The VICE documentary This Is What Winning Looks like [0] was very illuminating for me, the situation there is a total clusterfuck and waste of resources.
This is one of the best pieces of journalism I've ever seen.
And it's not like we didn't have plenty of warning. Our experience in Afghanistan is exactly the same as the Soviets before us, and the British, like, five times before them.
It is obvious that very shortly, and at their own pace, the Taliban will overtake the current government. They will even probably decide not to overtake Kabul, as it will be politically and strategically convenient for them.
Russian will use Pakistan as a proxy, and will fill the void. The way the pull off was decided and implemented will prove to be a decision as bad as the decision to go into Afghanistan.
They better have a good plan for a pull off in a hurry
of the current US Embassy. As soon as the wind changes
it is pretty clear to what allegiance the current Afghan Army
will go with.
"After troops exit, safety of US Embassy in Kabul top concern"
Im no fan, but do you remember how Trump tried to withdraw more and his own generals lied to him about the numbers? Seems that IC and bureaucrats had a different plan
I’m not sure he gets exactly lumped in with Bush and Obama here. Too early to tell what Biden admin will do.
It’s difficult in today’s environment to align with Trump on some FP issues w/o caveats but his first FP speech to the AEI at Georgetown (I think, it’s on c-span somewhere) was filled with him calling them and the neocons a bunch of losers who got us into dumb wars and how he probably wouldn’t hire any of them.
The left mostly focused on his “take the oil” comments, not his “get out” statements. Pretty much everyone in Obama’s cabinet and staff is on record saying he screwed up not doing more (boots on the ground) to take out Assad.
For all of Trump’s ranting on NATO, I really question the EU’s wanting us to do something about Putin, Ukraine, Syria, etc while shutting their nukes and building gas pipelines to Russia.
We need to stop doing wars when there isn't a direct, imminent threat to the United States itself, full stop. No "threat to our national interests", no "threat to strategic allies in the region", none of it. We make the world worse and we make the United States worse, and we abandon any moral high ground we may still possess.
We need to stop doing wars where we cannot clearly envision the end state and have a clear plan for getting there. The U.S. has engaged in far too many conflicts where we simply didn't like what some country was doing and so we removed the government. Almost universally though, we did not know how to, or were unwilling to install a stable replacement government or governments.
The point: there's substantial risk to waiting for an indirect, non-imminent threat to become a direct, imminent one. Addressing it is frequently easier and cheaper in the early stages.
Isolationism was easier when adversaries took weeks/months/years to get to you.
US can delegate it to the regional powers or power brokers.
US needs to make its Asia pivot now, you cannot waste military resources in a desolate land and stretch your self.
Getting out of Afghanistan will make the big powers .. China, Russia et al. to pay attention now that Americans are no longer bogged down.
20 years is enough - I do not even know how many trillions are wasted. Do you know the GDP of Afghanistan, it is less than USD50 Billion.
Pay-off the warlords put some mercenaries in Kabul, ask Indians and Russians to fund opposition to Taliban because it is their strategic headache.
Give Turkey some security role because they seem to have good terms with Pakistan, so that Kabul is out of Taliban control or some kind of compromise.
Not putting troops is not isolationism.. you apply other levers of your power.
Right. I don't really stomach how long we've been in the Middle East and I don't like the idea of those with incentives to go to war prolonging and pushing war. But geopolitics is very messy. Instability in a region can encourage other leaders to take advantage and cause even more geopolitical upheaval.
Instability can cause upheaval, sure — but are we preventing instability or upheaval? It seems to me that we are prolonging instability and promoting extremism and terrorism by blundering in with our military. Is the Middle East, for example, any less unstable than it was three decades ago?
> Part of the problem in geopolitics is that there's genuinely no way to ever know this sort of thing,
The other problem is that while people talk about caring about this, none of the actors who pretend to actually have this as their primary goal, its just an excuse used when advantage, not stability, is being sought.
In general, yes to both questions. There's a point where a large-scale conflict becomes a direct threat to the United States, and WWII might have been that by 1941, but I would at least initially have opposed interfering.
