Afghanistan was going alright till about 2020. Then everything changed. My naive reading is that it might be the pandemic or the new US administration.
None of this would have happened under Trump.
He almost got peace with NK. He got rid of ISIS. He laid out a plan for conditional withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was ignored by Biden Admin (look where we are now).
HN is not going to like this comment, because (almost) everyone thinks they are smart, called Trump stupid in 2016, and now can't admit they are wrong because their egos ride on a self-perception of being smart.
He would have done in a more controlled manner, and slow down if necessary - not let it get to this point where it's a total takeover by the Taliban while Biden is vacationing.
He was also the first president in 40 years to NOT start a war.
In the US, wars are started by Congress, not the President. The conflicts I listed are the only wars authorized by Congress over the last 40 years. We can bring other conflicts into the discussion, but that’s a different standard than “war”.
It never means a damn thing. It’s always the same story book for the US. And each time you have a fresh batch of recruits from the poorest neighborhoods of every major city ready to “fight for our freedom” and be discarded after like we discarded the Afghans, the Vietnamese etc…
All for the sake of lining the pockets of some billionaires, companies and politicians. Politicians who stays there for 40 years and tell us they’re fighting for us and this time will be different.
Much like the British and even the Russians did, Americans will stop stomaching further losses and will reduce their empire to a more manageable extent. I am practically sure of that. Hillary Clinton lost election partly on account of being a "warmonger" and there is little appetite left in the American electorate to go elsewhere for an armored vacation.
What that is going to mean for the rest of the world, I don't know. Vacuum of power never lasted too long, and will last even shorter with 8 billion people competing for resources, water and arable land.
I think we will see more conflict in the future, but with fewer American dead. Perhaps the U.S. will end up where Germany and Sweden currently are: an ostensibly peace-loving nation that just really likes to sell hi-tech weapons, ehm.
One can only hope. But first we need to fix ourselves from that PTSD that 9/11 left us with, though I am not sure we can stomach that.
I wonder if the Germans ever came to terms with their WWII shame? Hard to tell. From my encounters with them, it always seems like a burden carried in perpetuity, generation to generation. Who knows.
In my experience, the Germans believe they have done a terrible thing, but were the ones to learn the most from it. They have since studied their doings and reflected on them heavily. So much so that they are moral leaders of the world and others should learn from them of how to have a pure heart.
The German right: "We are a superior nation due to our precision, organization, engineering and business skills. Everyone should, naturally, emulate us, or fall behind."
The German left: "Morality is the measure of all things and there are no compromises possible. Everyone should follow us to salvation, because we have been through hell and, as a consequence, we know best."
Sorry for having offended anyone :) The common thread seems to be the conviction that Germany is a Vorreiter (leader) of Europe, which, frankly, it isn't anymore. Europe has weaker and stronger countries, but no clear leaders.
Germany is a leader in turning off nuclear power plants when they should be turning off coal. Also a leader in trying to sneak (russian) gas as a "transition" energy source into decarbonation plans. Anything but a moral leader.
Your description of the German left sounds like a description of some religious-extremist group - not sure if that was the intention, or if they are really behaving like self-anointed saviours of the rest of us unwashed masses?
I wouldn’t extrapolate too much. Afghanistan isn’t really of any strategic importance to the US other than not providing a safe harbour for international terrorism, which is not even clear the talibans still intend to do.
Major difference: neither Sweden nor Germany are the ocean police the US is. Global trade is basically guaranteed by the US Navy.
Vacuum of power in the seas means severe commerce disruption, which means isolation and autocracy for many countries. And war. The US is big in terms of land, water, and people. Not so much many other countries, including European ones.
While I agree with your points, it's not the only outcome. As a German, technically the US did the same thing to our country in '45: Throw bombs, invade and then occupy it — then gradually leave and pull out and let us handle our own stuff including military and defense. Being a bit biased, I'd still say it worked out brilliantly.
I'm seriously curious about what made this work out so well, compared to Afghanistan or Vietnam.
Is it because there was no big difference in religion? Because there was more mutual respect? Because there was a common enemy in the East? Or because the US _really_ made a giant effort to rebuild the German economy (The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan is still remembered fondly by especially older Germans and to this day is a core reason for friendly sentiment towards the US despite the anti-foreign sentiment into the other direction lately)
Like, maybe I'm dumb, but the US went into Afghanistan and theoretically gave "them" weapons and training to defend themselves, but apparently the big majority was either not interested or too scared to defend the country against the Taliban. I'm stumped on the big difference.
Germany was a reasonable country that took a turn at the top toward extreme unreasonableness. When the Allies kicked out the Nazis Germany was able to go back to reasonableness because that was normal for Germany. It just needed some support from the Allies to keep things from falling apart so that it could transition back to reasonableness.
Afghanistan was pretty much always a poorly governed country rife with corruption. The US went in to stop it being taken over by something even worse. Stopping the Taliban didn't do anything about a corrupt government that does a poor job of governing. It would either eventually end up a dictatorship from someone within the government seizing permanent power, or someone would topple the government because the government is too corrupt and ineffective to organize a good defense.
Really all the US could hope for as long as that government remained in control was to delay the Taliban long enough for it to be someone else who toppled the government and then hope that the new government was sufficiently more competent to handle holding off the Taliban.
