According to a new CNN/ORC International survey, only “17% of those [Americans] questioned say they support the 12-year-long war” in Afghanistan. According to a recent Associated Press/GfK survey, 57% of Americans say that invading Afghanistan was a mistake. This makes the war in Afghanistan the least popular conflict ever polled in America.
Yet, I don’t see anybody in the streets complaining about it.
This is the downside of an all-volunteer army. The Establishment can spend a decade and a half fighting a war and it doesn’t even really matter whether the war goes well or what the public thinks about it.
Were things any worse when we had a draft?
(Wikipedia) According to the French academic Dominique Reynié, between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war.[3]
In the United States, even though pro-war demonstrators have been quoted as referring to anti-war protests as a “vocal minority”,[4] Gallup Polls updated September 14, 2007 state, “Since the summer of 2005, opponents of the war have tended to outnumber supporters. A majority of Americans believe the war was a mistake.”
The PTB did not listen then and they do not listen now. Why bother? No one expects them to listen.
People haven’t been “out in the streets” on many issues, actually. People who have health insurance don’t seem to give a shit about those who don’t. People with jobs don’t give a shit about people who don’t have jobs.
Perhaps the draft would change something, but who knows? Any American can lose their job or health insurance at any time (at least prior to obamacare the latter was true) and still, no (or not many) people in the streets.
Well there was Occupy, but the Press imposed a blackout. What good is a protest no one knows about?
Considering 60% of American adults likely don’t remember why we invaded Afghanistan in the first place, this doesn’t strike me as newsworthy. War, polls and American knowledge of foreign affairs don’t mix well. Around the start of the Iraq invasion around 55-60% of Americans were all for that idiocy.
I would be interested to see how this Afghanistan war poll phrased the questions, but I don’t see a link to that at the article. Are people opposed to the length of the war or have they now decided that taking down the Taliban and pursuing bin Laden and AQ were a mistake? How can one have a poll like this and not ask a clear question about the original mission?
In 72 I remember young people in the streets (like me) protesting about Vietnam. We truly had skin in the game. I was waiting anxiously for my draft number and my Mom was mentally rehearsing what she would pack for me on my move to Canada.
FWIW, I went looking for troop level stats of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Here they are in that order:
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/vietnam/escalate_graph1.gif
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/57324000/gif/_57324404_us_troops_iraq_624.gif
http://www.thenewstribe.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/301.jpg
Damn! Nixon did bring the troops home!
yeah, Nixon “did” bring the troops home. He also sabotaged peace talks being held in secret to end the war 4 years earlier … he had been told of them during briefings for both candidates.
He also claimed a “secret plan” which just happened to not be implementable until after the ’72 elections.
But yeah, he brought the troops home.
Ronnie’s roadmap for rat-f**kery, wasn’t it.
Looking at those Iraq and Afghanistan graphs, why doesn’t Obama just declare that the troops there now are just advisers and not combat troops at all. Problem solved!
Maybe they realize that AlQueda is now in Pakistan and all we are doing in Afghanistan is defending Cheney’s pipeline and the CIA’s heroin operation. Even the Republicans and Teabaggers that I talk to agree with this. The Emperor has no clothes.
Yes. The only reason the draft was historically necessary was because it was needed to sustain a force many multiples higher because the casualty and death rates were also many multiples higher.
60,000 died in Vietnam. 2000 died in Afghanistan. It’s a low stakes, low intensity war fought by professionals.
And the only reason Iraq isn’t the least popular of all time is because Republican partisans are still lying to themselves about it.
Low stakes for the US. For the Afghans, not so low stakes.
Fuck them. They’re the enemy.
This is about the war in Afghanistan, not the one in Iraq. And in October 2001, polling was about 90% in favor of the invasion-by-proxy. We used the “Northern Alliance,” a loose-knit group of former warlords and other mass murderers and rapists – the guys that were so bad when they ran things in 1992-96 that Afghans turned to the Taliban in the first place. As it turned out, despite promising not to, the US promptly put those people back in business when the Taliban fell.
I was part of the 10% that opposed the war, and I was in the streets at the time – and I also had a media perch to write and talk about it. People were incredulous that I could be opposed to the invasion.
The unsavory allies, the history of the Soviet and other foreign invasions, the dubious legal rationale (invading a country and deposing its government because it “harbored [unconvicted] terrorists,” a wholly invented standard the US and almost every other government in the world failed), the kabuki that was “negotiations,” none of it mattered. Americans, led on by the media and both parties, wanted to kick the shit out of someone post-9/11. It didn’t much matter who, which is why the Cheney/Rumsfeld axis wanted so badly to pin the whole thing on Saddam.
The loss of the draft didn’t just reduce the number of people with skin in the game. It also dramatically reduced the number of people who understand what war is. We’ve had 40 years now of a society where most people’s understanding of it comes from movies, video games, and “news” coverage that treats war as entertainment. The result is a country that relentlessly glorifies its military without having a fucking clue what we actually use it for – or how badly it damages the people in the front lines.
So weary of having to wait a dozen years for a majority in this country to catch up on the right thing to do.
10% may have opposed the first Bush/Cheney folly, but far fewer than that number were vocal about their opposition.
I remember CNN polls that showed about 50% were opposed if as many as 50 Americans died in the invasion and something like 70 or 80% were opposed if 100 Americans died. Remember Bush promised a bloodless invasion with our soldiers greeted by cheering crowds with flowers.
That was Iraq not Afghanistan. And at least half of the opposition melted away as soon as the bombs over Baghdad began to fall.
