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| Internment Camps (Changed from Concentration Camps) |
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| kojax |
 Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 9:56 pm Post subject: Internment Camps (Changed from Concentration Camps) |
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Forum Radioactive Isotope
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People keep saying that the only way we're going to win in a war like the kind we're fighting is if we're willing to commit genocide. And I'm wondering if maybe instead of killing everybody, we should just arrest them, and move them to internment camps (I originally said "concentration" camps) for the balance of the war. It seems to me that any political objective that can be obtained by killing large numbers of people can be equally obtained by detaining them indefinitely. It's not technically genocide.
Unlike the Germans in WWII, I'm pretty sure we'd be able to feed everybody, so there wouldn't be a lot of deaths, just massive amounts of inconvenience for the villagers who get us mad at them. A Taliban representative tells the villagers "We'll kill you if you talk to the Americans." They can come back and say "Yeah, but the Americans will come and detain us all if we talk to you." How powerful is the Taliban's fear factor then?
Last edited by kojax on Sat Feb 20, 2010 2:17 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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| inow |
| Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 10:18 pm Post subject: Re: Concentration Camps |
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| Lynx_Fox |
| Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 12:28 pm Post subject: Re: Concentration Camps |
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[quote="inow"]
| kojax wrote: |
| It's plainly false. This is a battle of ideas, not of body count. |
Exactly.
There's also the impression that "A Taliban representative tells the villagers "We'll kill you if you talk to the Americans." The Taliban use the carrot as well as the stick to fight in that battle of ideas--it's not JUST fear and intimidation that allows them continued support by many of the Afghan people.
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| kojax |
| Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 1:43 am Post subject: Re: Concentration Camps |
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Forum Radioactive Isotope
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[quote="Lynx_Fox"]
| inow wrote: |
| kojax wrote: |
| It's plainly false. This is a battle of ideas, not of body count. |
Exactly.
There's also the impression that "A Taliban representative tells the villagers "We'll kill you if you talk to the Americans." The Taliban use the carrot as well as the stick to fight in that battle of ideas--it's not JUST fear and intimidation that allows them continued support by many of the Afghan people. |
Very true. They do both sides. If nothing else, they offer the people order and structure, and a sense of unity. You can't get that without both sides of the stick. I think the US military already does a reasonably good job on the positive side, sending doctors into their villages to treat illness, food drops, giving them things like radios to listen to. Where we fail is that we treat everyone with kid gloves when the time comes for us to be punitive.
You can't unite people without the punitive side of the stick. There has to be a penalty for anyone doesn't join in the group effort, not just a reward for those who do. The primary factor that's going to motivate individual villagers to decide to follow one group over another is the "everybody's doing it" factor. It's just like when teenagers say that to their parents. No matter what the rewards are, people won't follow us if they feel like they're going to be the only ones. If we say "follow us, or we'll detain you", and then start detaining whole villages who don't follow us, then the whole group is either giving in, or fighting with one accord. Giving in is only shameful if a single individual does it, while the rest of the group holds to its principles. That one person feels they've lost status, or face, with their peers. Surviving torture at Guantanimo without giving up any intel is serious bragging rights.... for an individual. But, not for a group.
With a whole village in custody, you don't even need torture, just inconvenience will break their collective will. All it took for the Nazis to pacify the German public in WWII was to make sure the trains ran on time. That's how petty the mindset of a group is. Tell a whole village that their lives are now on hold, and will remain on hold until the war is over, and they'll start becoming increasingly interested in seeing it end. (Even with all their material needs fully met, they won't want their children to grow up there, knowing nothing of the outside world except what they read in books, and learning literacy in schools run by infidels.) |
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| Lynx_Fox |
| Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 7:48 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| You can't unite people without the punitive side of the stick. |
There's a lot of history of counter insurgency that says otherwise, particularly when it comes to the entire population. There's just as much history that shows punitive measures often turn the population against the one perpetrating the violence (or inconvenience).
You Nazi example is really poor. They weren't fighting an insurgency and they came into power by mass popularity for a variety of reasons far more involved than keeping the trains on time.
Collecting people up is usually associated with ethnic cleaning, which is against international laws for good reason.
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| fizzlooney |
| Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2010 3:44 am Post subject: |
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| You Fools, we are fighting an idealogy namely Islam. How do you defeat that?? |
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| inow |
| Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2010 8:11 am Post subject: |
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| fizzlooney wrote: |
| You Fools, we are fighting an idealogy namely Islam. How do you defeat that?? |
To be fair, when you get right down to the core, what we are actually fighting is poverty and a lack of education. It's just that this poverty and lack of education often expresses itself as radical forms of Islam. Above, however, you seem to be talking about symptoms, not cause. Islam is not the cause of these problems, no matter how much you may have been led to believe nor how much you wish it so.
Now, don't get me wrong... I'm a person who tends to find all religious practice equally stupid and delusional, but as a point of accuracy the problem being described here is not something which will change by "defeating Islam."
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| inow |
| Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2010 8:15 am Post subject: |
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| Lynx_Fox wrote: |
| Quote: |
| You can't unite people without the punitive side of the stick. |
There's a lot of history of counter insurgency that says otherwise, particularly when it comes to the entire population. There's just as much history that shows punitive measures often turn the population against the one perpetrating the violence (or inconvenience). |
Complimenting and reinforcing the history you mention are psychology and sociology.