To really address the Afghanistan problem probably requires someone to go in, smash the Taliban and kick out the current government (as of last night--haven't seen the news today so am not if they are still current), then oversee something like a constitutional convention for all Afghanis to develop a new more democratic government with sufficient safeguards to keep the corruption down somewhat.
That's hard to do while trying to stay on the right side of the line between empire building and truly helping a people develop a good stable non-corrupt independent representative government.
It's funny, after the war-profiteers loot and pillage the US and the hapless country on the receiving end, they have the audacity to recruit their journalists and academics and self-proclaimed experts to opine about how everyone in the US shares blame for how things have turned out. Everyone must accept the consequences of the wars foisted on the world.
"Your son died so we could steal your money, but you must pitch in and share the burden of the consequences of the war we started in Afghanistan."
No I'm sorry, Americans are among the victims of these maniacs. It's not "Americans" who are collectively responsible for these atrocities, it is the profiteers themselves. And I don't intend to lessen the suffering of the Afghani (or Libyans, Syrians, Iraqi, etc).
You just watch, in the coming months, years, these same shysters will solemnly come to you, cap in hand, telling you how you have to pony up more money, or send your children to more conflicts, or learn to live with more terrorist attacks in your country -- because you are somehow responsible for their war.
So how about starting a campaign to prosecute the politicians responsible for those wars? I understand what you are saying, but it’s kind of hard to take it seriously if the American society doesn’t even try to do anything about it.
The system they have set up to protect themselves from the people does not allow them to be prosecuted. Anybody who tries would be attacked, bullied, censored, deplatformed, branded a conspiracy theorist or Russian traitor or communist, the "experts" would all be wheeled out to "debunk" them, etc.
I too would like to see stronger anti war sentiment and protests, but the system has become so much stronger and more resilient against those since Vietnam.
And the absolute worst part is that the same money could be spent and the same people employed, to do things of productive use like repair infrastructure at home (or abroad via aid!). Instead it gets pissed away with nothing to show for it.
It was clear even to a child. I was 14 when we invaded Afghanistan and it was blatantly obvious to me that it was a terrible idea and that Iraq was an even more terrible idea. It continued to be a terrible idea for ever one of the last 20 years. The scars we left will stay for another hundred. Actions have consequences.
Was there really anything good to expect from the intervention anyway?
Invade a country, throw bombs, and try to control the population, all you get is a bigger mess than they were in to begin with. All these countries have nothing to do in there, they aren't welcome and only trigger more hate towards the west at large.
Congress approved a lengthy occupation costing over 2 trillion dollars on tax payers money, all to feed an industry that murders and benefits a small number of crooks.
Have you noticed how quickly Americans discovered that they in fact care so deeply about Muslim lives and Filippino fishermen that they're willing to risk nuclear war and total destruction of its west coast? Ridiculous.
There's always a stated reason for these middle east US wars, and then there's a real reason. I can work out Iraq but what is the real reason for the Afghanistan war?
If it had turned into a friendly, America-loving democracy that would tolerate our bases, then it’s an unsinkable aircraft carrier bordering Russia and China. Pretty good real estate.
It'd have to be very America-friendly for that motivation to make sense, to make up for being situated such that keeping it supplied relies on the cooperation of one or more potential adversaries.
You mean "democracy"? Let's be honest, US (and to a lesser extent EU) can tolerate just about any atrocity performed by a "friendly" regime if there is enough to gain from it. There are countless examples past and present across the globe.
The last time the US installed bases in a nation bordering Russia, Russia parked a nuclear missile battery 90 miles off the Florida coast.
China is exerting soft power now by buying up properties and ports in the Caribbean and Latam. Make no mistake, if a real US base had been activated in Afghanistan China, or Russia, would have planted one in Venezuela.
It being a breeding ground for extremism was the reason. In order to stop the Soviets, we (the USA) pushed Afghan society towards religious extremism because it was the only way it was "acceptable" for Afghans to kill other Afghans that supported the Soviets. After it was all over, we just packed our bags and left instead of helping them build a society that wasn't based on religious extremism. When I was in the military, they told us that we shouldn't have to go to Afghanistan, but we're stuck cleaning up the mess made decades prior.
>we just packed our bags and left instead of helping them build a society that wasn't based on religious extremism
Yeah, let's completely destroy the relatively stable secular state built with the help of those evil Russians (DRA was able to fight for 3 years after the Soviet army has left) using religious extremists amply supplied with western weapons and funds, and only after that we will help Afghans to built a prosperous society. Maybe. I think there are certain parallels to be found with Iran.
As usual, reality is far more nuanced than the stuff that gets you easy virtue points.
It wasn't a stable secular state when we started influencing things. There was a king. The commies overthrew the king, the US didn't do much of anything at this point (because we just got done with Vietnam and there was zero appetite for anything that could lead to more of that). The commies started infighting. The soviets picked favorites. The US didn't want to see the soviets build a total satellite state so we gave the other guys weapons and training via Pakistan who were the ones who fanned the extremist flames. 35yr later here we are.
