America’s Second Vietnam... what are we fighting for today in Afghanistan? ( Archived) (44)

You should stick to inane memes and silly cartoons ... it's all that you're good at l'il Gal !

ps I own and enjoy the complete musical works of WAM !

Good question.

The POTUS wants us to hurry and finish up what ever so we can leave. Politicians and generals seem to want us to stay but give no real proof or evidence as to why except to avoid another Iraq like what started in 2012.

Afghanistan has many seasoned generals and veterans as well. Why do we have to stay? It would seem that they are fully capable of training and fighting by now, on their own. We don't control their economy and rebuild either.

Is there another proven threat from another country or worse, we're not being fully being made aware of, if we leave them to their own?

@ Draegoneer ... The CIA have a massive investment in opium production from the poppy fields that has to be protected so there's a steady supply of drugs into the US ... which is necessary to justify the 'War On Drugs' and keep that particular empire funded and armed !

Not too sure about that , if Iraq had not invaded Kuwait I'm sure the west would have stood by and supplied arms to both Iraq and Iran for eternity . The day bin Laden ordered the planes into the twin towers the game was on .

I don't think so. The war would not have occurred if America's mate the Shah of Iran hadn't been overthrown. Quick internet search copied and pasted:
Relations with Iran had grown increasingly strained after the shah was overthrown in 1979. Iraq recognized Iran’s new Shi?ite Islamic government, but the Iranian leaders would have nothing to do with the Ba?th regime, which they denounced as secular. Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the Iranian revolution, proclaimed his policy of “exporting the revolution,” and Iraq was high on the list of countries whose governments were to be overthrown and replaced by a replica of the Islamic regime in Iran. In addition, Iran still occupied three small pieces of territory along the Iran-Iraq border that were supposed to be returned to Iraq under the treaty of 1975.

The Iranian agenda in Iraq is shaped by the horrific Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988.

The war is often said to have caused half a million or more deaths. The Battle Deaths Dataset, developed by a team of political scientists, estimates fatalities at more than 600,000. The Correlates of War Project, another major scholarly dataset, estimates 500,000 Iraqi dead and 750,000 Iranian dead.

Iranian and Iraqi government officials offer lower — though still terrible — casualty figures. One of Saddam Husayn’s generals, Ra’ad al-Hamdani, recently estimated that 250,000 Iraqis were “martyred” in the war with Iran, including 53,000 killed in the battle for Shatt al-Arab. The Iranian Basij [copy of material on dead link] paramilitary organization counted 155,081 “martyrs” of direct engagement with Iraqi forces, plus 16,154 Iranians killed in the “war of the cities."

Iraqi president Saddam Hussein wanted to reassert his country’s sovereignty over both banks of the Sha?? al-?Arab, a river formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that was historically the border between the two countries. Saddam was also concerned over attempts by Iran’s Islamic revolutionary government to incite rebellion among Iraq’s Shi?ite majority. By attacking when it did, Iraq took advantage of the apparent disorder and isolation of Iran’s new government—then at loggerheads with the United States over the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by Iranian militants—and of the demoralization and dissolution of Iran’s regular armed forces.

Iran repeatedly launched fruitless infantry attacks, using human assault waves composed partly of untrained and unarmed conscripts (often young boys snatched from the streets), which were repelled by the superior firepower and air power of the Iraqis. Both nations engaged in sporadic air and missile attacks against each other’s cities and military and oil installations. They also attacked each other’s oil-tanker shipping in the Persian Gulf, and Iran’s attacks on Kuwait’s and other Gulf states’ tankers prompted the United States and several western European nations to station warships in the Persian Gulf to ensure the flow of oil to the rest of the world.
Bush's Ambassador lied to Saddam after Saddam had advise Bush of his intention to take Kuwait, then had allies confront Saddam and took all the causalities while USA tanks went on a joy ride around the fighting all the way to Baghdad

No other country cared about the war between Iraq and Iran till it affected oil , private matter . US had no reason to destroy Iraq untill they invaded Kuwait , cosy till that day . US was not bombing arabs before Kuwait and not stopped since . It was that that ticked off bin Laden hence the need to be in Afghnistan .

