Cut your losses. We should never had been in there other than to get OBL but Bush chickened out with AF and didn’t make them give him up when we knew where he went to after Tora Bora.
The prize would have been a massive reduction in opium production. Nowadays with most US OD deaths being on Chinese synthetics and lobbyist-supported Sackler shit, the landscape's evolved a tad.
Total defeat tends to do that, yeah. A better description might be that resisted regime change usually doesn’t work. Which is certainly not unfair with regards to Afghanistan.
If we had rebuilt Iraq like we did Germany and Japan, it probably would have worked. We could have created a secular, democratic state. We would have had to keep several hundred thousand troops there for a decade or more to make it happen, though, and there wasn't the political will to do so.
It's quite egregious how the US thinks it has the right to force a regime change in any state it chooses, and that "secular" and "democratic" is always the answer. This is an extremely Western biased, and sorry to say, extremely ignorant way of thinking.
First of all, I didn't say that the US had the right to force a regime change on anyone it chose. You're reading that into my comment. I only said that, if we wanted to actually change a place like Iraq, we couldn't do it "on the cheap" like we tried to do.
Back in World War II, we didn't initiate the "forcing". Once we won, what did you want us to do? Leave Germany and Japan to nurse their grievances, rebuild their militaries, and come back 20 years later for another round? (Note the pattern of Germany between World Wars I and II.) Having won, we (quite rightly in my view) decided that they were going to be transformed. Don't want your society transformed by outsiders by force? Don't start wars with them that you're going to lose in the end.
If you want to say that Iraq is a less justified case, I might agree. If you want to say that going to war to remove him was the wrong thing to do, that's a reasonable position. But having removed him, what should we do next? Just help the people set up any semblance of a government, and walk away?
It may be that secular can't work in some place like Iraq. That's possible. It may be that democratic can't work, either, not without preparing people for a generation. But what would you shoot for instead? Who should be the non-democratic leader, and why should it be them? And why do you think that way would work better?
> Don't want your society transformed by outsiders by force? Don't start wars with them that you're going to lose in the end.
Iraq was invaded by the US and its allies, especially in 2003, under the guise of baseless WMD. Yet, the political leaders in the US and its allies never faced any ramifications for their actions, that directly resulted in the deaths and mutilations of hundreds of thousands of people over time. But hey, they're just "brown people", so who cares, right?
> not without preparing people for a generation
"Preparing" meaning brainwashing, correct? Again, what gives the US the right to "prepare" people of other states and countries, especially since we see the failures of US-style "democracy" and "secularism". Face the facts, people in the Middle East are generally conservative and religious, and they don't see Western style democracy or secularism as a solution, particularly when many aspects of those directly contradict their religion and culture. Furthermore, we saw what happens when the local population elects someone not in line with US's interests (see Morsi, etc.).
The US is now forced to declare peace with the Taliban, after all it's put Afghanistan and its people through. Countless lives and trillions of dollars later, and it's back to where things started (almost).
I'll say this again, since you seem to have ignored it the first time: I'm not defending the invasion of Iraq. So you can stop saying "But Iraq!" as if that somehow refutes my position. It doesn't. (Neither does "But Afghanistan!")
> "Preparing" meaning brainwashing, correct?
Well, take Japan. The people there had been brainwashed into a cult of the emperor and militarism. So the choice is, leave them brainwashed into something that sees no problem with trying to kill massive numbers of foreigners, or brainwash them into something else.
Again, what gives us the right to choose to do so? That they attacked us, and that we won.
Is building a massive military control zone down the middle of a country "success"? So Korea, at the moment, is success and the Berlin Wall divided Germany was success?
Japan was definitely success. We changed the culture enough that they never reappeared as a military threat, to ourselves or anyone else.
Germany was a success as well. We changed a culture that had war as an ingrained part into one that has been peaceful for generations. And the Berlin Wall was not the fault of America or the west.
As for Korea... we continue to be there, not because we're trying to change their culture, but because we are trying to deter invasion from North Korea.
Germany and Japan were mono-ethnic industrial states that largely didn't have anyone sabotaging the reconstruction, and Germany had the disadvantage of being split in half; everyone wanted to surrender to the US, because the alternative was the Soviet Union.
Well that's the reason the War on Terror is such a stupid concept. There was no win condition, because we never defined one or stuck to it.
As Kissinger pointed out in World Order (love or hate the man, it's a good read) - military force is a political tool to achieve political goals. And just like Kissinger's abject failure to achieve any meaningful political goals other than endless, meaningless war and death, it's because he could never define goals that could be achieved in the first place.
And that's the story of American foreign policy in the middle east. Our leaders and political theorists can't even agree on what goals should be or even goals that can be reached - just meaningless diatribe about "presence" and "if we're not there someone else will step in."
Not just the middle east, but the world over. We can't have normal relations with Cuba because they're repressive, yet we'll sell weapons to Vietnam? Politicians get maligned for simply meeting with Bashar al-Assad, but selling weapons to Saudi Arabia gets met with a shrug? The political establishment in the U.S., usually backed by the media, pushes a nonsensical foreign policy that's often against U.S. interests. Turning Iraq, Libya, and Syria into failed states runs contrary to just about any goal you can imagine for the U.S., but the political and media establishment decided to go at it full bore for whatever reason.
I think you missed my point, which was that the wars in the Middle East failed because we didn't have clear political objectives. That's not true in the other examples you listed, we have pretty clear goals as it relates to the Saudis and Cubans. With respect to Libya and Syria we're more sideline players but the goals are still fairly clear.
If you try and apply a consistent morality onto geopolitics you're going to see everyone is hypocritical. But geopolitics is not a debate between philosophers on morality and political theory. It's applied game theory closer to what Sun Tzu wrote than Hobbes or Locke.
The US can't have normal relations with Cuba because the families of those who fled are swing voters in Florida. Whereas nobody cares about Vietnam and they're now a fairly normal far east state (effectively one-party, but so is Singapore) and communist in name only like China.
> Turning Iraq, Libya, and Syria into failed states runs contrary to just about any goal you can imagine for the U.S
All of them had publicly defied the US at some point. It's the insult that matters to the establishment.
I think if you say "often against the non-ruling population of USA's interests", then you might find a reason why the elite still sell arms to both sides.
> Well that's the reason the War on Terror is such a stupid concept. There was no win condition.
What if the win condition is actually having a constant percieved threat, and thus a war to act on said threat.
From someone not from the US, american politics is dominated with who is right and who is wrong. The entire political spectrum seems to be divided between "winners and losers" and the politics seem very black and white compared to my experience with politics from other countries.
What if the wars the US have started are merely a political tool to rally the population for party support?
The thing you're observing is the stubbornness and arrogance derived from the rugged individualism that defines the American identity. It's not that politics is about who is right and who is wrong, but the notion that any individual always believes they are right. It's not about being a winner or a loser, but being the good guy in your own narrative - others be damned. There's this very deep divide between that mindset that we respect as Americans and the utility of those that exemplify it being in positions of leadership in a representative democracy.
The problem is that those that get elected or rise through the ranks of military and our government tend to be the exact people that shouldn't. That's not necessarily just an American thing, since selfish and proud people exist everywhere.
What it leads to is not some conspiracy to keep endless wars going to stay in power. To the contrary, the endless wars are a product of the continuous flux of people who believe they are right and arrogantly refuse to believe they can be wrong at all. If you speak with those in the civil service or those educated by our thought leaders in foreign policy, a consistent notion in why we continue these pointless wars is not because we have some absolute objective. It's because we believe that if we aren't there, someone else will be, and better us than them. That is the deep arrogance and stubbornness of America at work, that we are always right, even in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.
Sorry for the rambling. It's just that some of this deeply upsets me and I've had this debate many times with family members and friends who have more direct influence and experience.
Of course, since OBL was being sheltered in Pakistan by the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, and much of the support for extreme Islamism was coming from Saudi Arabia (as were some of the hijackers), and those countries were untouchable, the reprisals had to be carried out against the two Arab Muslim countries that were least popular with the US instead.
