Quote Originally Posted by Surferbeetle View Post
Fuchs,

You regularly bring up some interesting points to consider which had not occurred to me.
I assume I would have been disinvited for being a straining annoyance long ago if I didn't occasionally add at least some value*.


I've got a strong preference for non-mainstream ideas because I would consider my contributions as worthless if they weren't original.

In this case I'm no fan of the mission at all, so there's a personal bias against mission creep. Political reasons (as German polling results) also weigh in against an escalation, so I'm seeking for arguments that oppose escalation and mission creep.
The search for such arguments would be a less interesting activity for those who would like to see mission to evolve, of course.

----

@milnews.ca:
Such propaganda is utterly incompetent, and it doesn't seem to have much influence in the 'West'. It's more the numbers that cause troubles because of lazy journalists** who act as multipliers.

The political opposition (to the ISAF mandate) in Germany is either flat-out ideological (and thus uninterested in specifics, but interested in photos for political posters) or rather rational.
Taliban propaganda is in part being distributed through people who don't seem to have good education or good command of German. I 'think' the original Taliban propaganda is quite ineffective in Germany. Maybe it influences a few disgruntled lower class Muslims, but their consumption of such feeds alone likely already triggers attention at the internal security institution.

We've got a solid majority against the ISAF mandate, and that doesn't seem to be rooted in propaganda at all for it is really old and well-established.


http://www.infratest-dimap.de/typo3t...28d65c3334.png
(primary source link)
question ("Should the Bundeswehr according to your opinion continue to be stationed in Afghanistan or should it withdraw from Afghanistan asap?"

red: "Withdraw asap"

blue: "Continue to be stationed."

Now guess how this would look if the question wasn't about staying there, but about waging a COIN campaign or even "war".


Article 5 was fulfilled by 2002 when the Taliban lost power. Our involvement there is on feet of clay for a reason. It's not our war.


*: I rarely add value to the pro-COIN line, of course.

**: Generalists a.k.a. "universal dilettantes" who lack the knowledge about specifics like proximity and PD fuzes and didn't see the actual photos with bomb craters or even ever read the GCI-IV.