America, etc. I think the best measures of insurgent success are those listed by Dr. Jeffrey Record - (1) existential struggle on the part of the insurgent vs variable commitment on the part of the counterinsurgent (2) external support/safe havens for the insurgent (3) poor strategy on the part of the counterinsurgent. And yes, one could argue that all three elements exist in Afghanistan. That doesn't mean the war itself is not worth fighting - just that it will be difficult and require all means to fix all three elements.

The 90's saw some really violent domestic terrorism, and subsequently some very violent responses.

What would you call things like Waco, Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City? Were those organized or spread out acts? They seemed to be all from the same demographic: conservative, white, Christian, and in a lot of cases, racist and xenophobic.

I don't think the responses were excessively violent, and I don't think any of those groups count as genuine organized terrorist groups. The Waco group AFAIK never committed any outward acts of aggression at all until ATF agents arrived on their property. I think the response in the 1990s had a lot to do with why we haven't seen any acts of violent terrorism by organized domestic extremist groups - the FBI made domestic terrorism a priority and got very good at infiltrating and monitoring these groups. Again, lone wolf terrorists are much more difficult to monitor or catch before the act, and I don't really count these as terrorist groups at all.

[alguien]

The drone strikes, however, have enraged Pakistanis to the point where they are (besides special forces) the most hated part of the American occupation. Do you really think there won't be any blowback from that? I also question whether that really puts pressure on the Pakistani military to police its Pashtun population.

Interesting you say that. I was just reading the third article in the Washington Post adapted from Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars.

The title of the article is The Cancer is Pakistan.

The kind of pressure they're applying to Pakistan, and the dissonance between its civilian and military government were fascinating (if unsurprising). I was reminded that, as far as Pakistan is concerned, their primary focus is India. Also found it interesting that their civilians couldn't figure out what the big deal about 9/11 was for us.

[Ckrisz]

Also found it interesting that their civilians couldn't figure out what the big deal about 9/11 was for us.

I don't think that section of the article was about how Zardari couldn't understand why we thought 9/11 was a big deal. It was more about how we tried to explain to the Pakistanis that if the Faisal Shahzad bomb had blown up in Times Square and killed dozens of people, the rules of the game would have changed completely and we would probably have seen hundreds of airstrikes in Pakistan. The Pakistanis couldn't understand why a few dozen people getting killed by a car bomb was a big deal in the U.S. considering how often it happens in Pakistan.

[alguien]

I don't think that section of the article was about how Zardari couldn't understand why we thought 9/11 was a big deal. It was more about how we tried to explain to the Pakistanis that if the Faisal Shahzad bomb had blown up in Times Square and killed dozens of people, the rules of the game would have changed completely and we would probably have seen hundreds of airstrikes in Pakistan. The Pakistanis couldn't understand why a few dozen people getting killed by a car bomb was a big deal in the U.S. considering how often it happens in Pakistan.

Yeah, now that I read over the article again, you're correct. Still, how horrifying is that? That they can essentially say, "What's the big deal? Its only a car bomb. I see three of those on my way to breakfast." is pretty bleak.

[shadowbinding shoe]

Coco - Compare these situations with criminal violence in 'bad' neighborhoods. Trying to better the lives of the people in these neighborhoods and to give them proper educations and routes for respectable employment doesn't mean the Justice system ignores the crimes of those who already committed crimes. The criminals are punished despite their extenuating circumstances. The olive branch, as you call it, is offered to the rest of them (or even to the guilty ones once they paid for their crimes).