(Much of the supplies for Afghanistan had to be driven across a thousand miles of lawless Pakistani frontier and were occasionally attacked there; the Afghan occupation was also hampered by being unable to pursue or fire across the Pakistani border.)
I initially wrote a response about why it isn't worth it. Many downsides and not as many upsides, but on second thought I realized I was prejudging the HN community and I don't like that I was doing that. Considering this is a day old and probably only people particularly interested in the topic are still reading, I'll give a go.
I'm not fully sure how to structure this, so I'm just going to dive into a list of potential answers to the original question: What was/is there to win? While I am aiming at the question about Afghanistan, general region topics and Iraq factor in very much as well.
1. Destabilization: Much of the problem in the GWOT was and is due to the confusion of purpose. Some saw it as to defeat Al Qaeda. Some as revenge for 9/11 (despite the fact that most of the hijackers were Saudi Wahhabists, even if they had been in the Afghan training camps. That eventually evolved over time to issues with the Taliban, and it's various networks like the Haqqani and the Quetta councils in Pakistan. The problem is that while certain groups like the military leadership (such as Petraeus) bought into this, they didn't understand or weren't empowered to counter the underlying desire for instability at the political and above level. When I say above I mean what I call the political "shadow players", the ones that exist through multiple presidencies and have a huge influence over top-down decision trees in government. I like to use Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger as prime examples. They in turn influenced the top level political entities to make moves often counter to the surface purpose of the war(s). A great example of this would be when Ian Bremmer and Rumsfeld, despite protestation from the military, decided to tell the Iraqi commander with 40k troops asking what to do with them to go fuck off. In the end, much of actions of that type were very much geared towards keeping things unstable, for reasons I will go into further, and it's worth noting that's pretty much exactly what has happened.
2. Containment: Let's be frank. Iran is sandwiched in between Iraq and Afghanistan and it has been in the crosshairs for quite some time now. Also worth remembering in context is that much of Saddams power was increased when we quietly backed him in the Iran-Iraq war. The joke on the ground used to be "How do we know Saddam has WMDs? Because we still have the receipts!" Not much actually changed from the 90's and destabilization of the region plays into keeping Iran busy there instead of elsewhere such as in Lebanon and Syria, at least to a degree. It's more than that, but Iran is the main target of containment. It also was used as a draw to get fighters to show up there instead of in western countries, another form of containment. Lots of foreign fighters started showing up the body count.
3. Presence: By establishing and expanding the middle east and western asian connections, infrastructure, bases, etc, we have closer inroads for conflicts in the future, and that's not even necessarily geared towards ME countries. It could be China, Russia, Africa, etc. Africa in particular happened to play this out with Libya, Sudan, etc, and it continues to this day.
4. Combat hardiness: at a more Machiavellian level, the relatively tame conflict(s) on blue-side were seen as a good proving ground to refine modern combat techniques, tools, tactics and strategies. Lots of think-tank analysis after the fact to help gear up towards conflicts in a future that might be more tri-polar conflict likely. It's a dirty business to be a general and have to think like that, but it is what it is.
5. Black markets: Just as in Vietnam, the destabilization and control offered a great opportunity for certain organizations to participate in black markets. See, for example, congress is supposed to have purse string control of the CIA... but if they can pull some Iran-Contra esque gun-drug running on a suddenly booming opium producing country...
Brilliant response, thanks for taking the time to write it up! Realize that the community here is not a fixed quantity. If you lead with high effort comments like this, eventually the community might return the favor. Unfortunately, I don't understand the politics here enough to personally offer any useful critique. If you don't get the feedback you want here, posting a version of this to an Open Thread on Slate Star Codex might start a good conversation.
Alternatively it is an inspiring story of a bunch of ragtag rebels who never gave up and never lost faith for decades and ultimately defeated the World’s most powerful military.
This has been a recurring theme in history. If you want to overthrow the world's largest best equipped most powerful armies, build a small guerilla force of ragtag rebels. This also applies to startups, research, engineering and other facets of life.
Actually there were many more successful conquerors of Afganistan (Greco-Baktrian Kingdon, Mauryan Empire, Kushan Empire, Sassanian Empire, Ghaznavids, Mongol Empire, Timurid Empire, Mughal Empire and Safavid Empire to name just a few) then failed ones.
Alexander of Macedon[2], British, Soviets and now USA have failed because they all have had unrealistic objectives.
But Afghanistan had been ruled by "foreign" rulers for most of it's history. They all had one thing in common - they have kept multiple forces in balance and limited their rule to the capital.
> He shows how governing these peoples was relatively easy when power was concentrated in a small dynastic elite, but how this delicate political order broke down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Afghanistan's rulers mobilized rural militias to expel first the British and later the Soviets. Armed insurgency proved remarkably successful against the foreign occupiers, but it also undermined the Afghan government's authority and rendered the country ever more difficult to govern as time passed.
> Afghanistan is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how a land conquered and ruled by foreign dynasties for more than a thousand years became the "graveyard of empires" for the British and Soviets, and what the United States must do to avoid a similar fate.
Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History
by Thomas Barfield [1]
> Recounting the plight of the most powerful leader of the time as he led the most sophisticated army of its day into the treacherous world of tribal warlords, Holt describes those grueling campaigns and the impact they had on Alexander, his generals, their troops, and the world. Into the Land of Bones also examines the conflict from the point of view of the local warlords who pushed the invading Greeks to the limits of their endurance—and sometimes beyond, into mania and mutiny.
whats up with the "text only" version? is it somehow required to deliver any service at all if i decline the consent dialog and this is what they came up with?
I don’t know, but if declining tracking consent serves a plain text view I’d love all websites to adopt it. Saves clicking reader mode which doesn’t always work. I’m on mobile though which wraps text nicely. What happens on desktop? Browser full width?
ACK. i am still curious if this got implemented because of the consent dialog and legal requirements to deliver a service in case consent is declined... maybe it is the first time i see it properly implemented somehow?
Nothing and no. It served as a jobs program of sorts to a lot of places that have nothing else, so that's about all it has boiled down to in the past 20 years. The people who started it all will die peacefully, though I hope I am wrong.
I like how the US Department of Defense became the US Department of War right about the time it changed its name from the Department of War to the Department of Defense.
And arbitrary armed violence is "world police". And militias we decide to back are "rebels", the ones we don't are "terrorists". And governments we don't like are "regimes". And acts of terrorism from our side are "targeted killings". And killed civilians are "collateral damage". The list is endless.
Watched Vice[0] recently starring Christian Bale as a corpulent power-grabbing[1] vengeful, power-behind-the-throne, Dick Cheney; Amy Adams as his steely missus; Sam Rockwell as a likable "W"; and Steve Carell (of all people) playing Donald "Don" Rumsfeld.
They get to the part post 9/11 where the gloves come off and they sit down with corrupt legal advisers (Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo), many who are advocates of the Unitary Executive Theory[2], to concoct a legal firewall around their actions. The twisted logic is: The US does not torture therefore the varieties of "enhanced interrogation" being used cannot, ipso facto, be torture.
Alongside "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture) we have those other Newspeak euphemisms[3] "extraordinary rendition" (state-sponsored kidnapping) and "enemy combatants" (any fighting-age male present in a combat zone).
Then there's the legal limbo that is Guantanamo Bay, the suspension of habeas corpus[4] (a foundational legal right in modern democracies), and the frankly draconian USA PATRIOT Act.
The French supported "America gorilla revolution" against the British.
America has supported "gorilla revolution" for revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries against multiple nationals, at least some of which involved the CIA selling cocaine domestically for money to fund foreign weapons.
Which is half of a dozen? Which is six of the other?
This breaks several of the site guidelines. Would you please stop doing that on HN? You've been doing it a lot lately (to pick just one of many: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22450681) and it's not ok. We need senior users like you to set good examples, not bad ones.
War's changed. We don't line up on either side of the battlefield and run at eachother. Guerrilla warfare gives smaller numbers the advantage. All out blowing something up and paying the civilian penalty is a non-starter.
Agreed. At some point the Taliban and Pashtun nationalism become quite intertwined (even in areas of Pakistan). This made it so that probably not a insignificant porition of the Pashtun people sympathize with the Taliban if nothing else.
