"she took man out like robocop never seen nutn like it"

old.Tohtori

old.Tohtori

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BloodOmen said:
Oh christ help, I've started the Scouse rant engine.
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Chilly

Chilly

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quick reaction from the cops. barely out of the car and nailing the guy. damn.
 
soze

soze

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megadave said:
How the fuck is this being called a terrorist attack?
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Definition is. A surprise attack involving the deliberate use of violence against civilians in the hope of attaining political or religious aims. As the solider was walking down the street and not in uniform I think it counts.

Also as they just run someone walking out of the Barracks down at random they had no idea he was a Solider did they? They were not after him. If it is just someone leaving a building it could of been a guy there to fix the photocopier?
 
rynnor

rynnor

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soze said:
Definition is. A surprise attack involving the deliberate use of violence against civilians in the hope of attaining political or religious aims. As the solider was walking down the street and not in uniform I think it counts.
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He wasn't on assignment either - Woolwich Barracks is not a front line posting.

I wonder how long he had left to serve?
 
soze

soze

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If they tried to attack a squaddie on guard out side Colchester Barracks that is one thing. But a guy leaving a building in a H4H hoody is not automatically a serving solider.
 
DaGaffer

DaGaffer

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soze said:
If they tried to attack a squaddie on guard out side Colchester Barracks that is one thing. But a guy leaving a building in a H4H hoody is not automatically a serving solider.
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He wasn't even leaving; he was on his way back to barracks from a recruitment thing in central London. Unless they tagged him when he left, I'm not even sure how they identified him as a soldier at all.
 
old.Tohtori

old.Tohtori

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It was rather funny how "breaking news!" came on the screen when he said "most of us are normal" :D
 
Dukat

Dukat

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I know when the quote I used was from - it was from before we went in. I was trying to point out that we were invited into Afghanistan - it isn't an invasion as some people seem to be calling it.
 
DaGaffer

DaGaffer

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Dukat said:
I know when the quote I used was from - it was from before we went in. I was trying to point out that we were invited into Afghanistan - it isn't an invasion as some people seem to be calling it.
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Sorry, we were invited? Were we bollocks. We invaded, pure and simple, because Al-Qaeda were using the whole Pakistan border region as a giant training camp. The mission then expanded to become an anti-Taliban plan and a ten year suck because once again, the objectives in Afghanistan were never clear. The so-called "Northern Alliance" that the Americans armed when they came in were the ones who "invited" us (except they didn't really), but since at the time they only ran 10% of the country, you can hardly claim they were a legitimate government inviting in an ally, they were just one slightly more palatable bunch of killers than the other bunch.

If the Americans and NATO had stuck to a narrow brief of wiping out the Al-Qaeda camps and arming the Northern Alliance to fight their own war, we'd have been long gone, but once again, that wasn't enough and we decided to go on a civilisin' mission, failing to learn from 150 years of failure to civilise anything in Afghanistan. There is no winnable war in Afghanistan. There never was unless you're prepared to commit genocide.
 
rynnor

rynnor

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I see the security forces are trying to suggest they couldn't have spotted them - if its true about them stopping one man when he tried to fly to Somalia then this defence doesnt really stand up.

As soon as people start taking actions rather than just talking they should immediatly be upgraded as a threat.
 
Dukat

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Not sure what you're history and understanding is of Afghanistan, DaGaffer. I'm know you're pretty well travelled and knowledgable about current affairs - I really, really don't want to get into a pissing match over this.

I understand bias and I know that certain things aren't exactly as they seem, but I've also seen quite a bit over there with my own eyes to support my own views on this.

You call it an unwinnable war yet I've seen the change over there, even over the past few years. Victory in Afghanistan is and always has been about understanding the population, and that is what is happening.

Change isn't going to happen over night and yes, the place has seen enough war in its history to leave scars that will always be present. The fact remains that our understanding of what is going on has never been as good as it is now and change is happening, change for the better.