What? 1978s PDPA coup has begun from assassination which was allegedly done with CIA help. USSR didn't have any reason to destabilize the relatively friendly Daoud regime. When shit hit the fan, they simply chose PDPA as an ideologically close force.
I would attribute US with intentionally destabilizing Afghanistan. They didn't want to lose ground in the region, especially after the puppet schah got overthrown in the Iran's Islamic revolution (1978-1979). After the initial Soviet intervention the country was stable for quite a while. There were insurgent pockets in the countryside and cells in Pakistan under ISI umbrella, but nothing seriously threatening.
And DRA had support of the populace (otherwise it wouldn't have lasted 3 years without Soviets), not unlike the current (fallen) Afghanistan government.
>The US didn't want to see the soviets build a total satellite state
So let's wreak total havoc in this state to promote our agenda? Who cares about democracy, prosperity, human life and other ideals which are foundation of the western society if we are to buy into its propaganda? And we certainly will not get bitten back by the created chaos...
>Pakistan who were the ones who fanned the extremist flames
Are you seriously implying that the US didn't know who are they working with in Afghanistan? FYI in 1985 Reagan's government has officially started supplying Stingers to mujahidins. And I am quite sure that CIA has closely worked with the forces on the ground far before that. Also considering that Saudis (well-known democratic states, who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11) also co-founded this campaign, I highly doubt that the US didn't know really well who exactly they support.
It's far from the first time when the US has supported really questionable forces to get an advantage in the Big Game.
At the time there was a lot of talk of the usual "making Afghanistan safe for American business" thing, that's been the actual motivation in some historical US invasions of countries with very weak militaries.
For example, a Slate article debunking one of the more popular specific claims of that sort, published Dec. 2001:
Taliban didn't want to turn over the people who attacked us so we wrecked their country for 20yr.
Frankly I think we should have worked harder to get them to go after OBL and Al-Qaeda for us since they could go after them in ways that we cannot and that would probably have a greater deterring effect on any future people with dreams of attacking the first world.
The gut-wrenching horror here is the people involved in the decision making from the start probably foresaw this outcome, and everyone involved after about 5 years must have known what was going on.
Honestly, this should be enough to soft-ban anyone who was in the US Congress in the last 20 years from running again. It is quite hard to describe the scale of this disaster without seeming wild-eyed.
Nothing was doomed. The US had enough resources to succeed. If only they has actually a definite goal and were willing to apply enough power to get it done.
But nobody knew what they wanted Afghanistan to be and allowed themselves to be engaged in a war of attrition.
Exactly. Next time, if there is a next time, we'll probably go straight to installing some despot because at least that gives us a defined goal to work toward.
We did have a goal. The building of the nation of Afghanistan into a functioning liberal democracy. Of course Afghanistan barely qualifies as a nation and many (most?) have no desire to live in anything resembling a Western nation-state. Short of a truly brutal, imperialist takeover or the installing of a strongman puppet to do the dirty work for the next 50 years, there's no real chance of transitioning the peoples and their cultures over to our way of things. Americans likely have no stomach for such things, and the state of realpolitik is such that this would be truly untenable on the world stage.
> We did have a goal. The building of the nation of Afghanistan into a functioning liberal democracy.
Come on. You can't build a functioning liberal democracy in a place like that while doing zilch to promote even the basics of civil society and liberal norms. (And no, elections and ballot boxes are quite irrelevant; they're simply a red herring. Electoral processes have zero legitimacy to begin with in a non-liberal society.) The whole idea is quite simply preposterous.
The reason it wasn't a quick in-n-out was because a "significant enough to cause political problems" chunk of the American public would have never tolerated wrecking a nation purely as punishment and then leaving.
Wanna blame someone? Look around. HN is chock full of exactly the kind of people who cause this outcome (albeit many of them are too young to bear any responsibility). Upper middle class types, the kind of people who vote, write the occasional blog, people who's voices are heard politically and who generally will not tolerate violence without some pretext of necessity. They're why we got stuck in Afghanistan. Lower class voters would have mostly been fine with "bomb them back to the stone age and go home". We had to spend 20yr pretending we were actually going to fix things so that educated voters could feel good about themselves. It's like the nation state equivalent of not wanting to sell a project car you'll inevitably never get around to and then finally selling it because you're moving and the prospect of incurring a bunch of cost hanging onto it finally forces you to deal with reality.
The thing that amazes me is how frequently the US engages in foreign wars, when the vast majority of the US population, even those who vote, do not want war.
There was a decent (but one I still disagree with) argument made once for bringing back the draft, as a way to make the actual bloody practical cost of perpetual war felt by the average person, perhaps in the hopes that they would become less frequent. Slavery is slavery though and it's only a thought experiment.
Say no to war, and say it loudly. Don't work for or with people who support or supply wars.
The real horror of 9/11 was not the few thousand deaths in the western hemisphere, but the few hundred thousand unnecessary ones executed in retaliation in the eastern hemisphere (none of which reduces the likelihood of a recurrence).
All we learned from the whole thing is that if you want to attack the USA, terrorism is the most effective way. A tiny investment will cause the entity to respond by working hard to abandon its own principles destroying itself, destroying thousands of others, and wasting unfathomable amounts of money.