Well it's not changed that much, The Battle of Teutoburg Forest (9AD) was basically massive powerful army thinks it can win anywhere, guerrilla tactics (and maybe some luck) show that's not how war works.
In what sense did they take on the US military or win? Some of them continue to exist, I suppose, but that's rather like a defeated boxer claiming to have won simply for surviving the bout.
The various militas of Afghanistan were bombed and engaged haphazardly for years and now, it seems, we're withdrawing. That's hardly an Afghani victory in my mind.
One reason I have a problem with this kind of statement is that we should encourage the cessation of pointless wars, and not try to equate ending them with losing or being defeated.
The Afghans win because they successfully repelled the invaders after a long and terrible war. Repelling the invaders is a winning end state in a war where the start state was invasion by a foreign country.
This is as poor a "victory" as the others suggested in this thread. "We won because you spent so much money on bombs and missiles exploding on us, and soldiers occupying us" is a line I'd expect from Zap Brannigan and not anyone residing in reality. They didn't inflict anywhere near that dollar amount in damages, instead it was paid to American soldiers and contractors.
The simple fact is that the US occupied their country for years. Bombed and killed with complete impunity, and then decided to withdrawal. It's absurd to call that a victory for the Taliban or Afghanistan. Their claim to victory is that they aren't entirely dead at the time we wanted to withdraw and the reason for that is that we knew it would be immoral to use the force required to completely kill them, not any strategy or cunning from them.
It's bad rhetorically and morally to pretend like this is an American loss because that implicitly says that in order to "win" we'd need to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. We shouldn't have been there anywhere near as long as we were, we shouldn't have done anywhere near as much as we did, and it's great news that we're withdrawing. Calling it a loss, or a Taliban victory, isn't just immoral because it implicitly argues for perpetuation of the war, it's also completely delusional.
That's not what I said, but I certainly don't think Afghanistan or the Taliban won.
The war had no clear objectives. It just continued until people decided to stop it and stopping it is a good thing.
Regarding your question about why we didn't commit genocide, yes, it's because we realize that would be immoral and the American people wouldn't support it.
Not at all. It was our choice to withdraw and we did. That's not winning the war, that's our interests aligning.
Again, Afghanistan didn't force the US to withdraw - they survived because we chose to let them. We decided to withdraw not because of fierce Afghanistan resistance, more military personal committed suicide than were killed by enemy action, but instead because we elected a politician who thought the war was a waste of time.
This is not a time to lament with absurd claims like "Afghanistan won the war". Instead, we should be happy that a needless war is coming to an end.
They disagree with simple reality. As I laid out before, they won no significant battles, killed a relatively small amount of our people (relative to the number of theirs we killed, but also to something like the regular suicide rate). The damage they did, as you alluded to earlier, was almost entirely in the form of making us detonate expensive ordinance on them and pay people to occupy their country for decades. At every moment it was US decision makers deciding what would happen, from deciding that the invasion would start, that the occupation would continue, until the US decided the occupation would cease.
The Taliban may say whatever they like, but that doesn't make it so. It's simply wrong to claim they won or the US lost. It is good that our interests have aligned and the war will stop.
The Taliban quite likely will be back to their goal quite quickly: the ruling power of an islamist state Afghanistan. If that's the "aligned interest" the US fought for, it could have had that a lot cheaper.
Do you really believe we invaded afghanistan to save these people? You think we invaded iraq to bring freedom and democracy to the iraqis? Was turning libya and syria into rubble part of our campaign to bring happiness to these people? I guess propaganda does work. "Mission Accomplished".
You can. As they said in Vietnam, we had to destroy the village in order to save it. If the alternative is an Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban, I really do not see what there is to lose.
Imagine if much of that had instead been invested in renewable energy. The same people trumpeting energy independence could have had it and made the U.S. the dominant renewable exporter. Yet we still do everything possible to equate only oil to energy
Not to mention the reputational damage around the world and the lasting legacy of hatred that will be felt for generations of Afghan people towards the US. That kind of thing can take more than century to forget. The Chinese still hate the Japanese for the Rape of Nanjing in 1938 (there are probably better examples but I'm not a historian).
Reputational damage? Are you forgetting that the Taliban were utter bastards who banned female education, were unrecognized by most countries and murdered 3,000 US civilians one fine fall day? The reputational damage is done because we didn't kill them all when we had the chance.
This deal is capitulation. Only this time there won't be refugees grasping at the skies of helicopters. We'll just lock them out and watch the Taliban kill every educated woman in the country.
The Northern Alliance, which the US sided with, also contained its fair share of bastards: they've been accused of summarily executing thousands of Taliban POWs, murdering civilians in raids on villages, and profiting from the opium trade, among other things.
Despite fighting alongside Al-Qaeda and despite harbouring bin Laden, the Taliban aren't Al-Qaeda.
For what it's worth, the Taliban had by 2001, brought relative peace and stability to a country that had two decades of civil war, including the Soviets and lawless warlords and humanitarian crises, and wonton destruction/chaos that existed in the '90s. The Taliban itself was not directly involved with 9/11 (and I don't think they had any interest outside of Afghanistan), however, they had some complicity since they allowed OBL and Al Qaeda to train in Afghanistan (how about the responsibility of say, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia?).
Yes, the tradeoff was that they had a puritanical interpretation of Islam and had a horrible human rights record.
It's probably for the best now, but it shouldn't have needed to come to this. In "Call Sign Chaos" by Jim Mattis, he talks about how the Bush and Obama administrations both repeatedly ignored the recommendations of military and intelligence officials. The Bush administration was too cavalier and thought they knew best, the Obama administration was too weak and wanted to score political points by not providing the force that was required. When I was in the Marines, they told us that we shouldn't need to be there, but politicians from the 80s/90s left things such a mess after trying to stop the Soviets, that now we had to go try and clean up the mess created 20 years prior.
>When I was in the Marines, they told us that we shouldn't need to be there, but politicians from the 80s/90s left things such a mess after trying to stop the Soviets, that now we had to go try and clean up the mess created 20 years prior.
This is of course true but you can play this fallacy out forever. The right thing to do in the 80s was not to meddle. Then after that we should have cut our losses and stopped meddling. And now 40 years later we are cleaning up failed clean up attempts on failed clean up attempts.
At every point in this chain, the correct move is to admit you can't be world police and stop meddling.
left things such a mess after trying to stop the Soviets
So much contained in this one sentence. People need to go look at what backing an insurgency against a repressive but modernising government does and ask questions.
The effect of backing the mujahadeen on the actual Afghans was, I'm sure, never in the picture.
(Anyone remember the Living Daylights where James Bond teams up with the Oxford-educated Afghan head of the local islamists to beat the Russians together?)
One might say the whole effect of the domino theory was to justify US military intervention against Russia and every single place they did, it backfired.
Iran, the oil backed coup of the 1950s led to Pahlavi, hatred and fear which in turn led to Kohmeni in Paris. Simply letting the Iranians nationalise the oil industry would probably have been better long-term.
1953 to 2020, US oil interests stuffing up peace...
> One might say the whole effect of the domino theory was to justify US military intervention against Russia and every single place they did, it backfired.
A few counter examples: Greece, [South] Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia.
Chile is another well known example, though IMO U.S. involvement is wildly exaggerated. AFAIU, it was conservatives in the Chilean Congress that engineered and pushed for the coup. The prospect of American support (e.g. a wink from the CIA) simply made it a marginally easier sell among the people whose heads might roll if it failed.
None of which is a defense of the Domino Theory or a comment on the merits of intervention. The take away from all of this, IMO, is to avoid grand strategic theories and goals--context matters.
If you think Phillipines or Indonesia worked, I think you're wrong. Both have systemic corruption, massive structural issues and lingering left wing and Islamic rebellion. Indonesia killed millions in their counter communist reaction. Greece I grant you, "worked" within the limits you aren't a left wing Greek. The US wound up having to play in Greece and Turkey simultaneously, nobody is happy in the middle east really.
> If you think Phillipines or Indonesia worked, I think you're wrong. Both have systemic corruption, massive structural issues and lingering left wing and Islamic rebellion.
