As horrible as those allegations are, let's appreciate that the U.S. military may be about the only military force that is both capable of committing these mistakes/war crimes and investigating them.
Just imagine what would happen if Russian or Chinese military lawyers or journalists tried to do something similar.
>U.S. military may be about the only military force that is both capable of committing these mistakes/war crimes and investigating them
I'd prefer if they just not did them in the first place. I consider the alleged transparency simply to be a more subtle form of propaganda. It simply exists to give more credibility to warfare. It's in a sense how everything around American society is structured. When you make everyone belief they can be a millionaire they're not going rebel although they won't, when you get people to voluntarily fight they'll do it eagerly, etc
Also as a psychological mechanism it is a kind of reverse version of what Adorno called secondary antisemitism. Which is the kind of antisemitism where someone will use the crimes committed against the Jews against them. (for example "I hate them, they've ruined the idea of German nationalism!"). Arguing to take American war-crimes as an opportunity to appreciate American virtue in dealing with them is to relegate the victim to an object, and to basically declare the American moral character the most important thing in the world, which is very bizarre.
Following through on your analogy, though, this would be akin to "secondary patriotism" - responding to criticism of your country with mitigation: "well, we've done bad things, but at least we have mechanisms for internal criticism and improvement". Put that way it doesn't sound so bad.
So the US internally docummented some of the incidents. Is that useful to anyone? Did it have impact on anything? A lot of the reporting at the time in the west was actually done by non-US organizations like airwars.org.
I watched the reporting quite closely at the time.
At least now I know how to interpret the reports from reporters embedded with US coalition in the past that they were not allowed into some area before it was cleaned. This article paints a clear picture of what might have been happening.
And y'all wonder why Americans are hated. It takes a special amount of delusion to pat yourself on the back, for whatever made-up reason, after having killed innocent people.
Imagine saying the same thing about 9/11 and watch your life be torn to pieces.
In the real world military actions often have unintended civilian casualties. The difference is that some groups don't care (china, russia) or are doing them purposefully (terrorists). If you can't understand the moral distinction then I don't think you're going to be able to add anything but noise to these kinds of debates.
The only intention of our many stupid wars is to further enrich armaments manufactures. It has nothing to do with security; Americans are vulnerable mostly to violence from ourselves. Killing civilians enriches armaments manufacturers just fine, and it plants the seeds for future wars, so it certainly is intended. Probably not by the rank and file (cf. Daniel Hale), but certainly by everyone in the Pentagon.
Claiming otherwise is the best example of "noise".
Americans are hated? I think you hang out in a fairly small social circle if that is the norm. Or are you just one of those self-hating Americans who thinks everyone else is just like you? Guessing that's the case from the use of "y'all"
You should travel more and ask people outside the US what they actually think about US military policy. Note, some people do distinguish between what the US establishment does and what ordinary American civilians do but that is not always the case.
Ordinary Americans are quite nationalistic and rarely leave their country. World knowledge is very poor amongst the mid and low class American citizens.
The US military has made plenty of mistakes but it is easily the fighting force that has done the most to ensure the rise in standard of living across the globe via protection of shipping lanes and maintaining global order
On multiple occasions in my life I've needed to order extra pages for my passport because it was full of stamps. I've been to every continent except for Antarctica and 50 plus countries and have literally never had a negative interaction because of my nationality.
Maybe you need to travel more? You hear "Americans are hated" by.... Americans mostly. And, I would guess, Americans of a certain political bent that say it more as a badge of their identity rather than it being an honest belief in the truth(literally "America's #1!!!", but for liberals). It's a grade school level understanding of the world(as is "America #1") and I find it a fair indicator of stereotype-oriented thought patterns when I hear it.
Have you actually had a conversation with anyone outside the US about what they think about US govt/military policy? Most people are too polite to say these things unless specifically asked.
By the way, I am not an American and I don't live in the US. So I have a perspective on this which you probably don't have.
Those are correlated. If your military is killing civilians en masse and over half the country is still celebrating the military, putting up flags everywhere, shouting F YEAH MURICA at every turn, then those people are ignoring the truth. Here in Germany there really is a growing blanket hate of American military policy and by extension American mainstream populace.
Responding to nationalistic flamebait with more nationalistic flamewar will also get you banned here, regardless of how provocative another comment is or you feel it is. No more of this, please. It's not what this site is for.
Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here, regardless of which nation you have a problem with. Please don't post like this to HN—it creates hellish threads that destroy what this site is supposed to be for. I realize that the GP comment was a provocation, but outright flamewar is exactly the wrong way to respond to that.
- and you've continued repeatedly to do it, including recently. If you keep this up, we will have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so please stop abusing HN in this way.
That's not what the article says. The article says that they stymied any internal inquiries, fudged numbers, and lied at every possible opportunity to do so. It's great that the NYT is covering it, because liberals might pay attention, but this looks like another case (like the rocket into the compound of an Afghan family seemingly out of a Hallmark card or a segment of CBS Sunday Morning) where pictures, testimony, and clear analysis were up shortly after the event, but since they were posted by locals and people opposed to the war, completely ignored by the media.