I think there is a big difference between the powers that committed those atrociticies. Japan was behind Pearl Harbor wheareas a scraggly fundamentalist group in the middle east was behind 9/11 attacks. The former was a full blown exercise of military power and neutralization of some half of our naval fleet in the Pacific. The latter was a targetted terrorist attack largely organized by one main guy. We got the guy, and we could have probably gotten him without 20 years of war.
Probably Afghanistan was also the wrong target, or at least not the only country in the region that should have been targeted. Bin Laden hid in Pakistan after all, and the Taliban often crossed the border to Pakistan to seek refuge.
> Afghanistan was also the wrong target, or at least not the only country in the region that should have been targeted.
Afghanistan wasn't the only country in the region (nor weas that the only region in the world) in which the US conducted campaigns against al-Qaeda and factions allied with them.
> Bin Laden hid in Pakistan after all, and the Taliban often crossed the border to Pakistan to seek refuge.
And the US conducted attacks against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan from very early in the war, and also against bin Laden himself there.
The population of many European countries overwhelmingly desperately wanted the US to intervene during WW2. This is not at all the case at all in Vietnam, Irak or Afghanistan
The planner of 9/11 was in Afghanistan and actually carried out an attack on the U.S. Presumably the parent comment didn't think he was a direct threat worth invading over.
One might make a similar argument about Europe during WW2 (I am not, but that's why I'm asking the question).
It's not entirely fair to blame Japan for its attack, as there was a lot of signaling by Washington that taking the strategic base at Hawaii would not be opposed. We might not have been attacked if we hadn't invited it, and there's reason to believe that implicit invitation was extended intending to give the U.S. an excuse to enter the war.
Notwithstanding some historians' claims that interventionists in the Roosevelt administration slyly baited Japan into attacking first, there is zero historical evidence that Japan would otherwise have avoided attacking us.
The escalating embargo and blockade of Japan meant their industrial output was facing collapse within months. The attack was a desperate attempt to protect their invasion of the resource-rich East Indies. They literally had no choice, and this is exactly the argument that won Tojo permission to go forward with the attack.
Plus, the spirit of the Japanese nation was very much in favor of total conquest. Hakko Ichiu was sort of the Japanese version of America's Manifest Destiny, except they explicitly applied it to everything from Russia to Australia and Burma to Alaska.
I think they were just taking my general "strategic allies in the region" comment to refer to Israel specifically, when it was intended as a category of countries, like Israel, South Korea, and Ukraine.
To instantly hop on the "anti-Semitic" train is asinine though.
I wonder if he knows the U.S. government turned away Jewish refugees by boat in WWII and that we didn't really land in Europe to go save the Jews or anything, but to stop Russia from marking territory all the way to where we landed...
Since WWII the world sees unprecedented peace and prosperity, all thanks to the USA being the world police. Just the freedom of navigation of merchant ships, afforded by the oversight of the US navy, is a huge enabler for world trade.
I hope US continues on its course for the next century instead of creating a power vacuum which the Chinese would be happy to fill.
I did not say all US intervention was good, but that as a whole, Pax Americana has been great to us. The Chinese or Russian alternatives are not very enticing.
But China and Russia do not interfere nearly as much with countries all over the planet.
And the “just let countries live their life peacefully” alternative is actually much more enticing than “force capitalism and democracy on countries that don’t care, by killing hundreds of thousands and ruining lives so they end up hating it for generations” reality that we live in.
Vietnam, Irak, Afghanistan, maybe learn from your mistakes at some point and acknowledge this strategy is not the best?
Taiwan and Ukraine are neighbors of China and Russia respectively. Also, I didn’t talk about the Soviet Union which disappeared 30years ago. But about Russia, who does not spend trillions in wars halfway round the globe.
Imagine China having occupied (and largely destroyed) 2 separate European countries for the past 15years. Or Russia having occupied two separate Latin American countries for the past 15years. Clearly the level of interventionism of the US is unmatched.
The U.S. also has an amazing history of leaving behind translators that they promised citizenship to, typically ending in their entire families being tortured and killed.
Can't imagine we're going to get very many more people agreeing to work with us...
That's a good snarky comment, and it points to a problem that is real — but what would you like to see? Should the United States have a military presence in every country that has human rights problems, forcing the local government to treat women/minorities/dissidents the way we think they should? I'd like to know what your solution is.