Both of those countries would have had systemic corruption and massive structural issues either way, just as they had before. U.S. intervention doesn't really figure into it. Anyhow, the goal was to stop the spread of communism, not lift people out of poverty.
The genocide of "communists" (i.e. Chinese and other outgroups) in Indonesia was absolutely abhorrent and a gross moral failure on the part of the U.S. But from the perspective of American geopolitical interests intervention wasn't a failure. It almost certainly wasn't even necessary, either, but that's beside the point.
Non-intervention has its own problems, too, as exemplified by Cambodia, Rwanda, and Syria[1]. Intervention vs non-intervention is a false dichotomy. To reiterate, context matters.
[1] I've said before on HN that I think Obama's refusal to directly intervene in Syria showed exceptional leadership, notwithstanding his about-face; indeed, because of his about-face. But that doesn't absolve the U.S. of its sins for having created the conflagration in the Middle East that resulted in the Syrian conflict. What Obama finally accepted, but everybody else refused to admit (including his own advisors), was that the U.S. was politically incapable of making the necessary commitments. Had the U.S. been capable--i.e. if the context were different--then greater intervention would have been the correct thing. What makes his decision so profound to me was that he accepted that reality at a moment when denial was easiest--when everybody felt it was the morally righteous thing to do (and arguably was), everybody wanted it, and when after it inevitably led to more bloodshed nobody would have ever blamed him, neither contemporaneously nor in the future.
I don't know if it's really fair to say that after 9/11 we were playing world police when we invaded Afghanistan. They were harboring Al Qaeda who had been carrying out smaller scale attacks on US assets for a while, culminating with 9/11. At that point you can't just ignore them and hope they stop; they'd been escalating violence for years.
We were always going to invade Iraq, as soon as GWB and Dick Cheney were elected it was inevitable. 9/11 just provided a convenient opportunity to manufacture the pretext by implying links between Iraq Intelligence and the hijackers.
The Bush administration did let the mission in Afghanistan creep from crippling al Qaeda, to reconstructing Afghan society so that al Qaeda could not return. This is what pulled us in to trying to dismantle the Taliban as well. Remember that Taliban and al Qaeda are distinct.
Off topic, but the whole concept of "world police" is just spin. A police force is one that enforces equally laws established by others. You cannot be at the same time the one who establishes the rules and who decides when and where to use force against those who break them. This is just arbitary use of violence.
"World police". I used to buy that, but the more I've learnt the more it seems it was just "corrupt this country for our own ends", covert control seemingly to support megalomania.
USA has certainly done a good job of pretending to be the good guy, whilst simultaneously arming bad guys and killing to support Capitalist and tyrannical goals.
For the Bush administration, they ignored initial recommendations to work with the locals after the initial invasion, creating a lot of unemployed, angry, young people with military training. For the Obama administration, they ignored recommendations to increase the military presence to a level that they could effectively remove the Taliban. Forces were kept low so they could keep saying "we're bringing the troops home" during speaches. It was like quitting an antibiotic treatment too soon; we eliminated the low hanging fruit, but the Taliban that remained had even better training, and could point to our prescence as a recruiting tool.
> to increase the military presence to a level that they could effectively remove the Taliban
This is easier said than done, if it is possible at all.
Having recently taken a dive into the U.S.' involvement in Vietnam, this argument rings eerily similar the one that got us into and led to our escalation in Vietnam.
I think these things are more possible than people believe.
If it were truly an existential threat the US would remove the Taliban very quickly (that doesn't imply a safe orderly society would result).
But Afghanistan, like Vietnam is an optional and non-essential conflict at this point with unclear definitions of victory. Maybe "victory" is packing up and going home at this point.
I don't think that was inevitable. If the Bush admin hadn't fucked up on such a grandiose scale after the invasion the result could have looked quite different (still surely far from pretty).
> ... the US would remove the Taliban very quickly...
No, no, no. The Taliban were broadly distributed throughout Southern Afghanistan, and they had a cross border sanctuary in Pakistan.
For its own reasons (Kashmir and the regional rivalry with India), Pakistan didn’t want to alienate the Taliban, and their military and ISI thus had extensive relations with the Taliban.
The US did not have enough leverage to get Pakistan to shut down the Taliban on its side of the border, and likewise did not want the destabilization of a nuclear state with borders on China and India that would accompany violations of Pakistani sovereignty inherent in large scale bombing.
> No, no, no. The Taliban were broadly distributed throughout Southern Afghanistan, and they had a cross border sanctuary in Pakistan.
I guess it depends on your definition of "remove". I don't doubt that a Taliban government could be very quickly overthrown by the US military. Probably within weeks. Now, the Taliban as an irregular militia is a completely different manner.
I remember watching a Vice documentary on Afghanistan called "This is what winning looks like". The line that struck me was a US Marine saying something like "the average Taliban fighter fights within 15 yards of their home". If that's anything close to true, no wonder the Taliban have been so hard to defeat.
There were over 100k US troops deployed to Afghanistan at the peak (part of 2010-2011). Between 2009 and 2013 it was over 50k.
The Soviet Union deployed over 115k for several years. The amount of fortune spent was a serious accelerator for the decline of the USSR.
Afghanistan is a large, dispersed, and landlocked country. With huge amounts of weapons from many sides. Decades of war. Little trust between population groups.
>>If it were truly an existential threat the US would remove the Taliban very quickly (that doesn't imply a safe orderly society would result).
With what, nukes? Or by sending 5 million soldiers using $400/gallon gasoline https://www.cbsnews.com/news/real-cost-of-gas-at-afghan-base... ? Like them or not, the Taliban are in their country and quite a few Afghani think like them. Let them be, with a major caveat--do not let anyone there attack us or our partners. I think they are rational enough to do that since USA did cause them a lot of problems.
They are so many problems in the world, USA cannot fix them. Not even make a dent.
Troop levels in Afghanistan kept increasing for the first decade of the war[1]. If a decade is considered "too soon," what should be considered "too long"?
Re bush: They also refused to negotiate / reintegrate the Taliban, in particular early on when they were weak (yes, there's a lot of parallels to Iraq). Once the Iraq war started there was very little attention paid to Afghanistan, for several years. Including very little effort building up security architecture.
Re Obama: there clearly was a lot wrong with the Afghanistan policy. But I'm not sure I really buy the "low troop level" argument. Even at peak deployment levels (pretty darn high) under Obama the military operations weren't going particularly well. And that wasn't sustainable.
> For the Obama administration, they ignored recommendations to increase the military presence to a level that they could effectively remove the Taliban.
1. Of course the military would ask for this, and complain after the fact.
2. It's easy for generals to make promises, but I have zero confidence that they would have actually delivered any results.
> increase the military presence to a level that they could effectively remove the Taliban
With Pakistan providing huge financial and logistical support to the Taliban, it would never be eliminated. Geopolitical experts understand that so long as Pakistan has the India problem, Afghanistan will have the Taliban as a buffer state.
One of the recurring complains / concerns of Pakistan is/was that Afghanistan post invasion was cooperating too much with India. From what I understand (which is certainly very limited) that was more fear than reality. But from the POV of Pakistan's,hugely anti-India, military, it's not that hard to understand how being encircled by India and a "puppet state" is seen as threatening.
I think there's pretty good evidence that the ISI has (does?) financed/organized training camps for anti India groups (like Lashkar-e-Taiba) in Afghanistan.
1) Fear of Indian sponsored proxies and being squeezed from both sides. An India friendly Afghanistan presents an existential danger to Pakistan's interests. Pakistan does not want to be encircled by hostile powers.
2) An unstable Afghanistan means possible anti-Pakistan elements taking root. Better to sponsor known "pakistan friendly" elements like the Taliban instead of unknowns.
3) Defense in depth. Pakistani military and political doctrine would use Afghanistan as a redoubt. Most of Pakistan is extremely flat until you get to the Hindu Kush/Pamir mountains. The idea would be, let India steamroll the flat lands, retreat into the mountains and cross the durand line, coordinate the response from Afghanistan.