> The real horror of 9/11 was not the few thousand deaths in the western hemisphere, but the few hundred thousand unnecessary ones executed in retaliation in the eastern hemisphere (none of which reduces the likelihood of a recurrence).
Not to mention the tens of thousands of illegally detained, usually on fake or wrong pretenses, and the many of them tortured. Every one of them, and everyone that knows them, has every reason to hate the guts of everything remotely American.
No, they aren’t - the difference is all about formalities; from the moral standpoint they are precisely the same. It doesn’t matter if you go killing innocent people because of religion, political interests, race, or money.
If that's true (which I doubt), the US military is fantastically bad at their job.
Low estimates of the cost of the Iraq war put it at 185k dead iraqi civilians.
I believe that it is much more likely that the US military simply doesn't care much about civilian deaths incurred whilst it seeks useless vengeance. This satisfies Occam's Razor, too.
The Afghanistan war was very popular. OBL had coordinated the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Almost every American citizen was out for blood. The Taliban was hosting him and weren't going to give him up easily. So we went through them to get him (even though we didn't).
The aftermath is where the popularity dwindled. Wars are easy, occupations are hard. And after dismantling the Afghanistan Taliban regime we thought we could be rebuild a better Afghanistan built on western standards. This was never going to happen.
Iraq was also popular. 80% of Republicans supported the incursion wholeheartedly. Slightly over 50% of Democrats supported the incursion, if WMDs could be found. Once Americans realized WMDs weren't going to be found support for the war in Iraq dropped stupendously. But support for the occupation was relatively high (for a while) because most Americans realized you break something you have to fix it.
For most Americans, war is hugely popular. But just the 1-2 months of actually fighting. The decades long nation building is what generals try and talk politicians out of.
> Almost every American citizen was out for blood.
That's simply not true; that was the narrative that was pushed. The military is adept at both manufacturing consent, as well as
making anyone that does not consent feel as if they are in a minority.
The vast majority are opposed to war, even after attacks.
Invading Afghanistan was very popular, to the point that I kinda shut up about it at the time because it just made people mad (at me), and even being against Iraq sure didn't feel like being in the majority—or even close to it—at the time.
Defense contractors got paid, that's all that matters in the United States. The military support industry owns the entire country. We will never see a Pentagon audit, nor any meaningful scrutiny of the U.S's military spending, ever. It sounds so conspiracy and implausible, but the United States is completely owned by it's military contractors, to the degree they insure their dominance is never mentioned in public without "that source is a crank" labeling.
Worst part is, it didn't have to be a waste of time. The Bush administration half-assed it because they actually wanted to go to Iraq, and the Obama administration half-assed it because "bringing the troops home" was easy political points. So many lives and so much money wasted because politicians from decades ago turned Afghan society to shit because they only cared about stopping the Soviets.
> I know how bad the Taliban is. I know what they do to women and little boys.
Someone who was on the ground there should know better than to confuse the Taliban with irreligious tribal warlords. The Taliban completely banned the old Afghan practice of "bucha bazi" or pedophilia. They hang pedophiles, they do not "do things to little boys". Of course, things may have happened in the fog of war, but the official Taliban policy - and they do have a policy - they are organized and disciplined, as the author admitted - is to punish pedophilia.
> We called them Hajjis and worse and they were better than we were, braver and stronger and smarter.
That is why they won. They are a strong and proud and incredibly resilient people that represent the Afghan majority and deserve to have sovereignty over their own country.
I'm not sure whether OP referred to pedophilia at all. I understood this much more in the spirit of subjecting young boys to weapons and explosive training in camps.
> That is why they won. They are a strong and proud and incredibly resilient people that represent the Afghan majority and deserve to have sovereignty over their own country
It comes at the cost of stoning women, tagging minorities(if they even exist) and taking the country back to medieval age.
And having a rulebook and following it are two different things.
We somehow don't have the money or resources to provide basic necessities like food and shelter for people, but there's always money for destructive and pointless wars. We could easily choose to improve the lives of others, but instead we choose to bomb and slaughter people around the globe.
Even outside of wartime the US military burns an entire Bezos net worth of cash every 90 days or so.
Uber's entire market cap would run the US military for just over a month.
The amount of money that is being wasted here is so far beyond the scale of anything we're familiar with in even the highest echelons of private wealth.
Politicians responsible for the war should be put on trial and then executed. (I’m against capital punishment, but the usual rules of law don’t really apply to this kind of crime.)
Sadly, the US is extremely loyal to its war criminals, so this can never happen.
And which ones initiated it? The ones that sent the troops, the ones that armed the Afghans to fight against the soviets decades ago? Or the foreign officials that helped the Taliban with money and logistics? All the NATO officials?
It's particularly hard when you want executions but the only one you can name is Mussolini.
We’re are talking about one particular war - arming Taliban decades ago is a separate issue.
It’s trivially easy to name the main perpetrators, starting with the USA president who made that decision. Sure, the further down the chain of command you go, the more diluted it is, so you need to stop somewhere - but it’s not any different from the fascist Italy case, or any other organized case of crimes against humanity.
What point are you trying to make with all these rhetorical questions? The purpose of investigations and prosecutions is to uncover these criminals and warmongers and bring them to justice. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc. These wars and genocides and destabilizing and destroying these countries didn't just organically come about through nobody's fault.