On the other hand, young boys will probably be better off. The Taliban are said to be much less tolerant of the rampant sexual abuse of young boys which is otherwise widely practiced and accepted across the country:
I mean, at the end of the day, if the people of Afghanistan want the Taliban as their government again, isn't that what they should get, according to the principles of democracy?
This would imply that anyone who worked with the US government, or are perceived as doing so, should leave immediately. You can't fight the tide.
The people of Afghanistan do not, to put it mildly, want anything in a unified sense. Their many civil wars illustrates that in a clear and bloody way.
The argument you may be looking for is that Afghanistan should be ruled by Afghans, without outside interference.
Most would agree, but there is no way from here to there without fighting it out, and whoever wins will rule very far from any western ideals.
Perhaps the more realistic scenario is that as the US leaves, Iran, Pakistan, and maybe Russia, China and India will keep fighting proxy wars there. As an American, I'm OK with that as long as we stay out.
The Taliban itself is predominantly foreign to Afghanistan too.
It was created by Pakistan due to the fear of the soviet invasion spilling into their country, it was ideologically and financially supported by the Saudis with some logistical support early on form the US.
The Saudis gave the funds for the ISI to train 100,000 fighters and introduced what essentially was a new religion into the area. Afghanistan wasn’t historically particularly conservative from a religious point of view Deobandi/Salafi fundamentalism is quite foreign, mosques were rare to non existent in the tribal areas and organized religion doesn’t overall works that well with a predominantly tribal and illiterate population.
It's not so much that "the people" want the Taliban in power, it's that the Taliban are the strongest military force. There's nothing to stop them from taking power. There's also an ethnic component to it. The Pashtuns, from which Taliban recruit, form the largest ethnic group. Afghanistan ultimately has the same problem as many countries in the region: Borders drawn with little regard to populations on the ground.
Myanmar is a good example of this. Typically the people with the guns can seize power. This does not mean it is the will of the people.
I heard an NPR story that there is a large backlog of asylum requests from Afghani that worked with the US government. They see the writing on the wall.
People with guns are nothing without support from local people. They'll always lose to other people with guns and support from local people. Because you need to feed, you need safe passages, you need cooperation with local people. If you have strong back up from another country which will supply you with enough goods, you can suppress all local people, but that's can't continue forever.
And yes, as I see that situation, Afghani local people do support Taliban, like it or not. They are Muslim people and they want Muslim country with Sharia law. Forcing democracy on such people does not do any good. You can't quickly change culture. USSR tried to eradicate religion for 80 years and former USSR countries are very religious atm.
But the Taliban have an ideology, which is not aligned with democracy, and they would not want to legitimize what they consider a foreign system put in place by a foreign power.
Afghanistan is an aggregate of tribes with shifting alliances and ideologies. With that in mind, the question "what do people of Afghanistan want" makes little sense.
If you accept the above statement, then very little of what has been done by US in Afghanistan makes sense either.
Aka collaborating with the invaders. I know Afghan tribal factionalism doesn't reflect Westphalia state mores, but purging traitors post war is the norm. US should have done more to extract these folks.
And countless other terrorist or suspected terrorists( or just bystanders) were assassinated by dronestrikes, so this is probably what he or she was referring to.
I wasn't trying to imply that there was no irony, just pointing out that the most obvious US Afghanistan campaign most wanted person assassination took place elsewhere. But with what you and others have pointed out it sounds like Osama Bin Laden isn't necessarily the only obvious example.
I assumed they were referring to the assassination of Qasem Soleimani last year [0], but there are plenty of less publicized examples as well. Technically that was in Iraq, but I think it's the method the US is objecting to, not the location.
It was a bad idea to go in. Having gone in, made a generations long commitment to people and started the work, it was a mistake to come out. But both mistakes were (are) wildly popular with the US electorate.
It would've been a bad idea to not go in and maintain Afghanistan as the El Dorado for international terrorists. The Taliban got the message rather quickly though, the occupation was unnecessary.
However, only in hindsight is it obvious that Afghanistan could not be turned around, to reverse the decades-long descent into tribal mob rule. It was a mistake worth making.
>However, only in hindsight is it obvious that Afghanistan could not be turned around, to reverse the decades-long descent into tribal mob rule.
I don't think this is true at all. I think we knew from Japan, Korea and other "projects" that it works but it takes generations.
