EU TROOPS SHOULD FIGHT TERRORIST TURKS, NOT TALIBAN!

Venitist Ted Carpenter points out that hours after thanking the world for the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama gathered with his war advisors to ponder sending 40,000 more troops into a country where American national security objectives are unclear at best. Instead of embracing General McChrystal’s proposal for a substantial increase in the U.S. military presence, or even adopting a McChrystal-Light strategy, the Obama administration should begin a phased withdrawal of troops over the next 18 months, retaining only a small military footprint relying on special forces personnel. Otherwise, America will be entangled for decades in pursuit of unattainable goals.
Carpenter asserts that we need to define success down in Afghanistan. That means abandoning any notion of transforming ethnically fractured, preindustrial Afghanistan into a modern, cohesive nation state. It also means reversing the drift in Washington’s strategy over the past eight years that has gradually made the Taliban, a parochial Pashtun insurgent movement, rather than al Qaeda, America’s primary enemy in Afghanistan. A more modest and realistic strategy means even abandoning the goal of a definitive victory over al Qaeda itself.
Instead, we need to treat the terrorist threat that al Qaeda poses as a chronic, but manageable, security problem. Foreign policy, like domestic politics, is the art of the possible. Containing and weakening al Qaeda may be possible, but sustaining a large-scale, long-term occupation of Afghanistan and creating a modern, democratic country is not.
The national security adviser of Uncle Sam, visiting the military commanders in Afghanistan, told them that if they requested more troops any time soon, Uncle Sam would have a Waltz-Tango-Foxtrot, aka What-The-Fuck, moment. De Gaulle mused that genius sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. Genius is not required to recognize that in Afghanistan, when means now. The emotion that people are feeling is deep disappointment over the Afghanistan policy of Barack Obama and the US Congress, which now registers as a surprising 90 percent disapproval rate. Doubt will turn into dissent; it will manifest in congressional districts. Amerikleptocrats will find it hard to ignore their base, as it will be very threatening to their electoral success.
Civilians are helpless and indecisive, caught between NATO forces and the insurgents, and thus unreliable. They might help you in the morning, then help your enemy in the evening. In fact forces are worried about protecting locals from them too, because there’s so much collateral damage. When you do anything that harms the locals, you just have a huge chance of alienating the population. Soldiers trap Taliban fighters in residential compounds, then allow them to send out the women and children, only to discover the fighters had slipped in burqas and walked out as well.
You have to be able to distinguish between the armed enemy and the unarmed enemy, the population that supports the enemy and the population that doesn’t support the enemy. The soldiers who don’t know how to distinguish friend from enemy wind up multiplying the enemy. The NATO forces are the invader, the outsider, that’s not going to change, and you add to this problem with your own record of human-rights violations. Soldiers cannot convince the locals they can protect them from the insurgents, after all, if the soldiers look like they are not sure they can protect themselves. The locals just ask the soldiers why are there in the first place, and the soldiers blank out!
All governments, even dictatorships, need some form of legitimacy to justify their rule to their own people. Otherwise they must revert to brute force, which is both expensive and corrupting to the police and army, who then abuse their respective powers and cause growing public resentment and anger. But while force and fear are temporarily effective, they are not enough for the longer term. A foreign threat thus helps dictators, as it is used to justify their despotic rule. Economic blockades can also reinforce dictatorial power and indeed even make governments richer as they profit from the consequent smuggling and black markets.
Offshore balancing is a strategy where a great power uses favored regional powers to check the rise of potential hostile powers. It permits a great power to maintain its power without the costs of large military deployments around the world. A great power will lose its credibility, if it keeps poking its nose in where it’s not wanted. As an offshore balancer, a great power would keep its military forces outside the conflict area. Hence the term offshore. As for balancing, that would mean relying on regional powers to check each other. A great power would remain diplomatically engaged, and when necessary would assist the weaker side in a conflict.
Basil Venitis demands all EU toops in Afganistan to get out now and be involved in throwing the terrorist Turkish troops out of North Cyprus! The primary purpose of public diplomacy is to explain, promote, and defend principles to audiences abroad. This objective goes well beyond the public affairs function of presenting and explaining specific policies of various Administrations. Policies and Administrations change; principles do not, so long as a country remains true to itself. By all accounts, Americans have been absent from the battlefield of ideas. They blankout when Venitis asks them why they have not expelled terrorist Turkey from NATO? How could Europeans tolerate Turks who terrorize EU islands every single day?
Public diplomacy has a particularly vital mission during war, when the peoples of other countries, whether adversaries or allies, need to know why we fight. What are the ideas so dear to us that we would rather kill and die than live without them? And what antithetical ideas do our enemies embrace, about which they feel the same way? After all, it is a conflict of ideas that is behind the shooting wars, and it is that conflict which must be won to achieve any lasting success. The main reasons for failure stem from intellectual confusion regarding what it is we are defending and against whom we are defending it. Venitis asserts the greatest confusion of all is the inclusion of genocidal Turkey in NATO. Terrorist Turkey has committed the Armenian genocide, the Pontian genocide, the Greek genocide, and the Cypriot genocide.
Basil Venitis points out Turkey, the most terrorist nation on Earth, has the nerve to apply for EU membership, even though it terrorizes many EU islands every single day and commits genocides on a consistent basis! Genocidal Turkey should not even think of joining EU! Moreover, terrorist Turkey should be expelled from NATO. Turkey claims that since its army is the second largest in NATO after the American army, it can violate all international laws as it pleases and can bully all its neighbors!
Venitis notes that casus belli is a Latin expression meaning justification for acts of war. Casus means incident while belli means of war. In 1995, The Turkish Parliament issued a casus belli against Greece in reaction to a possibility of an enacted extension of Greek territorial waters from 6 nautical miles(11 km) to 12 nautical miles(22 km) from the coast. Greece has the UN Law of the Sea on its side. Nevertheless, Turkey terrorizes on a daily basis many Greek islands, especially Kalogeroi, Imia, Antipsara, Pontiko, Fournoi, Arkoi, Agathonisi, Pharmakonisi, Kalolimnos, Pserimos, Gyali, Kandheliousa, and Sirina. It’s high time now for NATO to expel terrorist Turkey! Terrorist Turkey does not deserve engagement, but a shock and awe of bombs on Ankara!