I have seen this documentary and it was pretty thought provoking, two major thoughts I had after watching it:

1. Given the nature of the terrain, sparse population and way the ground army was "making progress" it felt like a futile endeavor, it is essentially felt like they were fighting against ghosts, and there was no realistic way to end this war or claim any kind of victory.

2. Given the nature of the villages and clans of afghans shown there, it was pretty evident that the concept of democracy simply wont work, the society there is simply not ready for it yet. Given these facts how will the military would even decide how much work is enough ?

in summary, Afghanistan felt like a land of hopelessness, the american loss of lives only contributes to generations of futility over and over. This aspect was very depressing.

Very pertinent observations.

That's why I dared to make a small parallel between politicians and commander officers.
This wrong situation is happening if the Army is following strategical objectives of political nature, instead strictly following its military objectives. This is why you cannot substitute the Army to anything else excepting basic national interests, without tainting the whole spectrum of its activity.

By the bounds of war's common sense strategy, political objectives are conflicting with military objectives and are always inflicting direct damage to the army that follows under its rule. If we look the overall situation, after almost 10 yeas of war, this policy has been damaging the US army, more than all the wars combined in which the US army has been involved. And most dangerous is the thing that this policy is slowly erasing its entire glorious past. This is not just a coincidence that most of the population of the UE and the global population is considering the USA soldiers more like pirates, invaders, and not like defenders of liberty and human rights.

A much more detailed example on this matter, how politics must not intervene in the fate of the army, is very well written in the book "Lost Victories", by Field Marshal Von Manstein. I recommend you to read specifically the campaign in Southern Russia, ending with the wrong decision of capturing Stalingrad, for pure propaganda reasons.

In Lost Victories, Manstein repeatedly said that the worst enemy the German army had faced was Hitler himself. The German Army was not defeated by the Russians, but by the wrong decisions within the high commandment of the German Army, which was directly substituted to Hitler, who was trying to merge all the time military objectives with his political ambitions, and these two contradictory goals pushed the German Army to its total annihilation.

I think that the American politicians are the worst enemies to the USA Army.

And btw., talking abt the afghans, when I have seen the elders of the valley, how they sleep on the ground and how they were not impressed, not feeling interested to promises of civilization and power, I thought about the locals in Avatar: "There's nothing that we have that they want. Everything they sent me out here to do is a waste of time"

I don't know if you're aware, but Tim Hetherington was killed in Iraq last(?) year.

didn't know
RIP

is it on youtube?

Freddy fucking Rumsen.

i don't know man, this might give some ideas to the wrong people :))

xD

In this thread, a Romanian gypsy learns that even American soldiers are capable of rational thought and ability to make rash decisions in the field of duty (doing just what they were trained to do).

Afghasnitan, being the rough terrain hosting a proud people, does not fair well to conquests. IN the past 1000 years, just the Americans, Soviets, Russians, British, Mughals, Timurids, Mongolians and Khwazermids attempted, mostly successfully.

Next week: a look inside raythenoob's mentality.

Romanian gypsy? interesting.. what other kinds are there? and why so specific?

1) he has me on ignore for trying to be different from his opinion and agreeing with Trance
2) Apart from Romanian Gypsies, there ar emany kinds of gypsies, most of which don't differ by the c ountry they resign in, but just by name: Romany, island Traveller, Eastern c: Also, there are countrywise gypsies sucha as Hungariangypsy, Romanian gypsy, Russian Gypsy, Baltic gypsy, British/Irish gypsy/traveller (popularised by Brad Pitt in "Snatch" ("do you like "dags"?)
3) Specific about what?

i found Armadillo better, but its a good documentary nonetheless

Some who recommended me Armadillo said the same. I beg to differ.

While armadillo is all about soldiers insight, Restrepo goes with more exhaustive look at the whole picture, where the soldiers in Armadillo looked clueless to me, not noticing the enemy was 2 m in front of them, and getting all pumped up for having 1 lame kill in their whole mission (I don't recall another success), by killing some scared to death talibans in a hole, in Restrepo you see cohesive action, air + ground troops operations, a much more detailed explanation on the whole operation and not the last as one did say there, they were in the middle of the goddamn conflict, not just walking by some random field ("As CNN dubbed it one day when Bush saw it and said, you know, the ugliest place on Earth the Korengal Valley").