Historically, the Pakistani intelligence forces have armed various mujahideen groups, both in Afghanistan, and in Indian Kashmir. Meanwhile, the Afghani government post-911 has been fairly close to India.
This hasn't been true as much recently because the Taliban and other groups became extremely powerful in Pakistan, especially in Pashtun tribal areas, and the Pakistani military was forced to intervene. However, the Pakistani military has never been able to completely corral their intelligence services, which is one reason why there isn't as much cooperation between the US and Pakistan anymore (they were once close allies), with US/India ties becoming closer and closer instead.
I've picked up a lot of anecdotes from various serviceman about the war in Afghanistan and I wonder how much of it is true.
> work with the locals after the initial invasion
1) Isn't it an ongoing meme in the US military that ANA troops are useless and that the government is corrupt to an unimaginable level?
2) Didn't we also originally burn their opium fields, only to allow it to become once again one of there chief economic exports since it was so vital to the local economies?
3) Is it true we had a formal policy of allowing elder tribal leaders to systematically rape young boys in order to be more accommodating to their local customs? Including trading viagra for tips on insurgent activity?
I realize some of these questions are pretty sensitive and may be uncomfortable to answer. It just seems like it needs to be brought up whenever we talk about the Afghan war (while it's usually swept under the rug...).
they ignored initial recommendations to work with the locals after the initial invasion, creating a lot of unemployed, angry, young people with military training
We then saw this play out to devastating effect with the de-Baathication agenda in Iraq.
I've been totally demoralized over nearly two decades of being AD, reserve and a civilian, at the level to which appointees and senior defense civilians just completely ignore those of us who have actual, ya know, experience with war.
Not just for now, it's the best decision the US government has made since 1973 Vietnam War withdrawal. Not one, but _three_ superpowers were defeated in Afghanistan: Britain, USSR and the US. You can't win a land war against insurgents who are spread out, have religious zeal about their fight, and don't mind dying. Or to be more precise you can, but you'd have to raze everything to the ground and kill everyone, which, while doable, does not seem like a good idea in this day and age.
I'm not a picking sides politically, but I see this as a perfect microcosm of problems of those two presidencies. I always thought during Obama's term it was a problem we got ourselves into and couldn't just leave, however much I don't think we should be interfering/policing other countries the way we did in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Seems like invading and destroying the pre-existing government of Iraq left the void, no?
I mean, if you drill a hole in the bottom of a bathtub and then stand there with your thumb in it to hold the water in, you don't blame the fact that it drained on your getting tired and pulling out your hand.
Hussein did a good job of keeping his thumb on the region, yes. But... when we took Iraq and Afghanistan, it was farmers with AK47s, Toyota Hilux trucks, and fertilizer IEDs.... when we “left” Iraq under Obama, we came back to ISIS with US military M16s, US Humvees, and high grade explosives.
We didn’t make ISIS... we just armed them very well (via Iraqi “security”).
The US filled enough of the void, especially post-surge, for things to be stable.
When the US invaded Iraq, there were a decent amount of protests against it, and generally, Americans grew to see it as a mistake. What's different here is this connection gets a lot less attention, and it was arguably worse for the region.
It doesn't seem surprising that it's portrayed that way, given that it's from a (former) high up member of the military. It's not like failures tend to be popular. There's plenty accounts describing it largely as a failure of the military too.
Found the two Afghanistan books by Steve Coll interesting. Certainly not flattering of any group involved.
Well, perhaps the Americans and the rest of NATO can go back to ignoring it.
Afghanistan is a country that has been in a civil war for over 40 years. It’s a tragedy for sure, especially when you compare photos of Kabul in 1979[0] to today, but ultimately no one is going to impose a peace there. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans could.
I expect there will be many more refugees. Once the Taliban regains control of the country I'm sure there will be many reprisals against those who supported the elected government.
Of course there won't be. I just watched Trump in a press conference say that (literal quote) "If bad things happen there after we leave we will be back with a huge force". You really can't make this stuff up.
While poking around for information about other places I ran across a great little documentary on Afghanistan by a guy named David Adams, who was one of the last people to see the Buddhas before they were destroyed. It’s a firsthand look into the history and culture of the country from a relatively apolitical, exploration based perspective, although it’s now somewhat old. Some people might find the whole Indiana Jones thing and the “quest” hook to the series a bit camp, but I quite enjoyed it. Encourage people give it a watch if they want to learn a bit more about the history of the place.
I like thinking about how today would look like from the perspective of someone 100 years in the future. For example Bill Gates might be more well known for his philanthropy (like Carnegie now) or, on some kind of level Trump might be listed as the most peaceful president. Sounds bizarre - I guess theres a paradox of intervention and non intervention at work.
Counterfactuals are hard. If Nato had stepped in after Syria used chemical weapons we may not have had a global refugee crisis. America has kept the peace pretty much everywhere but the middle east, and even there, I'd wager that Saudi Arabia would have nukes by now were it not for the American presence in the region.
But it is not really proven, that Assads troups did use it. (which was probablyop's point).
They knew, that chemical weapons could lead to an international intervention like in libya. So what would be the benefit, when they had air superiority anyway?
The rebel groups on the other hand would have profited very much from international intervention, so they could have an motive to stage it. And since ISIS and alike rose from the rebels, there surely were many cynical enough to do this "for the greater cause".
> If Nato had stepped in after Syria used chemical weapons we may not have had a global refugee crisis.
Let me give my point of view: if NATO countries had avoided supporting, training, financing and arming the "rebels", the war would have been over in six months- it probably wouldn't even have started. The refugees, the destroyed cities and the hundreds of thousands of deaths are fully on the conscience of the West.
NATO has no issues with military dictatorships as long as they support NATO, it is the form of government arming and training rebels would likely create.
Russia made it quite clear that they would defend the Assad regime, and ending that was the only way to realistically end the refugee crisis. Turkey has stepped in to fight Russia in Syria instead. I'm not sure how many Russian aircraft NATO intervention would have been able to shoot down before Putin explicitly brought up the nuke threat?
The US is currently quietly supporting Saudi Arabi in their war against the Houthis.
Again, hard to say with counterfactuals. Obama made the red line quite clear and he backed down anyway. In my view, Russia isn't going to start a nuclear war because they lost a few servicepersons in a unimportant regional ally.
So after 20 years of waging war with the Taliban and spending trillions of dollars, we sign a peace deal ? At the same time, we always seem to be eager to cut food stamps, refugee support, healthcare.
Other comments have taken shots at the foreign policy for Bush and Obama. We should remember how messy and complicated the region is, not to mention the home front.
“Add 100,000 troops and blast them all”, “get our boys home now”, “get revenge for 9/11”, “don’t repeat Soviet mistakes”. There’s a lot of clamoring at home, and a lot of long-standing tensions abroad.
We can assume for both the Bush and Obama administrations that most people were basically trying to do the best they could to solve intractable problems.
Foreign policy is really hard.
And despite my concern about the political motivations surrounding this deal, hints of peace are welcome.
It was a bad idea to go in. Having done so, killed so many people, made promises to so many more, pulling out is frankly disgraceful. America and the other countries involved have set that country back at least 100 years socially and ruined millions of lives.
Here's something that political (either way) Americans will understand but not accept.
If your neighborhood has termites, sooner or later they will destroy your property too. It wouldn't matter if they started from the house of your friend or your enemy. If you have a neighbor who is deliberately raising termites, you forget about termites and neutralize that neighbor first.
America, both parties really, deliberately side with the bad guys and later give excuses when things work out against them.
I wouldn't name names but it's not hard to guess who in this particular context is the neighbor raising termites.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadGraveyard of empires.
In fact, they increased production and got a host of veterans hooked on the junk.
Can we talk about things that happened in the last 70 years please
Back in World War II, we didn't initiate the "forcing". Once we won, what did you want us to do? Leave Germany and Japan to nurse their grievances, rebuild their militaries, and come back 20 years later for another round? (Note the pattern of Germany between World Wars I and II.) Having won, we (quite rightly in my view) decided that they were going to be transformed. Don't want your society transformed by outsiders by force? Don't start wars with them that you're going to lose in the end.
