Thread: Why don't we just divide up Afghanistan?

I have to admit I really don't know very much about Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan, and Iran doesn't exactly seem friendly, but I'm wondering: when small nations like Afghanistan provoke us, why not just invade, conquer, and then distribute their lands to their neighbors, thus erasing the country off of the map forever? I'm sure their neighbors wouldn't mind being granted new territory. If Afghanistan's case, we could even give some of it to China if we wanted, since they have a small common border to the North East.

I think that would solve the whole problem of setting up a new government. All the citizens immediately become subjects of the governments that claimed their lands.

https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en

Well, that worked a real treat in Africa, Papua, Timor, name-your-favourite-colonial-horse-trading-debacle.

Not.

Yeah . . . this is not a good idea

Originally Posted by adelady

Well, that worked a real treat in Africa, Papua, Timor, name-your-favourite-colonial-horse-trading-debacle.

Not.

Taking one big country, and creating a whole bunch of new countries out of it may not be the best idea. I suppose in Iraq we could make separate countries for some of the ethnicities (Kurds, Sunni, Shiites..... or something like that). But there are already way too many countries out there.

However, I'm thinking that reducing the number of total countries on Earth might really help, since it's hard for little countries to build strong economies on their own. Hence, partnerships like the European Union.

However, I'm thinking that reducing the number of total countries on Earth might really help, since it's hard for little countries to build strong economies on their own.

Switzerland, Finland, New Zealand? All do pretty well for themselves most of the time.

The EU is the biggest formally acknowledged linkage of sovereign countries. (We won't mention the annexations and assimilations of the empire type aggregations - Indonesia and China being the prime current examples.) But there are bodies like ASEAN and the Pacific Islands Forum as well as others linking African states and the South and Central American countries. These could very well develop along EU type lines - learning from some of the serious mistakes of the EU if they're wise. Give them time, give them breathing space, give them a chance.

As for other processes, look at the way many US citizens regard NAFTA. The balance of culture, tradition and perceived self-interest is a juggling act with many pitfalls.

Maybe it's better to just simply accept that competently governed small countries are fine, while horrible incompetence on the part of a government should/ought-to result in some kind of consequence. Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan may not have stellar records (I really don't know anything about the first three), but if they haven't failed so badly as to allow a major terrorist organization to set up base in their country, then they're better than Afghanistan's government, and reassigning those lands and people to their rule would most likely be a step up.

If they don't want the land and people, they can always refuse to take it. I certainly doubt China would refuse.

If they don't want the land and people, they can always refuse to take it. I certainly doubt China would refuse.

If they wanted those dysfunctional places they'd already have them. As it is they can get the precious resources, largest secured by Western military muscle--without the hassle or trying to run or change the place--the best of both worlds.

If that's true, then why did the Soviet Union fight such a long and costly war in the 1980's trying to get it?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan

Putting aside the moral factors and practicalities regarding civil unrest and the sort, here are a few questions.

What if a country decides it doesn't want its portion? Indeed, some regions of Afghanistan would incur a greater economic cost than gain.
Do you distribute based on area or value? After all, reserves are not evenly distributed across the country.
Do you provide land to other totalitarian states such as Iran?
When Pakistan invade Tajikistan for their portion of Afghanistan, do we invade again and divide that region further?
Who are we, as outsiders, to decide on such matters?

Originally Posted by nano

Putting aside the moral factors and practicalities regarding civil unrest and the sort, here are a few questions.

What if a country decides it doesn't want its portion? Indeed, some regions of Afghanistan would incur a greater economic cost than gain.
Do you distribute based on area or value? After all, reserves are not evenly distributed across the country.

Yeah, it would have to be split up by value instead of area, giving each taker some of the good lands, but also requiring them to accept bad areas if they accept any area at all. Some may choose to accept none. That's their choice.

However, you've got to factor in the way this would likely look to a small nation. In the modern world, those nations have no hope of ever expanding their borders any bigger than they are now. Their entire legacy is, in many cases, contained within an administrative line that got drawn this century, and I would venture to bet that most of them do not like how small an area it encloses. Adding more territory, at any cost, would be a long term investment.

Do you provide land to other totalitarian states such as Iran?

I don't see why we'd have to give any of the territory to anyone we don't like. But we couldn't split up the nation at all without international support like the UN, so probably they'd make us give some of it to Iran. Oh well. No plan is perfect.

When Pakistan invade Tajikistan for their portion of Afghanistan, do we invade again and divide that region further?
Who are we, as outsiders, to decide on such matters?