We knew that before going in.
We know it now even though it suits people to pretend it's impossible and that people in Afghanistan are somehow different to people literally everywhere else...
Its exactly this sort of ignoring of known facts that gives the US a bad name. The US is great at shock and awe and giving up.
Japan was already a highly literate, secular, capitalist society when nation building started. And they're still not really a democracy (they only recently changed governing party for instance, or take a look at their attitudes to criminal justice).
The US has had one foot out of the door of Afghanistan since day one. In Japan the US wanted an ally against the communists. Rebuilding was important. In Afghanistan, the US had no such need. So we didn't bother.
You can build nations (eg Japan). It takes longer when you're working from a rougher starting place. I don't think these are unreasonable points of view. Nor were they novel before Sept 11th 2001.
I should say the coalition or nato rather than the US for a lot of the above. Plenty of other countries followed along on an obvious bad idea.
I don't think you can find anything remotely comparable in US history that would give you the answer as to whether this mission was feasible or not, ahead of time.
> However, only in hindsight is it obvious that Afghanistan could not be turned around, to reverse the decades-long descent into tribal mob rule. It was a mistake worth making.
Dubious, but at leaat arguably true. But, unfortunately, the mistake you suggest is worth making is not the mistake we actually made, the serious effort in Afghanistan being shortchanged early on for the distraction of the war of choice in Iraq. Both Iraq and Afghanistan were (among other issues, particularly with Iraq) afflicted with “counterinsurgency on the cheap” disease in the Bush Administration, with fairly predictable consequences even if one thinks that nation-building with counterinsurgency warfare by the US as a key pillar was viable.
> only in hindsight is it obvious that Afghanistan could not be turned around
It's exactly this kind of stupid, arrogant, historically illiterate rhetoric that gets us into trouble.
Between the Brits and the Soviets, Afghanistan has been occupied half a dozen times in the modern era. Each time the occupiers have sought to reshape Afghan society from the bottom up into something resembling a modern western character. Every one has ultimately failed in a similar way. So now Americans act surprised that the seventh attempt failed? Are you fucking joking?
> Each time the occupiers have sought to reshape Afghan society from the bottom up into something resembling a modern western character.
You underestimate the degree to which countries like Afghanistan or Iran were already "westernized". Cities like Kabul or Teheran weren't that different from Istanbul. The Islamists that you seem to conflate with "Afghan society" are a modern phenomenon.
It's true that many have tried (and failed) to deal with this problem. The only ones who have succeeded unfortunately tend to be cold-blooded strongmen like Hafez/Basher al-Assad, Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi. Broader civil society is not equipped to deal with it. The mission objective was to change this. Despite the failure, it was a noble objective.
You speak from your position within a privileged society wherein religious extremism is a thing of the distant past. Imagine for a moment that your military didn't exist and that armed evangelicals chose to ride into every major city to defend some of their "values". How exactly would you defend yourself and your (lack of) values? I suspect you would react by keeping your head down and hoping for better times.
> You underestimate the degree to which countries like Afghanistan or Iran were already "westernized". Cities like Kabul or Teheran weren't that different from Istanbul.
Pick any aspect you like-- industrial, legal, political, civil, architectural, anything-- and tell me how "westernized" Afghanistan was in 1929, or 1919, or 1878, or 1838? Do you even know what those dates are? I'll give you a hint: moments in history, when Afghanistan was much the same as it was when we invaded in 2001, that could have enlightened us regarding our fate if we were willing to be educated.
> The Islamists that you seem to conflate with "Afghan society" are a modern phenomenon.
Modern radical islamism is completely irrelevant to my point. I neither mentioned nor even thought about it when writing my comment.
If history is any guide, not many decades will pass before some other wealthy nation again decides to civilize Afghanistan, and the inevitable tragic and bloody failure will again be justified post-hoc by historically illiterate folks who say things like "Gee whiz, who could have seen that coming? Oh well, at least it was a noble cause."
> Modern radical islamism is completely irrelevant to my point. I neither mentioned nor even thought about it when writing my comment.
You didn't think of it? If I understand correctly, your point is that Afghanistan has been "mostly the same" for 200 years straight and that by invading this country, the same mistake has been repeated over and over, for the same reason. That's a remarkable feat of reductionism. Big, if true!