Saddam Hussein was supported by the CIA from before he became President of Iraq

Sixty years ago, Iraq’s monarchy came to an end with a bloody coup that killed the young King Faisal II.

The kingdom of Iraq was founded in 1932 under Faisal I after the fall of the Ottoman empire. Faisal, who was born in Saudi Arabia, was a member of the Hashemite dynasty and fought alongside T.E. Lawrence during World War I.

Faisal ruled for 12 years under a constitutional monarchy imposed by the British until his death from a heart attack, aged 48.

Faisal’s son, King Ghazi, took the throne, but died six years later in a car crash in Baghdad. The title of king fell to Faisal II, who was just 3 years old, and his reign began under the regency of his uncle Crown Prince Abdallah.

Faisal II was educated in Britain at Harrow, along with his cousin, King Hussein of Jordan.

On July 13, 1958, when two army brigades were ordered to go to Jordan to help quell a crisis in Lebanon, Qassim, a disaffected officer leading one of the units, saw his chance and sent troops to the Qasr Al Rihab palace. By early the following morning, they had surrounded the palace with tanks and opened fire.

Shortly after 8 a.m., King Faisal II, his uncle the crown prince, and other members of the royal family and their staff were ordered from the rear entrance and killed.

The 23-year-old king was engaged to marry.

Saddam Hussein, who became president in 1979, setting the country on its calamitous course of foreign wars and brutal dictatorship, was fascinated by the young king.

The history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict began with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. This conflict came from the intercommunal violence in Mandatory Palestine between Israelis and Arabs from 1920 and erupted into full-scale hostilities in the 1947–48 civil war.

In 1947, the newly formed United Nations accepted the idea to partition Palestine into a zone for the Jews (Israel) and a zone for the Arabs (Palestine). With this United Nations proposal, the British withdrew from the region on May 14th 1948.

In 1917, the British had succeeded in defeating the Ottoman Turkish forces and occupied the Palestine region.

In 722 BCE, the Assyrians, under Sargon II, successor to Shalmaneser V, conquered the Kingdom of Israel, and many Israelites were deported to Mesopotamia. The Jewish proper diaspora began with the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE.

League of Nations mandates were to be taken over by the new United Nations, Britain had declared that it would leave Palestine by 1 August 1948, later setting the date for the termination of the mandate as 15 May; on 14 May 1948 the Zionist leadership announced the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

Jewish militant underground organizations and the British mandatory authorities rose from 1938 and intensified with the publication of the White Paper of 1939, which outlined new government policies to place further restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases and declared the intention of giving independence to Palestine, with an Arab majority, within ten years.

The King David Hotel bombing was a terrorist attack carried out on Monday, July 22, 1946, by the militant right-wing Zionist underground organization the Irgun on the British administrative headquarters for Palestine, which was housed in the southern wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

America formed the League of Nations.
The League of Nations mandates were later taken over by the then new United Nations who chucked the British out, the minor details.
Interdependent Arising's

Answer when the USA gets its listen back American troops might stop being killed in Afghanistan

WHY

According to the CIA World Factbook with data as at January 2017, Iran ranks fourth in the terms of biggest proved crude oil reserves in the world, behind Venezuela

Iran was an important factor in the overthrow of the Taliban and has since helped revive Afghanistan's economy and infrastructure. It re-opened the Iranian Embassy in Kabul and its associated consulates in other Afghan cities. In the meantime, Iran joined the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

Until 1857, Herat was part of Iran, and only after Iran and Britain signed the Paris Treaty of 1857 did Iran abandon its claim-although it reserved the right to send forces to Afghanistan "if its frontier is violated." From Afghan independence in 1919 until 1979, Iran's relations with Afghanistan were friendly.

Afghanistan–Iran border. The Afghanistan-Iran border is 921km (572 miles) in length and runs from the tripoint with Turkmenistan in the north to the tripoint with Pakistan in the south.

America needs to look in its own back yard and stop trying to steal from others all the time mate