There are warmongers and war profiteers and traitors involved, and they need to be brought to justice.
Entirely predictable and I wanted to say that the Taliban misogyny is bit unfair. Offer free quality education for their sons and daughters and you'll see real change, I promise you.
That appears to be audio—I've only read the transcript, personally—but the text is hard to find a direct link to. A search can probably dredge up pages that'll eventually lead to the text.
Public service announcement: stop voting for presidents who start wars. Here's the pattern since Johnson in 1964:
- Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the Vietnam War throughout 1964 and the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was passed just before his re-election in November 1964. There's a book, Dereliction of Duty, about how Johnson did this for the popularity it would earn him.
- Nixon didn't start any wars and he was re-elected.
- Jimmy Carter didn't start any wars, and the Iran hostage crisis had the opposite affect: it made him appear weak. He only served one term.
- Ronald Reagan got involved in Grenada and Lebanon in 1983. Both conflicts were relatively small and the U.S. withdrew pretty soon afterwards. His re-election was in November 1984.
- Bush Sr. started the Gulf War in January 1991. His re-election would have been in November 1992.
- Clinton got heavily involved in Bosnia in 1995. His re-election would have been in November 1996.
- Bush Jr. started the Iraq War in 2003. His re-election was in November 2004.
- Obama started the Libyan War in 2011. His re-election would have been in November 2012.
- Trump didn't start any wars. He wasn't re-elected, but we can be sure that he didn't start any wars to increase his popularity, like every other two-term president since 1964 except Nixon.
There's something to this, since starting a war is one of the easiest to measure ways in which a president can affect the world. There are of course other ways presidents can affect policies, but the effects are far weaker.
I’m going to leave this link because it seems like people are unaware of the events of the past several years. This is basically the outcome that was negotiated with the Taliban unilaterally without the involvement of the Afghan government.
Reading these comments it is wild how few people understand the US political and military objectives in Afghanistan.
Few understand that the Taliban while mostly all the things we associate with a terror group, it was also a successful political party that began taking power through democratic elections, this was actually in the Clinton years (Taliban founded in 1994). Since then the military wanted to intervene, but Clinton ignored it because the embarrassing failure in Mogadishu (the Black Hawk Down incident in 1993) and reluctance to suffer another failed military campaign in his first term.
When Bush took office he was surprisingly intent on use of force in Afghanistan against the Taliban, but it was politically and legally non-viable…then 9/11 happened and the administration had the pretext it needed, it just had to move quick before anyone could question the relationship between Taliban and 9/11. But in either case the US intelligence was always ready and willing to say that OBL was operating remotely from the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan as a legal justification to use armed force in Afghanistan against a non state actor because the state was failing to bring him to justice.
Whether you are for or against the US spreading democracy around the world and their willingness to use armed force to achieve its ends…Afghanistan was not about spreading democracy, rather Afghanistan was about the US not approving of a particular democratically elected party.
Of course there is a much deeper history of US funding/training of groups to fight soviets in the 70’s in Afghanistan and these groups ultimately lead to the foundation of Taliban, but for the most part it has little to do with the US use of military force in Afghanistan post 9/11.
> then 9/11 happened and the administration had the pretext it needed, it just had to move quick before anyone could question the relationship between Taliban and 9/11
Possibly this was knowable ahead of time; I recommend the book “88 days to Kandahar”. Written by an ex-CIA guy, so a broker in lies and mirages (as well as, perhaps, a decent and well-meaning guy). The general feel of the book is that a long-drawn war is unwinnable, that as soon as Americans quit, Taliban will be back.
But this, and hindsight, aside, is there another take on this? That there was a hope in the US political circles that, although the war perhaps should not have been started, or that post 9/11 there was no choice but to start one, but once it was going there was a hope for a better, new Afghanistan? That yea, it’s a slog, many will die and much money will be spent, but the end looks better than the start?
Maybe I’m naive but I’d like to think it was naive idealism that propelled the war (maybe not started) rather than outright cynical Machiavellism.
From today’s perspective, clearly we know the war was an expensive failure. But hindsight is everything. And the lucid impressions of a soldier on the ground may not be a complete picture.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] threadHN is not going to like this comment, because (almost) everyone thinks they are smart, called Trump stupid in 2016, and now can't admit they are wrong because their egos ride on a self-perception of being smart.
He was also the first president in 40 years to NOT start a war.
- Lebanon, 1983 (Reagan)
- Persian Gulf, 1991 (Bush I)
- Afghanistan/Iraq, 2001/2003 (Bush II)
Then in the past 40 years, wars were not started under Clinton, Obama, and Trump.
All for the sake of lining the pockets of some billionaires, companies and politicians. Politicians who stays there for 40 years and tell us they’re fighting for us and this time will be different.
What that is going to mean for the rest of the world, I don't know. Vacuum of power never lasted too long, and will last even shorter with 8 billion people competing for resources, water and arable land.
I think we will see more conflict in the future, but with fewer American dead. Perhaps the U.S. will end up where Germany and Sweden currently are: an ostensibly peace-loving nation that just really likes to sell hi-tech weapons, ehm.
