discord wrote:charlie: do you know the names of all the people living in a 100 meter radius? well if you live in a city i can almost guarantee the answer is 'no', so how do you reckon you are to know if one or a couple of'em are terrorists?
now why do you expect more out of someone else then you do of yourself?
terrorists is a nasty business, as is all asymmetric warfare, but the answer that works is not 'drones!' nor is it 'bigger bombs!', high tech and high explosive solutions for a low tech problem seldom ends well.
Firstly, we're talking about communities that actively aid & abet terrorists, knowingly. Those people who let the terrorists live in their houses? They are not our allies, they are knowingly supporting our enemies, they themselves
are our enemies. In some cases you look the other way, in others you don't, but in no case do you pretend that they deserve your protection or support. If it's easier to leave them alone, then you
consider it, weighing the potential ramifications. If it's easier to not leave them alone, then they're on the chopping block. You don't play nice, pretending that they're not to be touched, you aren't talking about a vague, amorphous relation such as between a civilian and a nation, you're talking about a personal choice. And the people that could potentially get caught up as collateral damage? Ignoring the incidents of questionable timing, these are people who are consorting with those that they know full well we consider targets, in areas that they know full well we are conducting combat operations in. You can feel sad about a civilian trying to make some money by pumping out the bilge of a German ship in WW2 who died when you bombed the ship, but if you know that they're likely to be there then you still do it, because anything else is
irresponsible.
Now, dropping a daisy-cutter to take out a single al-Queda member? From any perspective unacceptable. But a guided missile, with a lower chance of going off target than a cannon round, and a small explosive charge to boot? It's constrained, accurate, and therefor as reasonable as you consider the target itself to be.
Now, for an actual solution, this probably won't work unless we carry it out successfully for at least 20 years, with the "associating with terrorists == death" PR campaign that it needs, but that does have the potential for success. Ultimately, the real problem is multi-fold:
1) We never actually set out to create their economic problems, which come from somewhere inside of their actual economies. It is therefor inherently difficult for us to solve the problem. Now, if we were a bunch of imperialists this would probably actually be pretty quick to get handled, but we prefer more democratic ideas here in America, even at the expense of NOT closing the giant gaping wound, so there's a limit to how much we'll be fixing. After all, we rightly believe that locals should be in charge of fixing local problems.
2) We never tried to create the radicalization or militantization that these terrorists sprout out of. Thus, we're in no position to undo it.
There are various other influences (past & present US foreign policy, Israel, etc.), but there's little acceptable room to budge on those, particularly the ones that have already happened. Palestine? It would be swell to get a livable situation for the Palestinians, or at least to get the Israelis to start competing for hearts & minds like the PLO & such do, but any time that the Israelis have been interested the Palestinians haven't, and vice-versa. There's little that we can genuinely do without invading and taking over the place. Get us out of the current mess and give us a decade to repair the military and sure, we could probably do it, and would likely as not be in a position to actually improve something in the Middle East (possibly the first time since the Suez Canal dispute), but I doubt that you think that any more desirable than I do. Ultimately, we can either throw what few allies we have into the cold for the sake of
no allies, or we can invade and please
noone even after we make whatever actual improvements that we went in for, or we can work around the edges doing inconsequential minutia like we traditionally have. Of those only the first and third are half-way likely, and the first will probably only happen if we take a turn for the isolationist, in which case we'll basically be saying "screw you all, I have grass to watch".
discord wrote:CIA HUMIT would fine the rest of the plotters.
fine? how much? i assume you mean find, just point out you have a few spelling errors in there, seriously though, cia humint? america has never been known for good humint, america does not need humint, america got satellites! america got echelon! again with the stupid overpriced silver bullets, as usual with america, high tech solution to a low tech problem.
High-tech solution to a
highly distributed problem. What, do you expect the US to have it's spies running all over the place all the time to eavesdrop on all of the guys that we need to observe in order to actually have a clue what's going on? Doesn't work. They'll either
be one of the top dogs and therefor an important target, or be unable to get important info because they don't have the time to make the needed personal ties, or will get found out because they're running around spying on everyone all of the time. Signals Intelligence and related things are the only way to keep a thumb on massively decentralized operations like this, Human Intelligence only works right for centralized or highly leaky operations, and an operation that's centralized within a cell will still require knowing about the cell, which is only going to happen with SigInt. Start thinking about the "how" of the situation, and suspend your incredulity at the means.