> You're detouring into minutae in order to avoid my refutation of your idiotic "only in hindsight" claim.
Detour into minutae? Let's be clear: I'd like to stop talking to you, your style of debate is quite unpleasant. I get it, you have opinions. You can keep them.
> Nowhere did say or imply that Afghanistan has been "mostly the same" for 200 years straight.
How else am I to interpret this paragraph?
"Pick any aspect you like-- industrial, legal, political, civil, architectural, anything-- and tell me how "westernized" Afghanistan was in 1929, or 1919, or 1878, or 1838? Do you even know what those dates are? I'll give you a hint: moments in history, when Afghanistan was much the same as it was when we invaded in 2001, that could have enlightened us regarding our fate if we were willing to be educated."
The mistake is the same only if the objective is mostly the same and the country is mostly the same. If not, then your "could've seen that one coming!" assertion just falls apart. In particular, to disregard the rise of Islamism and the power-grab of the Taliban that preceded the US invasion strikes as willfully ignorant.
This is what makes your argument so weak - these premises are indefensible and you don't seem eager to even try. Instead, you resort to a gatekeeping maneuver. Nice try!
> I'll leave it to you to somehow divine what I did say.
Refusing to clarify when required immediately disqualifies you from debate.
I think you're having trouble interpreting it simply because you don't know what you're talking about. You don't know the significance of those dates, for example, so you probably can't imagine why I left 1979 off that list. You don't know how the country evolved throughout the British occupation, so you have no idea how absurd it is to talk about how "westernized" it was. This stuff is obvious to anyone who knows anything about the country's history.
The real problem is that your question doesn't even make sense. It makes no sense to posit whether Afghanistan has changed, because Afghanistan isn't a single entity. It's barely even a country. So the answer is yes and no. Vast rural areas are indeed almost unchanged since the pre-British era; life in eastern mountain valleys, for example, looks pretty much the same as it did a hundred years ago, with the notable and somewhat jarring exception of cell phones. Kabul and Khandahar on the other hand went through drastic changes mid-century. These are essentially different countries.
> The mistake is the same only if the objective is mostly the same and the country is mostly the same. If not, then your bold "could've seen that one coming!"-claim just falls apart.
That's some interesting logic. I and others who predicted failure in Afghanistan over twenty years ago were unaware of these rules, and yet we somehow managed to predict the course of the conflict. That could just be a total coincidence. Or it could be that a deep knowledge of the country and its history allows one to analyze the long sequence of conflicts there, differences and commonalities between the various actors and conditions of the country across those times, and then draw informed predictions. Do you think maybe a few books were written about this exact topic?
> In particular, to disregard the rise of Islamism and the power-grab of the Taliban that preceded the US invasion appears willfully ignorant.
You might be surprised to learn (and I'm guessing you'll actually be surprised) that the rise of militant Islamism did not make us more likely to win. Regardless, both the Brits and the Ruskies, who had very difference experiences in Afghanistan in many ways, including the absence and presence of militant Islamism respectively, were nevertheless able to confidently tell us that our own little project was almost certainly doomed. And hey, they were right, imagine that.
There aren't any "premises" here that have to be defended. This is just information about our countries and their common history that is easily accessible to you if you cared to find it. You could start with Edward Ingram's paper that I cited in a different comment.
Look, this is all pretty simple. Your claim was, "only in hindsight is it obvious that Afghanistan could not be turned around". This claim is idiotic. Not only idiotic; it's eye-rollingly, mind-numbingly stupid. Lots and lots of people knew exactly what was going to happen, and they've been proven right at every turn. And nobody on the other side of the debate, not even the most die-hard neocons, made the argument that our victory was assured. The neocon argument involved a lot of technical hand waiving about America's strength in intel and covert ops, but none of them was stupid enough to claim that failure was unforseeable, like you're claiming. Go read Doug Feith's book. Or Wolfowitz and Perle. Or anything.
Even worse was your second claim, that after trillions dollars and tens of thousands of lives lost, the "mistake was worth making". This is some arrogant, ignorant, first-world tech-bro idiocy that I don't even deem worthy of spending time on, so I didn't.
I have to say, as fun as it is for me to point and make fun, I probably won't come back to this thread.
