re: "Would the U.S. pay Pakistan's military to help murder American troops if the U.S. had military conscription?"

Pundita (" US foreign policy for the 21st Century ") isn't actually in favor of bringing back the draft, but is angry enough to ask the question.

Money quote(s):

"Through it all -- throughout all the deceptions, denials, evasions, rationalizations and insultingly useless advice given over the years by Americans in civilian government, the military and academia -- there is one question relating to U.S. tolerance for Pakistan's proxy war against NATO and Afghanistan that towers above all others. And yet it's the one question that has never been asked of a public figure. So in the title of this post I've put the question to the public."

She continued:

"I don't mean to shift blame to Americans at large, nor am I arguing to restore conscription. I'm simply pointing out that if service in the U.S. military was compulsory, there would have been such a large number of Americans personally involved in the outcome of the Afghan War that there would have been no 'dark' or 'lost' years in the war while the U.S. was fighting in Iraq.

Combine this with the instant era in global communications, and I think the outcome would have been that factions in Washington that managed for the better part of a decade to hide Pakistan's proxy war from the American public would have found their machinations quickly overwhelmed by the volume of complaints from conscripted Americans and their parents -- many of those parents veterans of the Vietnam War, I might add."

CAA questioned, at the time, both the timing and utility of our Iraq intervention back in the 2002-3 timeframe, both before and during his deployment there to.

While the 23 writs of the Iraq War Resolution sufficed as justification for the invasion, whether Afghanistan should have been put on a back burner (as opposed to a more general mobilization, if both campaigns were so urgently needful) is a good set of questions.

"I'm not arguing for conscription but I am asking whether it's possible for the United States to field an all-volunteer fighting force that's not treated as a mercenary army. The question needs to be answered."

Americans, as a people, have not (since Vietnam, when it was even less true) treated the AVF as mercenaries.

That privilege seems reserved to the inside-the-beltway folks, big picture thinkers, whose connections to the folks who do the deploying, fighting, and dying, are tenuous at best.

(The crocodile tears of the national media elite remain wholly unconvincing.)

"If you want to run with the fiend thesis, it's possible the entire problem of the U.S. approach to Pakistan could be solved by deploying a contingent of exorcists around various civilian government and military buildings, lobbying firms and academic institutions in Washington and Brussels.

But if you pooh-pooh the idea that Hell somehow got loose in those two seats of power you might want to opt for the only other proposition I can see that covers all the bases. This is that U.S. soldiers wouldn't be treated with such contempt if they weren't considered disposable; i.e., as mercenary hirelings. And as corollary that this treatment wouldn't occur if U.S. military service was compulsory."

The "fiend thesis" seems to have been that our decision-makers and strategy-setters have come under actual demonic and diabolical influence.

(CAA can neither confirm nor deny that.)

As touched as CAA is by Pundita's solicitousness on behalf of the troops and their welfare, sometimes an army has to be used. That puts men (and women) at risk. Troops understand that, they just ask that their risks be justified and not wasted.

When an army is used in an expeditionary fashion, as a furtherance of some national policy or another, the risks multiply.

12/17