While only anecdotal, I was completely alone in my opposition to Afghanistan among my circle of family, co-workers, and friends at that time. Reminded me of the time when Poppy had his little war with Saddam.
Yes, I know. I thought that was what we were talking about.
“The Establishment can spend a decade and a half
fightingsending other people kids to fight a war…”Fixed that for you. The “Establishment” didn’t do any fighting whatsoever, and very few of their kids did either.
In the Vietnam War, the grunts who paid the heaviest price were the draftees, especially draftee who were ambivalent about the war and whose officers sent them in severe harms way so they could learn the “truth about the war”. The ability to get a 500,000 troop buildup existed because of the the draft, and without the draft already in place LBJ would have had to introduce a draft law in Congress and have a debate about the war.
In the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, the grunts who paid the heaviest price were the National Guard, who had one or both parents in multiple deployments with minimal R&R, in the process losing good-paying jobs and and substantial contact with their children. When Guard were called up, there was a scramble to find relatives or friends with whom the children could stay. As deployments dragged on there were painful negotiations with employers about the possibility of employment after release from deployment. By 2009 and 2010, with Congress’s insensitivity to the troops they deployed, the number of Guard families who had lost their homes was substantial as was the number facing bankruptcy. That was serious federal abuse of what was supposed to be the home guard.
Drafts don’t prevent wars. I know of no draft bill ever failing. Having a volunteer military prevents wars only if the size of it is kept to small to contemplate a war without legislation to expand it.
The real problem is that the national security institutions have war and conflict built into the incentive system in such as way drive the institution in that direction. Soldiers don’t get battle ribbons and promotions except in war; otherwise it becomes a seniority system. Officers don’t get larger numbers of troops and assets to command and larger salaries and higher rank except in a war; otherwise it becomes a personal patronage system.
Where we are in the world now is that the presence of US troop in and of itself is destabilizing and works against our own allies. Karzai might be able to pull off a corrupt deal that provides some degree of healing for Afghanistan. But not as long as there US soldiers available as targets and US continuing the mistreatment of prisoners under its control.
Will American’s really weep over the loss of McDonalds-Bagram if the US fully withdraws?
Ironically, during Vietnam, the Guard was how you got out of the war, c.f. Bush.
Will you bet with me that the GOP will not start a “who lost Afghanistan”
debatewitchhunt?Well Fox has gone from showing war on terror shows like 24 and now has a modern day F Troop type comedy show about Army enlisted men who are not good enough to serve in Afganistan.
Better that than the “moron corps”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000
Wow. Just, wow.
(Wiki)As Seymour Hersh has reported in “My Lai: A Report on The Massacre and Its Aftermath,” Lieutenant William Calley Jr. was a reflection of the type of soldier recruited during the Project 100,000 initiative. Calley “who’d flunked out of Palm Beach Junior College…and couldn’t even read a map properly…was given command of a platoon.”
True. But more on topic the folks at Fox have dne their market research and concluded Americans are now less inclined to hold those who serve with reverence and instead see them as takers who take a government job because they are too inept to get a real job.
Why on earth did we not get out after killing bin Laden? It is not like we did not know by then what was what.
I would not make the assumption that the people making producing the recommendations for the President yet know what is what. Too much CYA to see the situation clearly.
This is on the President. There’s nothing we know now about Afghanistan that wasn’t obvious the day he took office. The problem is that the Democratic party is too wedded to the establishment on foreign policy and doing the sensible thing is seen as extreme.
As a former #1 in Nixon’s draft lottery this has been an issue for me. I ended up “volunteering” a month before Nixon declared his all-volunteer army. My company at Fort Dix, the first “all-volunteer” unit was loaded with drug addicts who thought going into the army was a way to clean up, minor felons who were given this option by a judge and farmboys incapable of tying their shoes whose parents thought that dying in battle was more heroic than dying in a thresher.
Of course, the economy was better back then too.
I was morally opposed to the draft because there had been a murder in my family and I was morally opposed to killing people or putting myself in a position where I’d have to kill someone. I also opposed the Vietnam War. My problem back then was that you only got the conscientious objector deferment if a divine being named God specifically told you not to kill.
So I would not want a return to the old draft, but perhaps a draft where everyone served in some capacity of public service if not the army. That way Senators’ sons would have to do something, not just wait until they’re forty to send other people’s kids into harm’s way.
I served from 1958 to 1979. I was sorry to see the draft go away. I agree that some sort of national service of which the military could be part, that lasts for from 4 to 6 years would be a very good idea.
Twenty year olds today do not know what discipline is and that do not know how to make good decisions.
Considering that I’d have probably been drafted and likely killed (not really a prime physical specimen), it’s probably better for me personally.
Of note, is that I have protested the war regularly, including the day the of Colin Powell’s UN presentation.
To be clear it was both anti-Iraq and Afghanistan wars protest.
For the one millionth time, it’s not a fucking war, it’s a fucking occupation.
For there to be a war you have to have an opposing military force and some disputed territory.
By contrast, in an occupation the war is over. One military has been destroyed, all territory in dispute is occupied by the other military. However, during the occupation remnants of the losing military may use their weapons, tools, and training to fight/resist the occupation. They may even have a semblance of their original organizational structure, but because they no longer occupy territory all their operations must take place covertly.
Of course, the US propoganda industry wants to keep calling it a war, because if they admit it is an occupation then people might actually understand what is going on, and that would be a bad thing for the US military industry.
By continuing to use the term “war” you are unintentionally assisting the US military. Ditto for calling the POWs in Gitmo “detainees”.