I wonder if the Germans ever came to terms with their WWII shame? Hard to tell. From my encounters with them, it always seems like a burden carried in perpetuity, generation to generation. Who knows.
When I visited Denmark and talked to Danish people, I was surprised how much the Danish and the Czech perspective on German politics overlaps.
The German right: "We are a superior nation due to our precision, organization, engineering and business skills. Everyone should, naturally, emulate us, or fall behind."
The German left: "Morality is the measure of all things and there are no compromises possible. Everyone should follow us to salvation, because we have been through hell and, as a consequence, we know best."
Sorry for having offended anyone :) The common thread seems to be the conviction that Germany is a Vorreiter (leader) of Europe, which, frankly, it isn't anymore. Europe has weaker and stronger countries, but no clear leaders.
Vacuum of power in the seas means severe commerce disruption, which means isolation and autocracy for many countries. And war. The US is big in terms of land, water, and people. Not so much many other countries, including European ones.
I'm seriously curious about what made this work out so well, compared to Afghanistan or Vietnam.
Is it because there was no big difference in religion? Because there was more mutual respect? Because there was a common enemy in the East? Or because the US _really_ made a giant effort to rebuild the German economy (The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan is still remembered fondly by especially older Germans and to this day is a core reason for friendly sentiment towards the US despite the anti-foreign sentiment into the other direction lately)
Like, maybe I'm dumb, but the US went into Afghanistan and theoretically gave "them" weapons and training to defend themselves, but apparently the big majority was either not interested or too scared to defend the country against the Taliban. I'm stumped on the big difference.
Afghanistan was pretty much always a poorly governed country rife with corruption. The US went in to stop it being taken over by something even worse. Stopping the Taliban didn't do anything about a corrupt government that does a poor job of governing. It would either eventually end up a dictatorship from someone within the government seizing permanent power, or someone would topple the government because the government is too corrupt and ineffective to organize a good defense.
Really all the US could hope for as long as that government remained in control was to delay the Taliban long enough for it to be someone else who toppled the government and then hope that the new government was sufficiently more competent to handle holding off the Taliban.
To really address the Afghanistan problem probably requires someone to go in, smash the Taliban and kick out the current government (as of last night--haven't seen the news today so am not if they are still current), then oversee something like a constitutional convention for all Afghanis to develop a new more democratic government with sufficient safeguards to keep the corruption down somewhat.
That's hard to do while trying to stay on the right side of the line between empire building and truly helping a people develop a good stable non-corrupt independent representative government.
"Your son died so we could steal your money, but you must pitch in and share the burden of the consequences of the war we started in Afghanistan."
No I'm sorry, Americans are among the victims of these maniacs. It's not "Americans" who are collectively responsible for these atrocities, it is the profiteers themselves. And I don't intend to lessen the suffering of the Afghani (or Libyans, Syrians, Iraqi, etc).
You just watch, in the coming months, years, these same shysters will solemnly come to you, cap in hand, telling you how you have to pony up more money, or send your children to more conflicts, or learn to live with more terrorist attacks in your country -- because you are somehow responsible for their war.
The system they have set up to protect themselves from the people does not allow them to be prosecuted. Anybody who tries would be attacked, bullied, censored, deplatformed, branded a conspiracy theorist or Russian traitor or communist, the "experts" would all be wheeled out to "debunk" them, etc.
I too would like to see stronger anti war sentiment and protests, but the system has become so much stronger and more resilient against those since Vietnam.
Invade a country, throw bombs, and try to control the population, all you get is a bigger mess than they were in to begin with. All these countries have nothing to do in there, they aren't welcome and only trigger more hate towards the west at large.
Congress approved a lengthy occupation costing over 2 trillion dollars on tax payers money, all to feed an industry that murders and benefits a small number of crooks.
Democracy at its best.
Supplies are an issue, hence why you don't see the military doing much complaining about letting Bagram go.
China is exerting soft power now by buying up properties and ports in the Caribbean and Latam. Make no mistake, if a real US base had been activated in Afghanistan China, or Russia, would have planted one in Venezuela.
It's not a coincidence that the withdrawal is before the 20th anniversary.
Yeah, let's completely destroy the relatively stable secular state built with the help of those evil Russians (DRA was able to fight for 3 years after the Soviet army has left) using religious extremists amply supplied with western weapons and funds, and only after that we will help Afghans to built a prosperous society. Maybe. I think there are certain parallels to be found with Iran.
It wasn't a stable secular state when we started influencing things. There was a king. The commies overthrew the king, the US didn't do much of anything at this point (because we just got done with Vietnam and there was zero appetite for anything that could lead to more of that). The commies started infighting. The soviets picked favorites. The US didn't want to see the soviets build a total satellite state so we gave the other guys weapons and training via Pakistan who were the ones who fanned the extremist flames. 35yr later here we are.
What? 1978s PDPA coup has begun from assassination which was allegedly done with CIA help. USSR didn't have any reason to destabilize the relatively friendly Daoud regime. When shit hit the fan, they simply chose PDPA as an ideologically close force.