Pakistan has nukes. I don't think we'd invade them, but for them to deliberately annex territory without the support of the international community would be a likely trigger for MADD.

I vote kojax for President of the World.

Final question: What if the Afghani's say that they want to govern themselves?

The British created India and Pakistan form a single country that really didn't turn out so good. That was just two countries from one, if you subdivided one country into say five where would that leave the region but even more unstable than it was before ?? Besides do you not think the people should choose their own fate ?

Pakistan and India is a good point actually. What was effectively a single nation was divided into two and now look at the hatred between them.
The same thing with Croatia and Serbia breaking up from Yugoslavia. North and South Korea. The Iraqi states. East and West Germany for a time.
The same thing with sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland.
Et cetera.
When you divide a nation you create hatred and tension between them.
It would surely be better for peace to try and unite the nation under a single, self-ruling, democratic governance.

The question is whether we're dividing Afghanistan up, or uniting greater Tajikistan with its long lost brothers (who recently lived in Afghanistan)? Or maybe greater Turkmenistan or greater Uzbekistan, or greater China.

The goal isn't to start with one nation and end up with 4. The goal is to start with 5 nations and end up with 4.

Originally Posted by nano

I vote kojax for President of the World.

Final question: What if the Afghani's say that they want to govern themselves?

I'm pretty sure they already did say that. However, they also hosted Al Qaeda. Hosting Al Qaeda is a pretty good way of indicating to the Western European powers that you don't take the business of running your own country very seriously.

I agree with the premiss that we need fewer smaller countries and more consolidated larger countries. However, take the UK, one country but 4 sovereign nations in their own right, unification brings strength but results in civil unrest due to centralised governance. The very fact that regions are united in a language (England & Scotland) and have similar social backgrounds and even religion still creates the them and us scenario. That is why the world will never be ruled as a single entity. Unless you want to use force.

Any Thoughts ??

Originally Posted by garr

I agree with the premiss that we need fewer smaller countries and more consolidated larger countries. However, take the UK, one country but 4 sovereign nations in their own right, unification brings strength but results in civil unrest due to centralised governance. The very fact that regions are united in a language (England & Scotland) and have similar social backgrounds and even religion still creates the them and us scenario. That is why the world will never be ruled as a single entity. Unless you want to use force.

What civil unrest?

What civil unrest?

Tibet, Papua and other parts of Indonesia, Yugoslavia didn't go so well after Tito, half a dozen African nations, some 'independence' movements in places like Britain can get a bit testy, separatist groups in a good dozen other places .....

Civil unrest is not just difined as direct action but other parties who would like to split the union. Such as sinn fehn in northern ireland. Scottish nationalist party in scotland plaid cumri in wales.

Originally Posted by SE15

Originally Posted by garr

I agree with the premiss that we need fewer smaller countries and more consolidated larger countries. However, take the UK, one country but 4 sovereign nations in their own right, unification brings strength but results in civil unrest due to centralised governance. The very fact that regions are united in a language (England & Scotland) and have similar social backgrounds and even religion still creates the them and us scenario. That is why the world will never be ruled as a single entity. Unless you want to use force.

What civil unrest?

Have you not heard of the Irish Republican Army? Knee capping? Bombs?

I guess one advantage of having terrorists not be from your own country is that you don't have to extend them rights. You can torture on suspicion by labeling them "illegal combatants" and not giving them a trial to prove whether they're innocent of that classification or not before you break out the water boarding paraphernalia. Hard to say if that's an advantage or a disadvantage, though, because the USA's decision to do so lost us a lot of political credibility in the "War on Terror". Hard to get other countries to assist you when you've made yourself look like a throw back to the dark ages.

The benefit of the terrorists being under your rule is you can more easily suspend their bank accounts, and when you finally identify them, you can make it really hard for them to run very far. Also it's a lot easier to recruit and place undercover agents. Intel gathering is way easier if most of your population speaks the same language and looks similar to the people you're trying to gather intel about.

I guess one advantage of having terrorists not be from your own country is that you don't have to extend them rights.

And you do this to demonstrate that your ideas of governance and civil organisation are superior?

Sounds like tyranny to me.

Originally Posted by adelady

I guess one advantage of having terrorists not be from your own country is that you don't have to extend them rights.

And you do this to demonstrate that your ideas of governance and civil organisation are superior?

Sounds like tyranny to me.

Even if our system were a great deal inferior to theirs, that wouldn't give them the right to kill our civilians in cold blood. So, no. If our goal is anti-terrorism, then we're not trying to prove anything to them about our system.