If you want to say that Iraq is a less justified case, I might agree. If you want to say that going to war to remove him was the wrong thing to do, that's a reasonable position. But having removed him, what should we do next? Just help the people set up any semblance of a government, and walk away?
It may be that secular can't work in some place like Iraq. That's possible. It may be that democratic can't work, either, not without preparing people for a generation. But what would you shoot for instead? Who should be the non-democratic leader, and why should it be them? And why do you think that way would work better?
Iraq was invaded by the US and its allies, especially in 2003, under the guise of baseless WMD. Yet, the political leaders in the US and its allies never faced any ramifications for their actions, that directly resulted in the deaths and mutilations of hundreds of thousands of people over time. But hey, they're just "brown people", so who cares, right?
> not without preparing people for a generation
"Preparing" meaning brainwashing, correct? Again, what gives the US the right to "prepare" people of other states and countries, especially since we see the failures of US-style "democracy" and "secularism". Face the facts, people in the Middle East are generally conservative and religious, and they don't see Western style democracy or secularism as a solution, particularly when many aspects of those directly contradict their religion and culture. Furthermore, we saw what happens when the local population elects someone not in line with US's interests (see Morsi, etc.).
The US is now forced to declare peace with the Taliban, after all it's put Afghanistan and its people through. Countless lives and trillions of dollars later, and it's back to where things started (almost).
> "Preparing" meaning brainwashing, correct?
Well, take Japan. The people there had been brainwashed into a cult of the emperor and militarism. So the choice is, leave them brainwashed into something that sees no problem with trying to kill massive numbers of foreigners, or brainwash them into something else.
Again, what gives us the right to choose to do so? That they attacked us, and that we won.
Germany was a success as well. We changed a culture that had war as an ingrained part into one that has been peaceful for generations. And the Berlin Wall was not the fault of America or the west.
As for Korea... we continue to be there, not because we're trying to change their culture, but because we are trying to deter invasion from North Korea.
On the ground, victory or defeat weren’t on the table. When we were there, we just wanted to come home in one piece.
As Kissinger pointed out in World Order (love or hate the man, it's a good read) - military force is a political tool to achieve political goals. And just like Kissinger's abject failure to achieve any meaningful political goals other than endless, meaningless war and death, it's because he could never define goals that could be achieved in the first place.
And that's the story of American foreign policy in the middle east. Our leaders and political theorists can't even agree on what goals should be or even goals that can be reached - just meaningless diatribe about "presence" and "if we're not there someone else will step in."
If you try and apply a consistent morality onto geopolitics you're going to see everyone is hypocritical. But geopolitics is not a debate between philosophers on morality and political theory. It's applied game theory closer to what Sun Tzu wrote than Hobbes or Locke.
> Turning Iraq, Libya, and Syria into failed states runs contrary to just about any goal you can imagine for the U.S
All of them had publicly defied the US at some point. It's the insult that matters to the establishment.
What if the win condition is actually having a constant percieved threat, and thus a war to act on said threat.
From someone not from the US, american politics is dominated with who is right and who is wrong. The entire political spectrum seems to be divided between "winners and losers" and the politics seem very black and white compared to my experience with politics from other countries.
What if the wars the US have started are merely a political tool to rally the population for party support?
The problem is that those that get elected or rise through the ranks of military and our government tend to be the exact people that shouldn't. That's not necessarily just an American thing, since selfish and proud people exist everywhere.
What it leads to is not some conspiracy to keep endless wars going to stay in power. To the contrary, the endless wars are a product of the continuous flux of people who believe they are right and arrogantly refuse to believe they can be wrong at all. If you speak with those in the civil service or those educated by our thought leaders in foreign policy, a consistent notion in why we continue these pointless wars is not because we have some absolute objective. It's because we believe that if we aren't there, someone else will be, and better us than them. That is the deep arrogance and stubbornness of America at work, that we are always right, even in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.
Sorry for the rambling. It's just that some of this deeply upsets me and I've had this debate many times with family members and friends who have more direct influence and experience.
Of course, since OBL was being sheltered in Pakistan by the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, and much of the support for extreme Islamism was coming from Saudi Arabia (as were some of the hijackers), and those countries were untouchable, the reprisals had to be carried out against the two Arab Muslim countries that were least popular with the US instead.
(Much of the supplies for Afghanistan had to be driven across a thousand miles of lawless Pakistani frontier and were occasionally attacked there; the Afghan occupation was also hampered by being unable to pursue or fire across the Pakistani border.)
Sovereignty and economic stability for their communities? Or do you imagine their goal involves hurting the West rather than improving their lives?
Truth is treason in an empire of lies.
I'm not fully sure how to structure this, so I'm just going to dive into a list of potential answers to the original question: What was/is there to win? While I am aiming at the question about Afghanistan, general region topics and Iraq factor in very much as well.
1. Destabilization: Much of the problem in the GWOT was and is due to the confusion of purpose. Some saw it as to defeat Al Qaeda. Some as revenge for 9/11 (despite the fact that most of the hijackers were Saudi Wahhabists, even if they had been in the Afghan training camps. That eventually evolved over time to issues with the Taliban, and it's various networks like the Haqqani and the Quetta councils in Pakistan. The problem is that while certain groups like the military leadership (such as Petraeus) bought into this, they didn't understand or weren't empowered to counter the underlying desire for instability at the political and above level. When I say above I mean what I call the political "shadow players", the ones that exist through multiple presidencies and have a huge influence over top-down decision trees in government. I like to use Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger as prime examples. They in turn influenced the top level political entities to make moves often counter to the surface purpose of the war(s). A great example of this would be when Ian Bremmer and Rumsfeld, despite protestation from the military, decided to tell the Iraqi commander with 40k troops asking what to do with them to go fuck off. In the end, much of actions of that type were very much geared towards keeping things unstable, for reasons I will go into further, and it's worth noting that's pretty much exactly what has happened.
2. Containment: Let's be frank. Iran is sandwiched in between Iraq and Afghanistan and it has been in the crosshairs for quite some time now. Also worth remembering in context is that much of Saddams power was increased when we quietly backed him in the Iran-Iraq war. The joke on the ground used to be "How do we know Saddam has WMDs? Because we still have the receipts!" Not much actually changed from the 90's and destabilization of the region plays into keeping Iran busy there instead of elsewhere such as in Lebanon and Syria, at least to a degree. It's more than that, but Iran is the main target of containment. It also was used as a draw to get fighters to show up there instead of in western countries, another form of containment. Lots of foreign fighters started showing up the body count.
3. Presence: By establishing and expanding the middle east and western asian connections, infrastructure, bases, etc, we have closer inroads for conflicts in the future, and that's not even necessarily geared towards ME countries. It could be China, Russia, Africa, etc. Africa in particular happened to play this out with Libya, Sudan, etc, and it continues to this day.
4. Combat hardiness: at a more Machiavellian level, the relatively tame conflict(s) on blue-side were seen as a good proving ground to refine modern combat techniques, tools, tactics and strategies. Lots of think-tank analysis after the fact to help gear up towards conflicts in a future that might be more tri-polar conflict likely. It's a dirty business to be a general and have to think like that, but it is what it is.
5. Black markets: Just as in Vietnam, the destabilization and control offered a great opportunity for certain organizations to participate in black markets. See, for example, congress is supposed to have purse string control of the CIA... but if they can pull some Iran-Contra esque gun-drug running on a suddenly booming opium producing country...
Alexander of Macedon[2], British, Soviets and now USA have failed because they all have had unrealistic objectives.
But Afghanistan had been ruled by "foreign" rulers for most of it's history. They all had one thing in common - they have kept multiple forces in balance and limited their rule to the capital.
> He shows how governing these peoples was relatively easy when power was concentrated in a small dynastic elite, but how this delicate political order broke down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Afghanistan's rulers mobilized rural militias to expel first the British and later the Soviets. Armed insurgency proved remarkably successful against the foreign occupiers, but it also undermined the Afghan government's authority and rendered the country ever more difficult to govern as time passed.