No one will be punished for this, ever, except the people who wouldn't let go of the incident internally, and anyone who leaked to a journalist.
I actually think that if it were China, we would see prosecution and punishment. It absolutely could never happen in the US.
I wonder what the larger societal context for this airstrike? The context for the "the rocket into the compound of an Afghan family" was a retreat from Afghanistan. Other previous bombings of questionable military value had other contexts.
These justifications for the bombing were disputed by the owners of the plant, the Sudanese government, and other governments. American officials later acknowledged "that the evidence that prompted President Clinton to order the missile strike on the Shifa plant was not as solid as first portrayed. Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of Khartoum in the 1980s." The attack took place a week after the Monica Lewinsky scandal and two months after the film Wag the Dog, prompting some commentators to describe the attack as a distraction for the public from the scandal.
The United States asked its ally countries to manufacture charges to imprison a foreign journalist for exposing many of its war crimes during the Iraq War, and they complied. We are no better than your imagined, contrived scenario.
This hubris that we are somehow better, more moral, or more able to investigate and correct mistakes is a long disproven farce that needs to die.
You overestimate the USA military's tolerance for investigation of its many "mistakes". Julian Assange has been persecuted for over a decade now for the "crime" of investigating such "mistakes". Korsak and Tate as described in TFA will probably suffer as previous whistleblowers like Daniel Hale, John Kiriakou, Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, etc.
Let's not give TFA too much credit, however. In 12 pages of reporting on USA military action in Syria, they couldn't find space to mention the fact that right now in mid-November 2021 USA military still occupies the oil- and agriculturally-rich eastern third of this nation, thus ensuring that while they can't buy food due to sanctions they're also not allowed to eat their own food because "fuck you"? In order for this brutality to end, it must be reported upon.
And their weapon system was retired. There were terrible crimes, but trying to make complex situations simple to suit your preferred narrative actually weakens your arguments.
There is no record of an investigation of how the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 got shot down. Whereas the incident with the Iranian airliner almost looks like it was provoked by the Iranian side.
Provocation is not grounds for killing 290 civilians. If, and that's a big if, there really was intentional provocation from Iran that doesn't mean you can kill 290 civilians.
> Just imagine what would happen if Russian or Chinese military lawyers or journalists tried to do something similar.
There doesn't seem to be English language publication to establish if similar internal criticism occurs in other countries or not. For all we know Daesh PR did a through analysis of burning Jordanian pilots alive in cages [0] and found it unhelpful to their cause. Given that any large enough human organization has internal conflict it would stand to reason that similar internal criticism occurs.
It's not as if US whistleblowers live carefree lives. The NYT associates Mr. Tate's job loss with criticism of the US' internal response to the bombing.
Mr. Tate, a former Navy officer who had worked for years as a civilian analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center before moving to the inspector general’s office, said he criticized the lack of action and was eventually forced out of his job.
Considering that the Daesh / ISIS-K organization is so freakishly violent that they're attacking the _TALIBAN_ for being too moderate, gives you everything you need to know about that group.
For better or worse, ISIS-K is the Taliban's problem for now. But I do worry that the Taliban are going to be toppled by ISIS-K, and once ISIS-K is in power they'll use Afghanistan as a training center to launch international attacks from.
Or Syria, or Iraq. ISIS-K has strength in a fair number of regions. They clearly don't care "which" land they get, they just want some land / safe havens to train up and grow in strength.
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Brutally killing civilians is their modus operandi. USA hides it when we do it because we're at least embarrassed about it and nominally against that sort of thing..
Unfortunately, we have more important things to worry about and prepare for.
> USA hides it when we do it because we're at least embarrassed about it
Who's embarrassed by it and who's hiding it?
The civilian Afghans killed by ISIS- K are terrified because that is the point. The civilian Afghans killed by Americans are still terrified because they are largely irrelevant to Americans. Which is its own point. These deaths aren't being hidden from Afghans by Afghan media. They are being ignored by US media. The killings are chocked up as "accidents" and the machine moves on.
Political science studies in English-speaking universities would uncover this. There isn't the same opportunity for public-exposed internal investigations in countries where media and whistleblowing is less free. Whistleblowing does not have to be safe in the US to still be more dangerous in another country.
1) there are systems in place to stop this happening.
2) there are system in place to investigate if it happens.
3) the systems in 1) are circumvented
4) the systems in 2) are stymied
This means the systems have been corrupted. It means the US military can claim to care about those things but actually acts entirely contra to those stated principles. This is more cynical than not pretending to care.
I think other NATO members do similar investigations too. But remember, most of the civilian casualties are never recorded to be even investigated. What you hear is just the tip of iceberg.
Not to mention that the US military force is also the only military force that is in the business of invasion and dropping bomb ALL THE TIME, which translates to more and more casualties.
Well, just right now, Russia is doing the same in Syria and sometimes Ukraine and other regions around the world. Then there's Iran. Other "bad guys" are more involved with their general vicinity.
You took the thread into a hellish nationalistic flamewar with this provocation. Please don't do that again. It's emphatically not what this site is for, and it's particularly avoidable.
