I’m not sure where your understanding of international laws comes from, but they are not as restrictive of national action as domestic criminal laws are for individuals.

Under international law, the United States has a right of defense. On 9/11, the reality was that the US was attacked as a nation (it wasn’t just some personal revenge thing). The intelligence analysis of the the attack, with which apparently most other nations agree, pointed to the origin of the attack as a group that had set up a base with the protection of the Taliban government and operated under the name “al Quaeda”. I do not have the evidence that proves whether this was true or untrue. I suspect we might find this out either during the trials of the five detainees in New York or when the records of this period are declassified.

The US asserted the right to attack both al Quaeda and the groups that provided them safe havens. On this basis, the US drove the Taliban from power, using the forces of the Northern Alliance and other groups that had been fighting the Taliban in a civil war.

The UN pursued restarting the talks that had begun years earlier in Bonn on November 27, 2001, and an agreement was produced by December 5, 2001.

The Bonn Agreement provided for the formation of an interim administration that would be required to convene a Loya Jirga within six months. The Loya Jirga would be responsible for choosing a transitional authority that would be in charge until a fully representative government could be elected in free and fair elections held no later than two years after the establishment of the transitional authority.

The Loya Jirga was held, and Hamid Karzai was elected head of the transitional government. A constitution was ratified in January 2004 and an election held in October 2004 in which Hamid Karzai was elected president of the constitutional government.

In 2002, the UN sent an assistance mission to Afghanistan. This development aid was hampered because although Karzai had been elected titular head of the country, the regional leaders (dubbed “warlords”) had not integrated their forces into the national army as was expected in the Bonn agreement. As a result, there were significant security and corruption issues in these regional areas, which hampered deliver of aid. The failure to deliver promised aid allowed a resurgence of the Taliban in the south, beginning in 2005. When the US involved NATO in Afghanistan under the clause in the NATO treaty that an attack on any member of NATO will be considered an attack on the alliance, the NATO countries got authorization from the UN. So at that point, US and NATO presence was authorized not by international common law but by the UN.

So the entry into Afghanistan was legal under the current international security framework. That “mish-mash” you are pointing out is just saying that this framework itself is a problem because it assumes US leadership on any action. The US is considered to be supporting the legitimate government of Afghanistan, created through a Loya Jirga and Constitutional Convention. It is not technically an occupying power.

The problem is that after eight years of military action and no improvement of living conditions, many Afghans have begun to see the US as an occupying power. And in the southern Pashtun areas, the Taliban has used that perception to rebuild its strength to the point that it is the local protection racket not the Kabul government forces or the US military. But there are large portions of the north of the country that never will accept Taliban return to power.

The military has been operationally stupid is carrying out its activities. In some parts of the country, it treated every civilian as a potential enemy and thus was not concerned with civilian deaths from drone strikes. But those who opposed the central Afghan government were sure to highlight these strikes as attacks on “innocent civilians”, which might or might not be true, presenting a “we say, they say” information war. Played by both sides.

The military also has not been observant of the Geneva Conventions in the treatment of civilians, prisoners of war, or detainees. And this contempt for the Geneva Conventions came from the highest levels of the Bush administration. The structural problem here is if the US is the default policeman, who is going to hold the US to account. It took a change in the government of Serbia to get Milosovich and Karadic to the Hague to face charges. If there were and international warrant for the arrest of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to stand trial in the Hague, do you think that Obama could in the current political climate extradite these two?

Until this year, the security that the US was ensuring was that of the legitimate government of Afghanistan, duly elected under the 2003 constitution. Karzai’s theft of the election called that legitimacy into question, just as the Bush v. Gore decision of the US Supreme Court called the legitimacy of the Bush administration into question. As a practical matter, the international consensus seems to be to let Karzai govern just as the world let Bush govern and continued to treat him as the legitimate head of state.

How is the security of Afghanistan being assured by the ongoing US occupation of that country?

That is really the question of the moment. Clearly, although legally there is not a US occupation of Afghanistan, there is a growing popular feeling that the US is an occupier. Obama sought to deal with that by setting July 2011 as the time to start turning over total security responsibilities to the Afghan central government. In 18 months there could very well be a new constitution of a new unity government that involves some of the folks who are currently insurgents. It’s a long shot.

And the decision to send additional troops was arrived at in consultation with the Karzai government and with the regional powers – Russia, China, Pakistan, and India.

Finally, if US forces are going to be concentrated in population centers, drones will become useless, but expect complaints about the behavior of stressed out troops, who don’t speak the language but are nonetheless expected to reduce the level of violence to a point that Afghan authorities can manage. And expect that the insurgents, regardless of their ideology, are going to be trying to draw US troops into creating those incidents of civilian casualties. That’s just the way asymmetric war works; you sucker the powerful into engaging in acts of repression that alienate the population.

If it means aything at all it means for every country to feel secure within its borders. There are international laws that codify that. For instance:

You are not allowed without provocation to infringe on the integrity of a country, because that is a crime against the peace. Neither can you threaten a country with violent action, that is also a crime. It is also the case that an occupying force has no rights but only obligations and can therefore not infringe on a country’s laws and you hace to take care to assure its safety. Neither can you engage in collective punishment.

Let’s leave aside the flagrant violations of every one of these laws in the unprovoked invasion of Iraq and in the threats against Iran. Please delineate for me how many of the above laws is the US in compliance with as pertains to the country of Afghanistan?

Keep in mind that the US is an accupying force there and has abolutely no rights within that country only obligations to be mindful of not vilating the stipulated laws. For example what obligation does it have to target ill defined targets and kill civilians while doing so. Or bombing ambulances that are in the process of rescuing the wounded. Or for that matter for taking it upon itself to increase troops on its own say so.

Lastly, if these laws are being violated why are they not being tried.

All the structures you cite for assuring international security were created for the benefit of all countries, not only the US. How is the security of Afghanistan being assured by the ongoing US occupation of that country?

Same source.

So, they’re Republicans then?