> Afghanistan is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how a land conquered and ruled by foreign dynasties for more than a thousand years became the "graveyard of empires" for the British and Soviets, and what the United States must do to avoid a similar fate.
Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History by Thomas Barfield [1]
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7718203-afghanistan
> Recounting the plight of the most powerful leader of the time as he led the most sophisticated army of its day into the treacherous world of tribal warlords, Holt describes those grueling campaigns and the impact they had on Alexander, his generals, their troops, and the world. Into the Land of Bones also examines the conflict from the point of view of the local warlords who pushed the invading Greeks to the limits of their endurance—and sometimes beyond, into mania and mutiny.
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1584212.Into_the_Land_of...
I'll be there will still be US presence/monitoring in Afghanistan for some time to come.
They get to the part post 9/11 where the gloves come off and they sit down with corrupt legal advisers (Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo), many who are advocates of the Unitary Executive Theory[2], to concoct a legal firewall around their actions. The twisted logic is: The US does not torture therefore the varieties of "enhanced interrogation" being used cannot, ipso facto, be torture.
Alongside "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture) we have those other Newspeak euphemisms[3] "extraordinary rendition" (state-sponsored kidnapping) and "enemy combatants" (any fighting-age male present in a combat zone).
Then there's the legal limbo that is Guantanamo Bay, the suspension of habeas corpus[4] (a foundational legal right in modern democracies), and the frankly draconian USA PATRIOT Act.
Ah, good times.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6266538/
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/etc/networ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory
[3] https://vizettes.com/kt/american_empire/pages/euphemisms-glo...
[4] https://www.thoughtco.com/bush-lincoln-both-suspended-habeas...
Gosh that Second Amendment sure is wonderful and has absolutely no downsides whatsoever.
America has supported "gorilla revolution" for revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries against multiple nationals, at least some of which involved the CIA selling cocaine domestically for money to fund foreign weapons.
Which is half of a dozen? Which is six of the other?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
History, repeating; make your own aphorism.
The various militas of Afghanistan were bombed and engaged haphazardly for years and now, it seems, we're withdrawing. That's hardly an Afghani victory in my mind.
One reason I have a problem with this kind of statement is that we should encourage the cessation of pointless wars, and not try to equate ending them with losing or being defeated.
Primitive stone age goat herders vs the "world's most powerful" military. Who will win?
The simple fact is that the US occupied their country for years. Bombed and killed with complete impunity, and then decided to withdrawal. It's absurd to call that a victory for the Taliban or Afghanistan. Their claim to victory is that they aren't entirely dead at the time we wanted to withdraw and the reason for that is that we knew it would be immoral to use the force required to completely kill them, not any strategy or cunning from them.
It's bad rhetorically and morally to pretend like this is an American loss because that implicitly says that in order to "win" we'd need to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. We shouldn't have been there anywhere near as long as we were, we shouldn't have done anywhere near as much as we did, and it's great news that we're withdrawing. Calling it a loss, or a Taliban victory, isn't just immoral because it implicitly argues for perpetuation of the war, it's also completely delusional.
> we wanted to withdraw and the reason for that is that we knew it would be immoral to use the force required to completely kill them
We won because we didn't commit total genocide, only partial genocide? Due to our very high sense of morality and goodness?
The war had no clear objectives. It just continued until people decided to stop it and stopping it is a good thing.
Regarding your question about why we didn't commit genocide, yes, it's because we realize that would be immoral and the American people wouldn't support it.
True for the US side, and thus was unwinnable.
Not true for the Afghan side. Their goal was to expel the invaders. Their goal accomplished, the only possible conclusion is they won the war.
Again, Afghanistan didn't force the US to withdraw - they survived because we chose to let them. We decided to withdraw not because of fierce Afghanistan resistance, more military personal committed suicide than were killed by enemy action, but instead because we elected a politician who thought the war was a waste of time.
This is not a time to lament with absurd claims like "Afghanistan won the war". Instead, we should be happy that a needless war is coming to an end.
Well, they disagree with you.
The Taliban may say whatever they like, but that doesn't make it so. It's simply wrong to claim they won or the US lost. It is good that our interests have aligned and the war will stop.
Territory control map in December 2019: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...
This deal is capitulation. Only this time there won't be refugees grasping at the skies of helicopters. We'll just lock them out and watch the Taliban kill every educated woman in the country.
Despite fighting alongside Al-Qaeda and despite harbouring bin Laden, the Taliban aren't Al-Qaeda.
Yes, the tradeoff was that they had a puritanical interpretation of Islam and had a horrible human rights record.
This is of course true but you can play this fallacy out forever. The right thing to do in the 80s was not to meddle. Then after that we should have cut our losses and stopped meddling. And now 40 years later we are cleaning up failed clean up attempts on failed clean up attempts.
At every point in this chain, the correct move is to admit you can't be world police and stop meddling.
So much contained in this one sentence. People need to go look at what backing an insurgency against a repressive but modernising government does and ask questions.
(Anyone remember the Living Daylights where James Bond teams up with the Oxford-educated Afghan head of the local islamists to beat the Russians together?)
Iran, the oil backed coup of the 1950s led to Pahlavi, hatred and fear which in turn led to Kohmeni in Paris. Simply letting the Iranians nationalise the oil industry would probably have been better long-term.
1953 to 2020, US oil interests stuffing up peace...
A few counter examples: Greece, [South] Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia.
Chile is another well known example, though IMO U.S. involvement is wildly exaggerated. AFAIU, it was conservatives in the Chilean Congress that engineered and pushed for the coup. The prospect of American support (e.g. a wink from the CIA) simply made it a marginally easier sell among the people whose heads might roll if it failed.
None of which is a defense of the Domino Theory or a comment on the merits of intervention. The take away from all of this, IMO, is to avoid grand strategic theories and goals--context matters.
Both of those countries would have had systemic corruption and massive structural issues either way, just as they had before. U.S. intervention doesn't really figure into it. Anyhow, the goal was to stop the spread of communism, not lift people out of poverty.
The genocide of "communists" (i.e. Chinese and other outgroups) in Indonesia was absolutely abhorrent and a gross moral failure on the part of the U.S. But from the perspective of American geopolitical interests intervention wasn't a failure. It almost certainly wasn't even necessary, either, but that's beside the point.
Non-intervention has its own problems, too, as exemplified by Cambodia, Rwanda, and Syria[1]. Intervention vs non-intervention is a false dichotomy. To reiterate, context matters.
[1] I've said before on HN that I think Obama's refusal to directly intervene in Syria showed exceptional leadership, notwithstanding his about-face; indeed, because of his about-face. But that doesn't absolve the U.S. of its sins for having created the conflagration in the Middle East that resulted in the Syrian conflict. What Obama finally accepted, but everybody else refused to admit (including his own advisors), was that the U.S. was politically incapable of making the necessary commitments. Had the U.S. been capable--i.e. if the context were different--then greater intervention would have been the correct thing. What makes his decision so profound to me was that he accepted that reality at a moment when denial was easiest--when everybody felt it was the morally righteous thing to do (and arguably was), everybody wanted it, and when after it inevitably led to more bloodshed nobody would have ever blamed him, neither contemporaneously nor in the future.
>At that point you can't just ignore them and hope they stop; they'd been escalating violence for years.
If you can't ignore the problem, then drastically escalate the violence on your own?
Off topic, but the whole concept of "world police" is just spin. A police force is one that enforces equally laws established by others. You cannot be at the same time the one who establishes the rules and who decides when and where to use force against those who break them. This is just arbitary use of violence.
USA has certainly done a good job of pretending to be the good guy, whilst simultaneously arming bad guys and killing to support Capitalist and tyrannical goals.
This is easier said than done, if it is possible at all.
Having recently taken a dive into the U.S.' involvement in Vietnam, this argument rings eerily similar the one that got us into and led to our escalation in Vietnam.
If it were truly an existential threat the US would remove the Taliban very quickly (that doesn't imply a safe orderly society would result).
But Afghanistan, like Vietnam is an optional and non-essential conflict at this point with unclear definitions of victory. Maybe "victory" is packing up and going home at this point.
The US' mistake was not capitalizing on Russia's failure, choosing instead to make exactly the same mistake.