However, if our goal is colonialism, then we need to prove our system is better. Admittedly, it's a waste of time, though. No amount of evidence is going to convince them to agree on that point. Every culture prefers its own way of doing things.

The problem with the current "war on terror", is the monkey who started that war apparently couldn't tell the difference between those two objectives, and consequently decided to lump them together into a tangled mess that has cost us a lot of lives and dollars. He decided we would "bring them democracy" and that would make them not want to kill us. (Because of course, two democratic nations would never go to war with one another, right?)

Because of course, two democratic nations would never go to war with one another, right?)

Can you think of a case where that's ever happened?

If you leave the nation intact (not divided) then you can easily exert more control over the WHOLE nation using just 1 government. For example: in USA, state government is controlled by a central-government because USA is a nation & not 51 nation. -If it is 51-nation it might be hard to collectively agree to make a billion dollar spacecraft to the moon.

For example (hypothetically/theoretically): Pakistan and India. If you require their cooperation you should give them twice the money, one for Pakistan, and another for India. It might be easier if they are united.

The only problem if we keep the nation intact and allow it to be absorbed by one nation, is it's easier for the people of Afghanistan to form resistance movements. If they're divided up prior to being absorbed, then each absorbing country gets one part to deal with. One nation would benefit more, but it might also find itself overwhelmed. I'm pretty sure China could handle it, due to its own size. Maybe India or Pakistan could.

On the other hand, it's not like the people of Afghanistan really work together all that much as it is. At least not as a collective group. In small tribal groups they seem to be extremely well organized, as evidenced by their success as insurgents. But as a full country they've not been seen working well together unless under threat by an outside power (and even then not very well.) Maybe breaking the country into pieces would make it actually harder to manage instead of easier.

We should only show mercy to those villages we consider to be on our side.

Not to worry, if all goes according to plan, we'll be out of there in 2 years. Then, the old mujahideen warloards will partition the state as they did after the collapse of the Najibullah government 20 years ago.
The militias are rearming as i type this in preperation for the fall of the current government.

Does history repeat? We armed the mujahideen to fight the soviets, meanwhile supporting Pakistan which was training and arming the taliban, who we then fought because bin laden(who had been a mujihideen, using his wealth to help the jihadists) used bases there in his anti-western economic war.

If you were Pakistan what would you be preparing to do in 2014?

As in all wars, whoever has the most power to kill civilians and get away with it is who wins. The USA has voluntarily relinquished that power, so nothing much we do over there is really going to affect the outcome of anything. Mujahideen will kill your mother in front of you without a second thought if they think you're offering them any defiance (or pour acid on the faces of school girls).

http://www.amren.com/news/2012/03/sa...n-in-pakistan/

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

We can't defend against it because the only good defense against those kinds of tactics is a good offense, and the only kind of offense that means anything is for those who act in that way to be afraid their own women and children will become targets of the same brutality. A concern they really don't need to think about, because we won't. Even against the men themselves, the worst we might do is detain them and send them to Guantanimo Bay or shoot them and kill them. Both are things we'd do anyway, even if they didn't commit crimes against humanity.

Hell, even if we do catch up with Mr. Hekmatyr and manage to kill him, we probably wouldn't even go so far as to deny him a proper Muslim burial.

Originally Posted by kojax

I have to admit I really don't know very much about Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan, and Iran doesn't exactly seem friendly, but I'm wondering: when small nations like Afghanistan provoke us, why not just invade, conquer, and then distribute their lands to their neighbors, thus erasing the country off of the map forever? I'm sure their neighbors wouldn't mind being granted new territory. If Afghanistan's case, we could even give some of it to China if we wanted, since they have a small common border to the North East.

I think that would solve the whole problem of setting up a new government. All the citizens immediately become subjects of the governments that claimed their lands.

https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en

I don't agree with distributing territory to it's neighbours, but instead of all this continuous fighting why don't we partition Afghanistan and allow the taliban to govern one part on the condition they stop fighting us. Then we simply allow everyone in Afghanistan to make a choice of where they wish live either in the democratic part or the taliban controlled part.

If they agree it will give everyone a fair choice, save a fortune and save lives, infact then we can all pack up and go home.

"why dont we just divide up Afghanistan?"