At the time when we went in, the Taliban were not popular. They rose to power because the population needed something to fill the vacuum left behind after the Russians - but what started as a popular movement of religious students changed and when they imposed strict religious law on the whole country after taking control things were pretty shitty for the average Afghan. Things are better over there now than they were - even if life over there has a way to go before it could be considered 'good enough'.

Either way - from my point of view, we are trying and in many ways succeeding to make life better in Afghanistan. That, to me, can only be a good thing.

Edit - Also, this is starting to become a bit of a broad discussion. The state of Afghanistan is a pretty hard thing to argue about, I think, seeing as even subject matter experts with far more experience and qualification would still manage to violently disagree on it.
 
DaGaffer

DaGaffer

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Dukat said:
Not sure what you're history and understanding is of Afghanistan, DaGaffer. I'm know you're pretty well travelled and knowledgable about current affairs - I really, really don't want to get into a pissing match over this.

I understand bias and I know that certain things aren't exactly as they seem, but I've also seen quite a bit over there with my own eyes to support my own views on this.

You call it an unwinnable war yet I've seen the change over there, even over the past few years. Victory in Afghanistan is and always has been about understanding the population, and that is what is happening.

Change isn't going to happen over night and yes, the place has seen enough war in its history to leave scars that will always be present. The fact remains that our understanding of what is going on has never been as good as it is now and change is happening, change for the better.

At the time when we went in, the Taliban were not popular. They rose to power because the population needed something to fill the vacuum left behind after the Russians - but what started as a popular movement of religious students changed and when they imposed strict religious law on the whole country after taking control things were pretty shitty for the average Afghan. Things are better over there now than they were - even if life over there has a way to go before it could be considered 'good enough'.

Either way - from my point of view, we are trying and in many ways succeeding to make life better in Afghanistan. That, to me, can only be a good thing.

Edit - Also, this is starting to become a bit of a broad discussion. The state of Afghanistan is a pretty hard thing to argue about, I think, seeing as even subject matter experts with far more experience and qualification would still manage to violently disagree on it.
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It's not really about the Taliban, they're a bit of a red herring; the problems are more fundamental than that; Afghanistan's borders, like so many post-imperial hangovers, are in the wrong place; so the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan (The Durand Line) divides up the Pashtun and Baloch territories into both countries, and a bit like the Kurdish issue in Iraq etc. lowland Afghans (who are kind of Persian in origin - although its way more complicated, but critically a good number are Shia) are culturally different from the Pashtun etc. but unlike the Kurds, the Pashtun tend to be the aggressors (and the religious majority) rather than victims, and there's no real incentive for them to change. Preying on the lowlands has been their game for hundreds of years, and the minute the last NATO soldier walks out of there, normal service will be resumed.

I'm really cynical about any attempts to impose democracy from outside anywhere in the Middle East tbh; there's no bedrock for it. We're democratic because we went through hundreds of years of painful struggle to become so; there's none of that in the Middle East, and in the case of Afghanistan, there's all the ethnic and religious divisions (Shia in west and center, surrounded by Sunnis along the border and the north) on top of that. Even if they maintain elections, they'll only vote in accordance with the instructions of the local sheik anyway.
 
Job

Job

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I think the Russians should be the first people to ask about Afghanistan..they were fighting the fuckers and we were arming them with anti aircraft missiles ffs...what goes around comes around.
 
rynnor

rynnor

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Is it me or did they quietly raise the terror threat level? Certainly acting like they did...
 
rynnor

rynnor

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Chilly said:
Arnt we always at "ZOMG THEY'RE COMING!!! QUICK, SURRENDER ALL FREEDOMS!"?
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New Labour certainly loved the 'stoke fear / remove freedoms' concept - former home secretary Reid keeps getting on shows and suggesting that kind of crap.

Hoping the Lib Dems will be able to fight that bit off tbh.
 
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