In case of Afghanistan, it is not just "maybe". Packing up and go home - is a clear win for the US in Afghanistan.
No, no, no. The Taliban were broadly distributed throughout Southern Afghanistan, and they had a cross border sanctuary in Pakistan.
For its own reasons (Kashmir and the regional rivalry with India), Pakistan didn’t want to alienate the Taliban, and their military and ISI thus had extensive relations with the Taliban.
The US did not have enough leverage to get Pakistan to shut down the Taliban on its side of the border, and likewise did not want the destabilization of a nuclear state with borders on China and India that would accompany violations of Pakistani sovereignty inherent in large scale bombing.
I guess it depends on your definition of "remove". I don't doubt that a Taliban government could be very quickly overthrown by the US military. Probably within weeks. Now, the Taliban as an irregular militia is a completely different manner.
I remember watching a Vice documentary on Afghanistan called "This is what winning looks like". The line that struck me was a US Marine saying something like "the average Taliban fighter fights within 15 yards of their home". If that's anything close to true, no wonder the Taliban have been so hard to defeat.
The Soviet Union deployed over 115k for several years. The amount of fortune spent was a serious accelerator for the decline of the USSR.
Afghanistan is a large, dispersed, and landlocked country. With huge amounts of weapons from many sides. Decades of war. Little trust between population groups.
With what, nukes? Or by sending 5 million soldiers using $400/gallon gasoline https://www.cbsnews.com/news/real-cost-of-gas-at-afghan-base... ? Like them or not, the Taliban are in their country and quite a few Afghani think like them. Let them be, with a major caveat--do not let anyone there attack us or our partners. I think they are rational enough to do that since USA did cause them a lot of problems.
They are so many problems in the world, USA cannot fix them. Not even make a dent.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2016/07/06/484979294/chart-how-the-u-s-t...
Re Obama: there clearly was a lot wrong with the Afghanistan policy. But I'm not sure I really buy the "low troop level" argument. Even at peak deployment levels (pretty darn high) under Obama the military operations weren't going particularly well. And that wasn't sustainable.
1. Of course the military would ask for this, and complain after the fact.
2. It's easy for generals to make promises, but I have zero confidence that they would have actually delivered any results.
With Pakistan providing huge financial and logistical support to the Taliban, it would never be eliminated. Geopolitical experts understand that so long as Pakistan has the India problem, Afghanistan will have the Taliban as a buffer state.
Pakistan is between Afghanistan and India. https://www.atlapedia.com/online/maps/political/Afghan_etc.h... I'm confused as to how it would be a buffer. Can you explain?
I think there's pretty good evidence that the ISI has (does?) financed/organized training camps for anti India groups (like Lashkar-e-Taiba) in Afghanistan.
1) Fear of Indian sponsored proxies and being squeezed from both sides. An India friendly Afghanistan presents an existential danger to Pakistan's interests. Pakistan does not want to be encircled by hostile powers.
2) An unstable Afghanistan means possible anti-Pakistan elements taking root. Better to sponsor known "pakistan friendly" elements like the Taliban instead of unknowns.
3) Defense in depth. Pakistani military and political doctrine would use Afghanistan as a redoubt. Most of Pakistan is extremely flat until you get to the Hindu Kush/Pamir mountains. The idea would be, let India steamroll the flat lands, retreat into the mountains and cross the durand line, coordinate the response from Afghanistan.
This hasn't been true as much recently because the Taliban and other groups became extremely powerful in Pakistan, especially in Pashtun tribal areas, and the Pakistani military was forced to intervene. However, the Pakistani military has never been able to completely corral their intelligence services, which is one reason why there isn't as much cooperation between the US and Pakistan anymore (they were once close allies), with US/India ties becoming closer and closer instead.
https://warontherocks.com/2015/03/the-bush-wars-ellis-on-ame...
https://warontherocks.com/2015/03/the-bush-wars-ellis-on-pop...
I am extremely skeptical that any feasible amount of troops on the ground could have achieved such a goal.
> work with the locals after the initial invasion
1) Isn't it an ongoing meme in the US military that ANA troops are useless and that the government is corrupt to an unimaginable level?
2) Didn't we also originally burn their opium fields, only to allow it to become once again one of there chief economic exports since it was so vital to the local economies?
3) Is it true we had a formal policy of allowing elder tribal leaders to systematically rape young boys in order to be more accommodating to their local customs? Including trading viagra for tips on insurgent activity?
I realize some of these questions are pretty sensitive and may be uncomfortable to answer. It just seems like it needs to be brought up whenever we talk about the Afghan war (while it's usually swept under the rug...).
We then saw this play out to devastating effect with the de-Baathication agenda in Iraq.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
In hindsight, withdrawing from Iraq left a void that ISIS filled.
I mean, if you drill a hole in the bottom of a bathtub and then stand there with your thumb in it to hold the water in, you don't blame the fact that it drained on your getting tired and pulling out your hand.
We didn’t make ISIS... we just armed them very well (via Iraqi “security”).
When the US invaded Iraq, there were a decent amount of protests against it, and generally, Americans grew to see it as a mistake. What's different here is this connection gets a lot less attention, and it was arguably worse for the region.
Did Mattis also disagree with bombing weddings and assassnating "males of fighting age"?
Found the two Afghanistan books by Steve Coll interesting. Certainly not flattering of any group involved.
Wrong THINK detected!
Afghanistan is a country that has been in a civil war for over 40 years. It’s a tragedy for sure, especially when you compare photos of Kabul in 1979[0] to today, but ultimately no one is going to impose a peace there. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans could.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview/18bumiller.h...
https://youtu.be/VXXmcGirPMA
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
Sadly no one will be held accountable.
Corruption everywhere.
Help Afghanistan to take their market niche of supplying neighbors with tons of drugs!
The rebel groups on the other hand would have profited very much from international intervention, so they could have an motive to stage it. And since ISIS and alike rose from the rebels, there surely were many cynical enough to do this "for the greater cause".
But it is proven that the West used this lie to justify committing yet more atrocities in Syria.
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/confirmed-chemical-weapon...
Let me give my point of view: if NATO countries had avoided supporting, training, financing and arming the "rebels", the war would have been over in six months- it probably wouldn't even have started. The refugees, the destroyed cities and the hundreds of thousands of deaths are fully on the conscience of the West.
If the war had been over in 6 months it could only have been so by genocide.
The US is currently quietly supporting Saudi Arabi in their war against the Houthis.
Or am I missing a something like "these are apples and oranges"?
If you can work out how supporting food stamps can make those same people filthy rich, and maintain their hegemony, then I'm sure they'll go for it.
“Add 100,000 troops and blast them all”, “get our boys home now”, “get revenge for 9/11”, “don’t repeat Soviet mistakes”. There’s a lot of clamoring at home, and a lot of long-standing tensions abroad.
We can assume for both the Bush and Obama administrations that most people were basically trying to do the best they could to solve intractable problems.
Foreign policy is really hard.
And despite my concern about the political motivations surrounding this deal, hints of peace are welcome.
If your neighborhood has termites, sooner or later they will destroy your property too. It wouldn't matter if they started from the house of your friend or your enemy. If you have a neighbor who is deliberately raising termites, you forget about termites and neutralize that neighbor first.
America, both parties really, deliberately side with the bad guys and later give excuses when things work out against them.
I wouldn't name names but it's not hard to guess who in this particular context is the neighbor raising termites.
If only, the US had destroyed Pakistan’s air bridge out of Kunduz in 2001 allowing thousands to escape by air to Pakistani safe areas.
If only, the US had kept the mission to light footprint special operations only, a la the very successful Central America model in the 80’s/90’s.
If only, Pakistan couldn’t guarantee the perpetual failure of Afghanistan.
There was a need to intervene 19.5 years ago like there was a need for Iran to intervene 20.5 years ago(Taliban liquidated Iranian Shi’a diplomats).
Few know US and Iranian forces actually worked together briefly capturing Herat in 2001.
I once had the chance to grill a former US ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009-2011, unfortunately I handled it poorly.
Time to decisively end the sunk cost fallacy bias.