Really, the only "HumInt" that's going to be useful in fixing the terrorism issue long-term, regardless of it's quality, is going to be observations made by ambassadors & the like, and it's rather dodgy to call that Human Intelligence, since that tends to imply spy agencies getting into places that they aren't supposed to be. Even then, it depends on analyzing a "treatment" for the "social illness" in question, and applying said "treatment" depends heavily on the local situation, which tends to result in the areas we most want to apply these social programs to being the same as the areas where something is most likely to
prevent it from working.
discord wrote:now how do you get people to not be terrorists? pretty much the same way you keep people from becoming criminals, make sure they have lots to lose(ie. decent job, home, decent spouse, family, shiny car, whatever.) and do not give them an excuse to get really really pissed at you.
happy citizens are generally not criminals nor terrorists, THAT is a proactive solution.
the big problems here really is seriously different culture, internationalism(or rather the lack of such), ease of international travel, and history, cause i can promise you, america is NOT innocent in the reasons for the war on terror, there is a reason why america is targeted by jihadists and not lets say spain.
and sadly if the people in power do not address the underlying problems for this conflict it will spiral out of control and get worse.
What are we supposed to do? Start an honest-to-goodness
!!!American Empire!!!, with the goal of making the entire world happy, productive, and free?
1) If they don't work for it themselves,
it will never stick.
2)
That is pretty directly un-American. We'll leave it to the Europeans... oh wait,
that didn't work.
3) They don't even want that in the first place.
Seriously, all that they really know for certain is that they're upset, and that America looks like some golden nirvana, and it's unfair for them to deal with this and Americans not to, thus they strike out. Except for the leaders, who tend to have a wider variety of reasons; some for power, some for radical religious beliefs, some for the same reason as the teenagers.
Different culture? Lack of internationalism? Irrelevant, as Timothy McVeigh showed. Disenfranchisement and militant radicalism are the real causes for these things, and you can't really fix either of those without taking over. Even then, radicalism essentially equates to religion in this case, so what are we supposed to do there, kill every Muslim in the area? There may be some people that would endorse such actions, but they are the same sorts that spawn domestic terrorism.
Addressing the "underlying issues" is indeed a nice idea, but at the end of the day that requires invasions and empire and chaos and is no improvement at all. Out of the options that are possible, letting them kill each other until they realize that
they are killing more of themselves than
we are is the only plausible option, because the real problems are local, and
we are in no position to directly address local issues, for the simple reason that
genuinely fixing someone else's problem is itself a form of disenfranchising them.
Charlie wrote:I only wish for guns laws similar to the US, I don`t at all feel that they are out of place. In my country there is a severe need for a way to safely kill or wound house breaking criminals. In the statics published by the SAPS a high number of house breakings were done by people on drugs. A few months back a man and an unknown number of others jumped my wall. They tried to break in to my house, my dad shouted at one of them, the criminal turned and tried to attack with a hammer. Unbeknownst to all of us Armed Security Officers and responded to a call by the next house over. They shot the man with the hammer twice in the back. While shot he ran about 60 meters to my wall, it is 1.8 meters high, jumped it and ran into the road were he was hit by a car. He still tried to get up and run but his legs were broken, Armed Response caught up to him, beat him and took him the the police station. Without a fire-arm, how would you have propose that situation be approached. Guns are a major deterrent to crime.
Actually, gun laws here in America are probably a bit too loose, though I wouldn't expect any of the Democrats in Congress to actually understand
how. It's way too easy for the mentally ill to get access to them, there's relatively little training in them (I'd personally like to see a shift away from the current heavy military, to a military-trained militia approach, and stick gun training in as part of it: our founding fathers liked democracy, but for citizenry they looked to
Sparta), the system isn't regularized between gun stores and gun shows (you should have to get a background check, and then be able to use it at
either so that the regulations can be unified), and you should be held to certain standards of accountability. None of these seem to be true at the national level, which is filled by a mixture of liberals who hallucinate demons every time they see a gun, and conservatives who hallucinate angels every time they see a gun
owner. Reproduce America's current approach and the druggies will be using the occasional gun instead of the occasional knife. You're better off learning the
important bit from Japan, where
culturally they don't do this stuff. The lack of an appropriate culture is the cause of both much gun violence in America, as well as a whole slew of other social ills. To fix the social problems in South Africa, a multi-generational social-uplift project is needed, because it's the only way that you'll be able to deal with the underlying problems (unless you want to build arcology towers, in which case you might try restricted access and a police station at the front door).