I would attribute US with intentionally destabilizing Afghanistan. They didn't want to lose ground in the region, especially after the puppet schah got overthrown in the Iran's Islamic revolution (1978-1979). After the initial Soviet intervention the country was stable for quite a while. There were insurgent pockets in the countryside and cells in Pakistan under ISI umbrella, but nothing seriously threatening.
And DRA had support of the populace (otherwise it wouldn't have lasted 3 years without Soviets), not unlike the current (fallen) Afghanistan government.
>The US didn't want to see the soviets build a total satellite state
So let's wreak total havoc in this state to promote our agenda? Who cares about democracy, prosperity, human life and other ideals which are foundation of the western society if we are to buy into its propaganda? And we certainly will not get bitten back by the created chaos...
>Pakistan who were the ones who fanned the extremist flames
Are you seriously implying that the US didn't know who are they working with in Afghanistan? FYI in 1985 Reagan's government has officially started supplying Stingers to mujahidins. And I am quite sure that CIA has closely worked with the forces on the ground far before that. Also considering that Saudis (well-known democratic states, who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11) also co-founded this campaign, I highly doubt that the US didn't know really well who exactly they support.
It's far from the first time when the US has supported really questionable forces to get an advantage in the Big Game.
For example, a Slate article debunking one of the more popular specific claims of that sort, published Dec. 2001:
https://slate.com/culture/2001/12/is-the-afghan-war-about-an...
I'm not sure I find its debunking as complete or convincing as the author seems to think it is.
Taliban didn't want to turn over the people who attacked us so we wrecked their country for 20yr.
Frankly I think we should have worked harder to get them to go after OBL and Al-Qaeda for us since they could go after them in ways that we cannot and that would probably have a greater deterring effect on any future people with dreams of attacking the first world.
Honestly, this should be enough to soft-ban anyone who was in the US Congress in the last 20 years from running again. It is quite hard to describe the scale of this disaster without seeming wild-eyed.
But nobody knew what they wanted Afghanistan to be and allowed themselves to be engaged in a war of attrition.
We did have a goal. The building of the nation of Afghanistan into a functioning liberal democracy. Of course Afghanistan barely qualifies as a nation and many (most?) have no desire to live in anything resembling a Western nation-state. Short of a truly brutal, imperialist takeover or the installing of a strongman puppet to do the dirty work for the next 50 years, there's no real chance of transitioning the peoples and their cultures over to our way of things. Americans likely have no stomach for such things, and the state of realpolitik is such that this would be truly untenable on the world stage.
Come on. You can't build a functioning liberal democracy in a place like that while doing zilch to promote even the basics of civil society and liberal norms. (And no, elections and ballot boxes are quite irrelevant; they're simply a red herring. Electoral processes have zero legitimacy to begin with in a non-liberal society.) The whole idea is quite simply preposterous.
Wanna blame someone? Look around. HN is chock full of exactly the kind of people who cause this outcome (albeit many of them are too young to bear any responsibility). Upper middle class types, the kind of people who vote, write the occasional blog, people who's voices are heard politically and who generally will not tolerate violence without some pretext of necessity. They're why we got stuck in Afghanistan. Lower class voters would have mostly been fine with "bomb them back to the stone age and go home". We had to spend 20yr pretending we were actually going to fix things so that educated voters could feel good about themselves. It's like the nation state equivalent of not wanting to sell a project car you'll inevitably never get around to and then finally selling it because you're moving and the prospect of incurring a bunch of cost hanging onto it finally forces you to deal with reality.
There was a decent (but one I still disagree with) argument made once for bringing back the draft, as a way to make the actual bloody practical cost of perpetual war felt by the average person, perhaps in the hopes that they would become less frequent. Slavery is slavery though and it's only a thought experiment.
Say no to war, and say it loudly. Don't work for or with people who support or supply wars.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
How quickly a generation forgets the horrors of 9/11.
All we learned from the whole thing is that if you want to attack the USA, terrorism is the most effective way. A tiny investment will cause the entity to respond by working hard to abandon its own principles destroying itself, destroying thousands of others, and wasting unfathomable amounts of money.
This is as true now as ever.
Not to mention the tens of thousands of illegally detained, usually on fake or wrong pretenses, and the many of them tortured. Every one of them, and everyone that knows them, has every reason to hate the guts of everything remotely American.
(Edit: please observe all the downvotes, implicitly claiming that lives of Americans are somehow more valuable.)
Both are tragedies but both are different.
Low estimates of the cost of the Iraq war put it at 185k dead iraqi civilians.
I believe that it is much more likely that the US military simply doesn't care much about civilian deaths incurred whilst it seeks useless vengeance. This satisfies Occam's Razor, too.
The aftermath is where the popularity dwindled. Wars are easy, occupations are hard. And after dismantling the Afghanistan Taliban regime we thought we could be rebuild a better Afghanistan built on western standards. This was never going to happen.
Iraq was also popular. 80% of Republicans supported the incursion wholeheartedly. Slightly over 50% of Democrats supported the incursion, if WMDs could be found. Once Americans realized WMDs weren't going to be found support for the war in Iraq dropped stupendously. But support for the occupation was relatively high (for a while) because most Americans realized you break something you have to fix it.
For most Americans, war is hugely popular. But just the 1-2 months of actually fighting. The decades long nation building is what generals try and talk politicians out of.
