There were 1.6 million US troops in Germany on VE Day, and Afghanistan has nearly twice Japans area. Just to be clear, there were about as many US troops in the rest of Europe in 1945 as in Germany proper. Plus the British and Russians.

There were a little over 90 million Germans in 1941; assuming most were alive in 1945 (though that is a rather large assumption considering the Wehrmacht was down to the Hitler Jugend at the end,) that is... well, I am sleepy so we will call it a 60:1 ratio of Germans to US soldiers. Again, plus the other Allied forces; America was only responsible for 1/4th of Occupied Germany, so more like a 15:1 ratio, give or take population clumping. Think maybe 16X as many US troops in Afghanistan might have pacified the country?

Bear in mind something else: When the US had 1.6 million soldiers in Germany, the US population was about 132 million; with the other 1.4 million soldiers in Europe, that means 3 million total, or about 2% of the population. So, quick and dirty sleep deprived version: If we occupied Iraq with 3 million soldiers and Afghanistan with another 3 million, dropping the occupier:occupied ratio to 10:1 in each, think could keep the peace riding around in Abramses and Apaches with GPS, arresting on sight anyone who walked more than a block without producing US issued ID displaying their name, occupation and purpose for being in that location?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Germany#Occupation_policy


I have spent several magnitudes of money greater than Afghan GDP on cars, but would not want to conquer TX with it. Just to be clear: Afghanistan and TX have roughly the same area and population, but Afghans may be slightly better armed (may; TX does have a battleship that was at Normandy and carrier that was at Midway, antiquated though they are. )


You are right, though not in the ways you meant; Afghanistan and post-war Germany are not comparable. Germany had three times the population packed into half the area, so less ground to cover but six times the potential threat vectors.


True, the Afghans government has not spent the the past fifteen years indoctrinating everyone old enough to walk into betraying their parents, children or anyone else to death camps if they deviate from official government policy. Probably why our Afghan occupation forces non-fraternization rules did not prohibit speaking to even native children for the first year of the occupation. I guarantee no Iraq or Afghanistan combat commander has been forced to ask, as Gen. Marshall was, "how a soldier is going to tell the age of a child before being kind to it?"


Starts at 20g for a dollar: http://www.yixingteapotsale.com/teaname.htm


Are you kidding? The Wehrmacht and Hitler Jugend come to mind in Germany. Japan practically invented suicide bombing, but I will grant it presented no organized resistance on the mainland. Invasion estimates put combined casualties for both sides at 3,000,000, so we nuked them twice to compel unconditional surrender instead. I was not advocating going quite that far in Afghanistan or Iraq, nor do I think it would be remotely necessary. No, there was no occupation resistance there, because instead of folding like Rand McNally in a couple weeks their resistance made us slog across North Africa, Western Europe and the South Pacific for four years just to reach their borders, while they shot us. They were no more above "asymmetric warfare" when they could not win a stand up fight either, hence all the Zeros flown into US flight decks literally designed for it, and all those South Pacific islands where the tops of mountains were literally blown off by 16" shells because the Japanese were dug in too deep for anyone to remove. Kinda like those Afghan mountain tops in Afghanistan. Please. I am not saying fighting Taliban and Al Qaeda snipers hiding in the markets baskets is a walk in the park, only that sending enough men guys were not forced into half a dozen combat tours would have ensured that after the first house-to-house search no more were needed.


Gee, I wonder why we "let" some of the enemy command structure escape. Either those illiterates were far more crafty and sophisticated than the guys who invented jet aircraft and conducted the first heavy water experiments, or we did not have enough man power to prevent large number of key personnel vanishing. My guess is the latter, since the ratio of occupier:occupied was about 25X higher in Afghanistan.


No lie, but again, have you seen pictures or film of Germany ca. 1945? I know Berlin back then and Kabul now both look like bombed out rubble, but the difference is Kabul has looked that way since the 1500s while Berlin hosted the 1932 Olympics. Per capita caloric intake is higher in Afghanistan right now than it was in post-war Germany for several years.


Well, we needed re-education, too, though that is a lot harder with the current broad UN definitions of genocide (is it genocide to expunge religion or politics advocating genocide? You would not THINK so, would you? ) But we committed plenty to the hearts and minds campaign, and there is not a soldier alive who does not quote "work smarter, not harder," as gospel (I first heard it, and often, from a retired Marine/Army reservist.) Unfortunately, no matter how smart or hard the little Dutch boy works, if we leave him to plug that dike by himself long enough, he runs out of fingers.

C'mon, man, get serious. We could transform a country under Hitlers absolute domination and indoctrination for fifteen years into a peaceful, productive democracy with a decade, but that is not long enough to stop running gun fights in the streets of Afghanistan or Iraq? Say what we will about Bush, the ever-mounting death toll in Iraq was a blot and a blight throughout his administration, and the only reason Afghanistan was not worse is we were too busy fighting house-to-house in Iraq to send the troops that would have made Afghanistan a fight, or usually to notice it at all. That PR hickey is no lovelier on Obama, yet the problem persists, and not because presidents grow fonder of quagmires with time. LBJ hated Vietnam for the same reason I do: It killed the Great Society, and trying to salvage the latter drove his escalations.

It is not for lack of effort, technique or innovation. It is lack of means born of lack of will in that any country not serious enough about war to draft is not serious enough to fight. They will let the very patriotic, bloodthirsty, bigoted and/or stupid go VOLUNTARILY, but no one else will join them. We are leaving with our tail between our legs yet again because most of us did not want to be there in the first place, thus most of us never were. Rule #1 of both strategy and tactics: Destroy the enemies will to fight. Ours was destroyed before the war began; how could we win...?

Sorry if I got a little bitchier than usual, but this has become a very sore point with me. We keep solemnly nodding that we have learned the lesson of Vietnam when we have not learned a darned thing, and I see Colin Powell thinking the same thing every time he faces the camera. We mislearned that "wars are bad" and "drafts are bad" instead of "you do not want to fight a war with half measures." By that I do not mean it is a bad idea (though it definitely is) I mean refusal to employ more than half measures demonstrates you literally do not WANT to fight a war. War is Hell, but one of the few benefits of grown up wars is deterring future ones by pointedly reminding all sides of that fact.