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| kojax |
| Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2010 3:48 am Post subject: |
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Forum Radioactive Isotope
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| Lynx_Fox wrote: |
| Quote: |
| You can't unite people without the punitive side of the stick. |
There's a lot of history of counter insurgency that says otherwise, particularly when it comes to the entire population. There's just as much history that shows punitive measures often turn the population against the one perpetrating the violence (or inconvenience). |
The trick is to do both equally well. When the mafia wants to own a public official they offer them both a bribe and a threat.
The Romans brutally suppressed a lot of uprisings, but they also built roads and other public works projects that made them seem like decent rulers to a lot of the common people. They appealed to the practical inclinations of the people, because knew they couldn't appeal to the cultural. Every society's cultural inclination is toward self rule.
We need to take a lesson from them. Nobody is ever going to see us as the "good guy" in Afghanistan. Ever. Period. It doesn't matter what we do. The only side of their brains we're ever going to get influence over is the practical side. Just like the Romans, an outsider can never be loved, only tolerated. We need to get to the point of being tolerated. |
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| Pong |
| Posted: Wed Feb 17, 2010 11:49 pm Post subject: |
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It's nasty, and it does work.
2004, Operation Phantom Fury, Fallujah, Iraq. This was the Sunni "City of Mosques", population ~400,000 prior to the operation.
It was determined that insurgent support ran so deep in this city, it would have to be cleared, house-to-house, each and every individual processed with extreme prejudice. A cordon was put around the city, and occupants ordered to evacuate... however males aged 15-55 were denied exit. These were suspected insurgents, trying to escape. They were told to remain in their homes during the attack. A refugee city grew outside Fallujah, housing women, children, and the elderly essentially in chain-link cages, camp-style. These people submitted to biometric identification, with matching ID tag they would wear at all times.
Meanwhile, the operation to clear every remnant of insurgency from the sealed city proceeded under media blackout. All persons remaining inside were officially deemed loyal to the insurgency. There were reports of overwhelming air support, incendiary weapons, house-by-house "mopping up" and continual movement of bulldozers. When the operation ended, 1,052 persons had been detained, the remaining population... unaccounted for. Fallujah was empty. A fifth of the buildings had been levelled, a half or two-thirds showed obvious structural damage; however the streets had been flushed clean by fire hose. Women, children, and elderly were gradually allowed to return to their homes a month later, on condition that they wear ID tags at all times. Checkpoints and curfews maintained order in and around the city for some time afterwards.
Nasty, and it worked. The returning residents have been remarkably passive. Human nature's funny isn't it? At some point they start kissing your hand.
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| Lynx_Fox |
| Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 9:41 am Post subject: |
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| Pong wrote: |
Nasty, and it worked. The returning residents have been remarkably passive. Human nature's funny isn't it? At some point they start kissing your hand. |
It was nasty. It did clean things up...though..killing or capturing around less than 1% of the population is telling of how a small active group can shape our action. Of course there was probably wide scale support of more a passive nature, people housing insurgents, feeding them etc.
The returning residents have Not "remarkably passive"...it rapidly returned to being, and continues to be, a problem area though at lower levels because the Sunni are more to our way of thinking than that of the Al Quida across all of Iraq etc.
I've been all over Iraq--there isn't anyone kissing our hands--unless you're holding a bag of gold or personally saved one of their lives.
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| icewendigo |
| Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 11:03 am Post subject: |
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For god's sake snap out of it already, there's no war on terror, its all fabricated and hyped to justify invading countries for resources and geostrategic reasons (and war profiteering) 
OBL was a CIA asset, islamic extremists were fostered, funded and armed by the US, Saddam was your man, even when he had gassed the kurds, the Taliban met to negociate at the Unocal and State Department,
its all bullhit 
The Taliban said they'd hand over OBL if the US provided proof, which is what any self repsecting country would do if another country asked for deportation of someone, sure just show me the case
please  snap out of the Islam paranoia and War on terror delusion, Iraq had ZERO WMDs, ZERO links with 911, ZERO links with OBL, but had OIL, an Israeli-next-target-mark and traded in petro-EURO!  |
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| Leszek Luchowski |
| Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 9:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Pong wrote: |
A cordon was put around the city, and occupants ordered to evacuate... however males aged 15-55 were denied exit. These were suspected insurgents, trying to escape. They were told to remain in their homes during the attack.
(...)
When the operation ended, 1,052 persons had been detained, the remaining population... unaccounted for. Fallujah was empty. |
Males aged 15-22 would have been something like a third of the total population. Are you saying almost all of them were killed? Sounds very, very.... familiar.
Lynx_Fox, why are you saying 1% ?
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| kojax |
| Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 4:01 am Post subject: |
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Forum Radioactive Isotope
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| Leszek Luchowski wrote: |
| Pong wrote: |
A cordon was put around the city, and occupants ordered to evacuate... however males aged 15-55 were denied exit. These were suspected insurgents, trying to escape. They were told to remain in their homes during the attack.
(...)
When the operation ended, 1,052 persons had been detained, the remaining population... unaccounted for. Fallujah was empty. |
Males aged 15-22 would have been something like a third of the total population. Are you saying almost all of them were killed? Sounds very, very.... familiar.
Lynx_Fox, why are you saying 1% ? |
I'm betting we simply didn't try and count the non-detainees, or round them up or anything. That can make it kind of sound like they're missing, but it doesn't necessarily follow that they died. The women and children exiting prior to the attack would have been counted, and of course we would count our prisoners, but the remaining males 15-55 were probably huddling in their basements. |
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| Lynx_Fox |
| Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 6:11 am Post subject: |
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| Leszek Luchowski wrote: |
Lynx_Fox, why are you saying 1% ? |
There were more than 400,000 residents when we went in. We killed or detained a tiny fraction of that.
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