Yes, pure Imperialism, its like playing Risk but killing real people. Ok, now back to your question, the reason "we just" dont divide up Afghanistan is thats not the type of evil Imperialism youre looking for, its the wrong flavor of icecream, what you want is a brand of evil imperialism that can still trick a hanfull of less astute people into thinking youre the good guys, that allows you to keep a straight face when you say you kill women and children for good reasons, unlike others that do the same on a smaller scale but with poor PR. Dividing up Afghanistan doesnt fit the marketing style warmongers seek, it will make it harder to sell mass killing to the public, and harder for criminally corrupt politicians to pretend the people want it. You want to divide up afghanistan and give to China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran? hum, let me think about it, now that you put it this way, "give it" to the SCO, its almost a good idea. I can already picture someone going to the taliban and say "look i have a piece of paper here with a drawing made by people on the other side of the planet that have been bombing you and now want to leave so they can invade another country, look on this piece of paper, they say the land where you have lived for generations, fighting back empires for centuries, is now ours, see this little line right there"

Conquer and divide.

Yeah. Have you ever heard of Australia.? westwind.

Are we, in the West, Still showing our paranoia about Tribal People.? You scratch the ground with a stick, and burn cow, or camel manure to keep the mosquitoes away. Your different to us. How can we unload all our consumer goods onto Tribesmen who haven't got a wheelbarrow? So we have, in the 20th and 21st Century, screwed them up. To sell them Wheelbarrows? No. To get our hands on their oil. westwind.

Originally Posted by garr

I agree with the premiss that we need fewer smaller countries and more consolidated larger countries. However, take the UK, one country but 4 sovereign nations in their own right, unification brings strength but results in civil unrest due to centralised governance. The very fact that regions are united in a language (England & Scotland) and have similar social backgrounds and even religion still creates the them and us scenario. That is why the world will never be ruled as a single entity. Unless you want to use force.

Any Thoughts ??

One possibility would be to use force.

The most important aspect of the plan is forcing the children to attend public schools, where they are taught how wonderful the history of your (world) country is and how their ancestors fought and defeated horrible tyrants in order to establish it. ...... Just like what I was taught in the public school where I grew up.

You can't coerce the first generation completely, but you can win over the second or third if you start young enough.

Originally Posted by icewendigo

hum, let me think about it, now that you put it this way, "give it" to the SCO, its almost a good idea. I can already picture someone going to the taliban and say "look i have a piece of paper here with a drawing made by people on the other side of the planet that have been bombing you and now want to leave so they can invade another country, look on this piece of paper, they say the land where you have lived for generations, fighting back empires for centuries, is now ours, see this little line right there"

I think you'd be surprised how good the Chinese are at assimilating territory.

Incorporation of Tibet into the People's Republic of China - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Some of the hints toward social engineering are getting a little creepy.

Originally Posted by Flick Montana

Some of the hints toward social engineering are getting a little creepy.

a little?----------------n.w.o.?

I guess the way I look at it, the "be proud of your ethnicity" history lessons children get from their parents and community are just as much BS as anything you could teach them in school. It might as well be BS directed towards a purpose instead of random BS.

The community tries to turn them into weapons with its BS. A coordinated education system BS program could be directed toward simply making them happy citizens.

The Loss of Face perspective. Hello kojax. Quote "" beproud of your ethnicity "" End Quote. Where and when did these Middle Eastern Nations lose their Self Respect?? Their loss of Face? Very meaningful to a Middle Eastern Tribe or Tribal Nation. Does the White House have views on this? We must understand any problems we are confronting for whatever reason.. Unless we can understand what the foundations are of conflict, and why the break down of the traditional mores of a society or Nation has occured, and we are willing to see the facts for what they are and plan our strategy accordingly, then no way can we rebuild to the extent of restoring situations to a habital invironment. westwind.

I think self pity is the main problem. Each culture believes it is entitled to something because it was mistreated during the colonial period. Most of those nations/ethnicities/etc were quite warlike in their own right. I almost laugh out loud when people try to describe the "mistreatment" of the Aztecs, for example. It seems they rarely stop to consider the surviving history about them pillaging, plundering, enslaving, raping, everyone around them. Then someone stronger came along and those bullies got what they deserved, becoming the victims of another bully.

The war era ended with the atom bomb. Now all we have is skirmishes, the outcomes of which mean little more than an honor match. The police actions/nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq are an interesting new idea, but those are still not really wars. They're domestic matters in seized territories (which we don't even want to admit to ourselves that we have seized.)

It's like if you're in a casino, and some guy bets everything on a roll of dice. He thinks he has a sure thing, but then the dice land on snake eyes and he loses. What these cultures are doing is kind of like if that guy were to demand to get his money back. The only one I feel any pity for is Tibet, because they weren't playing the conquest game. They didn't deserve to lose if they weren't playing the game.

FRom what tribes are the attacks coming from?