The Taliban _are_ bad people, horrific on so many levels.
Can you picture what it would be like living under their rule? Regular stone'ings for women who have the audacity to go outside the four walls of their house. Homosexuals beaten and murdered. I read a book about a women who was raped and got preganent, so her own family tied her up, covered her head with a bin bag, dowsed it in petrol and set fire to it. HER OWN FAMILY. The entire country is currupt, they're the biggest exporter of iligel opiets in the world. They're hard too, very hard, they took on and won the Russians, and handed out serious damnage to the 'western' forces.

And the soldiers _are_ brave, imagine what it's like to walk down a road and knowing at any moment an IED can go off, or a shot fired. Imagine a crowd of 100s of people all shouting and throwing stones at you and 11 of your mates. Sure, you could take them all on, you've got guns against stones, body armer against rags, but if you fire just one shot wrong, you can be put in jail. There are normally women and children in these crowds, imagine the guilt you would feel if you killed one?
( G/PP 💩💩💩💩💩&#128, Mon 23 Aug 2010, 14:01, 1 reply, 16 years ago)

And because they're so bad
We have to go there and kill them all. And it's bad if they kill us, but not if we kill them. For them, we're the horrific ones, with no morals. It's not about killing them, the people living under their rule has to realize that there is another way, and take them down. Foreigners telling you how to live, even if it seems a better way of living, are never welcome. You'd think we'd have learnt that by now.
(Aberracion Life's getting very complicated, but a lot of fun., Mon 23 Aug 2010, 14:09, Reply)

It's a tricky call though, innit?
Sure, you rarely get the result you want you want if you go in and "regime-change" 'em in the face, but does that mean you leave a large proportion of the population living in horrific circumstances while saying to yourselves "well, they've got to do it for themselves, haven't they?" Does it make a difference if they're being oppressed with weapons that you happily gave to their overlords a couple of decades ago so they could fight off the Russians? How does that affect your asylum policy? If all the dissidents are in your country, who's left to fight the battles? Sure, we had our revolutions way back when, but it was quite possible to flee your homeland then and return with an army lent to you by a friendly power or made up of hired mercenaries - not too likely to happen these days, is it?

Tough.
(wellgroomedwookiee is a filthy-minded hobgoblin, Mon 23 Aug 2010, 14:48, Reply)