Thinking outside the box is always a good thing mate :)
Interesting thoughts in this thread, a lot of valid points being made.
My personal thoughts, is that we could offer more economical growth to China by shipping our supplies to china and allowing them to transport them to the Afghan border. Hell we could pay to have their military bring it to our FOB’s, and no it would not have to be flown in. It would easier and faster to ship straight across the Pacific into China, and have China move west to Afghanistan by rail.
Now I'm not 100% on this but I'm reasonably certain there aren't many, if any, railway lines up that way. The other, and more important, consideration is: Do you really want US equipment passing through Chinese hands? They've probably got the plans/samples of most of your equipment but there's not point just handing it to them.
Two things I would like to see us do is, 1) get China behind us on the GWOT and fighting terrorism with us, and 2) see what their true military capabilities are. They have us by the balls when it comes to the economic stuff; however the more money we put into their economy the more they will be required to rely on us in the future. That would give us more leverage with China in the future IMHO.
With regard to terrorism. China doesn't have the same problem with terrorism that the West does. Much of the grievance that the terrorists have is related to Israel and US support of what they perceive to be illegitimate regimes in the Mid East right? China has no interest in Israel and the only solid partner they have in the Mid East is Iran, which is a very pragmatic relationship.
In fact, China once put forward a list of so-called terrorists (to the UN IIRC, for funding freezing and whatnot) that turned out to be legitimate protesters (democracy, Falun Dafa etc). The biggest problem they have is from Xinjiang but that's relatively minor in terms of terrorism.
With regard to the economic comments. China and the US are tied together at this particular moment. The US relies on cheap production and China relies on the US dollar. However, while China might own those bonds the balance is pretty much towards the US at the moment. There's actually an interesting theory that countries with heavy trade to each other will not go to war but it's not bulletproof and I don't put a huge amount of stock in it. There is a little to it, though.
Their military capabilities are interesting but I can't say too much about land or sea forces because that's not my area of interest but they're getting a lot of decent airpower these days. Not enough to fight anyone significant but it's good technology in good airframes. I haven't done enough research on their training to comment on that yet.
China has already started to spread their “global power” military presence, mostly in Africa but as posted before not largley, but they are. I think it would be smart of us to find out what their capabilities and national support for war is, especially with the amount of US vs China crap out there. I would like to know what they are capable of, prior to ever having to meet them on the battle field. Just my personal opinion.
Ah but NZ and Australia are also involved in that operation, to about the same extent as the PLAN. Does that mean we're spreading our global power? Not in my opinion. China can power project to about 500miles (from the last thing I saw about it) but not much further than that. Enough to throw their weight around over the Spratleys or Taiwan.
As for Pakistan, we need to cut them off and alginate them as best as we can. If we could open up economic growth through China and remove the importance of the Paki’s to Afghanistan, we might be able to get the Paki/Afghan border to shut itself down. Let it be what it is, a terrorist/insurgent haven and keep our military focus at killing the likes when they move into Afghanistan. I think the real key here is removing Pakistanis positions of importance, and moving forward with building better allies with China and long term friendship with Afghanistan (leaving the door open for Iran in the future).
I like what you're saying but Afghanistan will always be important to Pakistan as long as they are using the jihadis against India. I say fuck Afghanistan. The Taliban know not to harbour AQ now, let them do what they want. They'll probably have another civil war one the ISAF leaves anyway. Who knows, the Taliban might not win.
Again I know it sounds crazy, but just trying to look at this in a different light.
I enjoy reading your posts mate, thinking outside of the box is better than thinking in a conformal way.