> It makes no sense to posit whether Afghanistan has changed, because Afghanistan isn't a single entity.
You're the one that claimed Afghanistan didn't change, or rather that it was "much the same", so blame yourself for "not making sense".
Of course it's worth making the distinction between the rural population and the urban population. Indeed, rural living conditions didn't change much. Nevertheless, the influence of militant Islamism, a novelty of the twentieth century, has brought drastic changes.
> I and others who predicted failure in Afghanistan over twenty years ago were unaware of these rules, and yet we somehow managed to predict the course of the conflict.
Did you really? What precisely did you (or they) predict? Have these predictions been published at the time? Surely they must be available?
> You might be surprised to learn (and I'm guessing you'll actually be surprised) that the rise of militant Islamism did not make us more likely to win.
That's not at all the way I think about it. Islamists stand little chance in battle against the US military. The question is: Can you build a civil government and train it to stand on its own feet against the threat? This is a worthwhile endeavor, even if the odds are against you.
To that end, your 200 years of history aren't all that relevant. By looking at history, I could've predicted that the end of Apartheid would lead to the current state South Africa is in. That still wouldn't be an argument in favor of maintaining Apartheid.
It's true, history doesn't always side with the "goods guys" and if you predict ahead of time that the "bad guys" will win, maybe you'll be able to say "I told you so, idiots!". Congratulations for that, may you revel in your glee until the end of your days.
> Regardless, both the Brits and the Ruskies, who had very difference experiences in Afghanistan in many ways, including the absence and presence of militant Islamism respectively, were nevertheless able to confidently tell us that our own little project was almost certainly doomed.
The Brits tried to install an already ousted monarch in order to turn Afghanistan into client state. The Russians tried to bring fledgling communists into power.
I don't think either are comparable to trying to prop up an already existing civil government whose weak defenses just didn't stand a chance against hordes of extremists with rifles and a death wish.
What precisely is it that lets you draw the conclusion that, because the former two scenarios were "doomed", surely the latter one must be doomed as well? Please don't answer in the form of book references or papers. I've read through your Ingraham reference and it doesn't actually contain any insight about why that British plan didn't work out.
> I have to say, as fun as it is for me to point and make fun, I probably won't come back to this thread.
Just when I'm about to call your bluff? How convenient.
The modern history of Afghanistan is in large part the history of England and Russia. England's interest in Afghanistan was economic, the goal being to protect and expand British hegemony over trade by preserving a buffer between the expanding Russian empire and British territories in India (which then included modern-day Pakistan) and the Middle East.
Both the British and the Russians considered Afghanistan to be backward and ungovernable, and both made it their mission to civilize it to more modern standards, with particular focus on economic standards. See for example Britain's forcible re-installation of Shah Shuja in 1839, who was amply patronized by the East India Company.
Here's a good summary of Britain's societal goals in Afghanistan by Edward Ingram from his paper Great Britain's Great Game: An Introduction [1]:
"The first industrialized state and the first free society [Britain], in its own eyes naturally, was to take advantage of its superior technology, its steam power, its iron and its cotton goods to take over and develop the economy of Central Asia. And after British goods would follow British values, in particular, respect for private property. Given security for the just rewards of labour, nomads would settle and oasis cities surrounded by tribes of herdsmen would be turned into territorial states with agreed frontiers on the European model"
I agree. It is inevitable I think. I am glad the US is pulling out - there is no way we can fund the war anymore and regardless of what happens in Afghanistan, I would vote for no-more-war at every opportunity, including ending all the current ones.
The cheapest option was to do nothing. The best opinion was nation building. The US choose to pay for nation building but give up before any nations were built. The worst of all possible worlds.
There is an approach to politics that basically says people create excess value (more than they need to survive), and all politics is just deciding what to spend that on. Each "side" will sometimes squander resources just to stop the other "side" getting them: someone on the left will gold plate social security so that someone on the right can't use the money for tax cuts.
I never really subscribed to the theory, but I have to admit the "war on terror" seemed designed from day one to bankrupt the US treasury. Either the people in charge were all really stupid or it was intended, and I don't think they were all stupid.
I'd rather spend war funds on building our own infrastructure. American infra is falling apart. I think regardless of the %, it is simple - Afghan war has an opportunity cost.