That's simply not true; that was the narrative that was pushed. The military is adept at both manufacturing consent, as well as making anyone that does not consent feel as if they are in a minority.
The vast majority are opposed to war, even after attacks.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/4966/public-overwhelmingly-back...
Didnt Americans want some kind of war after 9/11
Someone who was on the ground there should know better than to confuse the Taliban with irreligious tribal warlords. The Taliban completely banned the old Afghan practice of "bucha bazi" or pedophilia. They hang pedophiles, they do not "do things to little boys". Of course, things may have happened in the fog of war, but the official Taliban policy - and they do have a policy - they are organized and disciplined, as the author admitted - is to punish pedophilia.
> We called them Hajjis and worse and they were better than we were, braver and stronger and smarter.
That is why they won. They are a strong and proud and incredibly resilient people that represent the Afghan majority and deserve to have sovereignty over their own country.
It comes at the cost of stoning women, tagging minorities(if they even exist) and taking the country back to medieval age.
And having a rulebook and following it are two different things.
Uber's entire market cap would run the US military for just over a month.
The amount of money that is being wasted here is so far beyond the scale of anything we're familiar with in even the highest echelons of private wealth.
Sadly, the US is extremely loyal to its war criminals, so this can never happen.
It’s not particularly hard, you just need to stop pretending it’s any different from, say, Mussolini.
It's particularly hard when you want executions but the only one you can name is Mussolini.
It’s trivially easy to name the main perpetrators, starting with the USA president who made that decision. Sure, the further down the chain of command you go, the more diluted it is, so you need to stop somewhere - but it’s not any different from the fascist Italy case, or any other organized case of crimes against humanity.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc. These wars and genocides and destabilizing and destroying these countries didn't just organically come about through nobody's fault.
There are warmongers and war profiteers and traitors involved, and they need to be brought to justice.
Entirely predictable and I wanted to say that the Taliban misogyny is bit unfair. Offer free quality education for their sons and daughters and you'll see real change, I promise you.
Not like this https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58219114
https://archive.org/details/theafghanistanpapers_202001
That appears to be audio—I've only read the transcript, personally—but the text is hard to find a direct link to. A search can probably dredge up pages that'll eventually lead to the text.
- Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the Vietnam War throughout 1964 and the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was passed just before his re-election in November 1964. There's a book, Dereliction of Duty, about how Johnson did this for the popularity it would earn him.
- Nixon didn't start any wars and he was re-elected.
- Jimmy Carter didn't start any wars, and the Iran hostage crisis had the opposite affect: it made him appear weak. He only served one term.
- Ronald Reagan got involved in Grenada and Lebanon in 1983. Both conflicts were relatively small and the U.S. withdrew pretty soon afterwards. His re-election was in November 1984.
- Bush Sr. started the Gulf War in January 1991. His re-election would have been in November 1992.
- Clinton got heavily involved in Bosnia in 1995. His re-election would have been in November 1996.
- Bush Jr. started the Iraq War in 2003. His re-election was in November 2004.
- Obama started the Libyan War in 2011. His re-election would have been in November 2012.
- Trump didn't start any wars. He wasn't re-elected, but we can be sure that he didn't start any wars to increase his popularity, like every other two-term president since 1964 except Nixon.
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/04/973604904/trumps-deal-to-end-...
Few understand that the Taliban while mostly all the things we associate with a terror group, it was also a successful political party that began taking power through democratic elections, this was actually in the Clinton years (Taliban founded in 1994). Since then the military wanted to intervene, but Clinton ignored it because the embarrassing failure in Mogadishu (the Black Hawk Down incident in 1993) and reluctance to suffer another failed military campaign in his first term.
When Bush took office he was surprisingly intent on use of force in Afghanistan against the Taliban, but it was politically and legally non-viable…then 9/11 happened and the administration had the pretext it needed, it just had to move quick before anyone could question the relationship between Taliban and 9/11. But in either case the US intelligence was always ready and willing to say that OBL was operating remotely from the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan as a legal justification to use armed force in Afghanistan against a non state actor because the state was failing to bring him to justice.
Whether you are for or against the US spreading democracy around the world and their willingness to use armed force to achieve its ends…Afghanistan was not about spreading democracy, rather Afghanistan was about the US not approving of a particular democratically elected party.
Of course there is a much deeper history of US funding/training of groups to fight soviets in the 70’s in Afghanistan and these groups ultimately lead to the foundation of Taliban, but for the most part it has little to do with the US use of military force in Afghanistan post 9/11.
I believe pretty much everyone stopped buying that by the time this happened: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...
Let's also not forget that Saudi Arabia was never bombed or invaded in retaliation.
But this, and hindsight, aside, is there another take on this? That there was a hope in the US political circles that, although the war perhaps should not have been started, or that post 9/11 there was no choice but to start one, but once it was going there was a hope for a better, new Afghanistan? That yea, it’s a slog, many will die and much money will be spent, but the end looks better than the start?
Maybe I’m naive but I’d like to think it was naive idealism that propelled the war (maybe not started) rather than outright cynical Machiavellism.
From today’s perspective, clearly we know the war was an expensive failure. But hindsight is everything. And the lucid impressions of a soldier on the ground may not be a complete picture.