Remember, not long before the war on terror Clinton had managed to balance the budget. What's the deficit at now?
Not all of that is Afghanistan of course. There was Iraq 2 too. And a bunch of other conflicts. And 2 rounds of tax cuts. I'd include 2008 bailouts but I think they ran at a profit in the medium term?
As a French person, I remember very clearly when war in Afghanistan and then Irak was decided almost 20years ago, and how obvious the outcome was for us even back then.
In 2003 I was 16, but we already knew how this was going to end up, and tried to warn our American friends, yet we were bullied with the whole « freedom fries » bullshit.
Since then, we saw events unroll exactly as we expected for basically 20years with no significant deviation from the idea we had of how things would go. Really frustrating and tragic situation.
Every time I hear "freedom fries", an interesting bit of trivia come to my mind: the guy who forced the capitol cafeteria to add Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast to the menu, Rep. Bob Ney, was one of only three republicans in the House to vote against the Patriot Act.
I am not trying to devalue your Frenchness, but there were protests around the world at the time. In London for example, but Amsterdam too ( I was there ).
Oh yes, Europe in general was against it. France got the honor of getting canceled before cancelling was cool but I’m not saying we were smarter than the rest. But America was fooled
I don't know the answer to the overall mess there, but the USA should have, at the very least, offered to take these Afghani patriots and their families away to a safe place of their choosing. But who am I kidding, the USA barely takes care of their own soldiers, and has a history of abandoning the people of foreign countries that no longer hold interest.
There was a program in place to allow (some of) the Afghani helping the US to immigrate. It is just moving a lot slower than the troop withdrawal, leaving them to die.
We did the same damn thing last time when we fought a shadow war there against the soviets. Many historians credit America's abandonment of our Mujahideen allies with the rise of both the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Shame. I kept thinking the US feels so different from when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s. But maybe it hasn't, I have. Instead of being proud to be an American, all I've felt for years now, is shame. Shit like this is why.
Dan, I honestly don't understand what the slur is, please tell me, but I will take your point that less politics is better.
When I put 'good' in quotes, if that's what you perceived as a slur, I simply meant that 'good' as perceived by Americans - Amercanized Afghans, which doesn't mean some kind objective good, since I don't think Americans conform to some objective good either. But if that was the issue, then clearly I made my point extremely poorly.
Between that and "these are not people we want in our country" and other things you said, it snaps closely to the grid of blatant prejudice. If that's not what you intended to convey, please disambiguate your intent more clearly in the future—it doesn't communicate itself automatically.
Half of Eastern Europe plus Germany used Western and Russian airplanes at the same time after the cold war ended. Before the Eurofighter finally arrived, the best fighter jets the Luftwaffe had were MIG-29s.
IIRC the west intelligence community reported him as a sort of control on the taliban. How or why is a bit of a deep dive, but historically it looks like they were right.
Its impossible to subdue a society little removed from the 7th century, unless you're willing to replicate the actions of Alexander the Great, Mohammed, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Abdur Rahman Khan:
That is, slaughter or enslave all males from any tribes who oppose you [1], take their women for your own [2], and enforce your own culture, language and religion [3].
All of that is rather politically incorrect these days, so Afghanistan and nations like it will remain unconquerable except for nations like China who are still willing to carry out that level of annexation and assimilation.
Where is the outrage over Afghanistan? So much of our money was spent on this catastrophic failure while so many people in own country struggle with basic needs. I'm furious. Why is this colossal waste of money tolerated by the upper middle classes?
Have you noticed that the stock market keeps going up? The upper middle class is feasting quite nicely, I doubt many remember where Afghanistan is. They certainly don't have any skin in that game, that is for certain.
The general populace, those that supply their children as cannon/IED fodder, has no control of the "game". I propose that all of Congress and those that work for the federal gov't must send their children into these wars as general infantry. Let's see what happens to our forever wars then.
Two trillion dollars. You can probably use your imagination to think of some better ways that money could have been spent instead of another lost war.
Fundamentally, the issue is competency. I guess I wouldn't be as furious if at least we had "won" and Afghanistan became a safe and prosperous democracy with some enshrined rights for people, but we didn't get that. We got absolutely nothing.
We flushed all that money down the toilet then walked away, and there will be no consequences of any kind for the people who are responsible.