Not perfect and sadly Harbor some insurrectionists who are under some mistaken idea that fascism is protecting Freedom and America. But still a cut above Russians and Chinese brutalists.
This won't get coverage as it would put the blame on Biden administration. NYT is out to try and win support for the current administration, I don't believe they care about actual accountability for wrong doing.
How long until people realize that any authority saying “justified” is not using a definition found in any dictionary.
The term used by any American imbued with the option of extrajudicial killings is only to - at best - match your pre-existing agreement with the action or your likelihood of agreeing with authority. “Justified”, for these people, does not mean “other actions were evaluated in a hierarchy and we were in a circumstance that this greater level of force was necessary” such as how a civilian is evaluated, it means “this choice was in a catalog of equally weighted choices, any of the choices including inaction would be justified”. I don’t view this as good enough, as it makes investigations and courts a waste of time and energy, when the only resolution can be to say “and now I present as evidence: the catalogue of choices that happens to list the choice taken” acquitting all.
I think it's even worse. "Justified" means "we issued a document that says that in in order to kill more terrorists, killing a lesser number of civilians is justified, then we issued a document that declared 90% of the civilians terrorists."
yeah, I think this is supported by a large number of people not understanding this.
like, a lot of support comes from evaluating each event in isolation from more neutral people, but I think even more hawkish as well as bigoted people would say "hm this is not okay for domestic or foreign policy"
> The most foolish notion of all is the belief that everything is just which is found in the customs or laws of nations. Would that be true, even if these laws had been enacted by tyrants?
> What of the many deadly, the many pestilential statutes which nations put in force? These no more deserve to be called laws than the rules a band of robbers might pass in their assembly. For if ignorant and unskillful men have prescribed deadly poisons instead of healing drugs, these cannot possibly be called physicians’ prescriptions; neither in a nation can a statute of any sort be called a law, even though the nation, in spite of being a ruinous regulation, has accepted it.
Why do we believe we killed Bin Laden even? Given the track record of the military, it was probably some goat farmers in Pakistan—-which is why no one saw the body and it was unceremoniously dumped in the ocean.
- Special task force ordered strike. They didn't have to go through normal checks and balances because they were doing it under emergency provisions apparently due to an emergency request from arab allies on the ground.
- They claim they didn't see the civilians because they were relying on SD quality drone feed.
- The group is accused of falsifying log records afterwards.
Second paragraph: "Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast."
>A 5th Special Forces Group officer in the task force looked at the drone footage and didn’t see any civilians, a task force officer said. But the drone he relied on had only a standard-definition camera. Central Command said there were no high-definition drones in the area that could get a better view of the target...In fact, a high-definition drone was available. The task force did not use it.
There were 2 drone streams. The HD one that the Qatar base was watching, and the SD one that the task force was watching (if we're to believe their account).
I wouldn't necessarily assume it's a lie. I have no inside information and, if I did, I probably wouldn't be able to share it. However, based on my experience in Iraq, it wouldn't surprise me if 5th Group were relying on a previous-generation drone and didn't know an MQ9 or better class drone was watching the same AO.
We once had a TF call in requesting a strike on military-aged males carrying rifles. In the strike cell, we had a newer drone on station and checked out what they were calling in. I'm glad we did. With higher fidelity video, we could see that it was actually teenaged males with fishing poles. The strike request was (of course) denied. In our case, it worked out the way one would hope, but with aging equipment and poor networking, it's definitely a "there but for the grace of God go I" moment.
The US record in Afghanistan is arguably even more ridiculous (and psychotic) than in Iraq. We went in with a pretty good justification (Taliban refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden for his central role in 9/11 terrorism) - although to be honest, the argument for doing the regime change op in Saudi Arabia was far more robust, as members of the Saudi government aided the hijackers and Saudi Royal family members were a key funding source.
Everything since then has been ridiculous. Getting in bed with heroin-shipping warlords because they were anti-Taliban? Not that the Taliban got over $100 million from the USA in 1999-2001 for opium poppy eradication efforts, which were quite successful, although TAPI pipeline talks didn't go as well in this period.
The whole 'Special Forces' fetishization is also pretty ridiculous. The best of the best of the best, la-dee-dah. Lots of nightime raids, which only pissed off the local population and made them quite willing to hand over power to the Taliban without a fight this year. Didn't 'US leaders' learn that from Vietnam? If the locals all hate you they're not going to support your remotely installed puppet government.
Oh, and the "Afghan Army Training Program" - at a cost of something like $10 billion to train and equip 350,000 Afghan Army members who'd be the nucleus of the new independent government... all that cash just went into Dubai bank accounts, didn't it? Or McMansions in Kabul. Gross blatant corruption (and the 'infrastructure projects' oh god... for a million bucks you get a chain of ten subcontractors backed up by one guy digging a ditch with a worn-out shovel... get used to it, that's coming here now).
American foreign policy in the 21st century - what an absolute disaster. Reminiscent of say, France and Britain in the Middle East from oh 1945-1954. Similar long-term results are to be expected.
> We went in with a pretty good justification (Taliban refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden for his central role in 9/11 terrorism)
That would _not_ be a good justification to wage a war, but I think the actual casus belli was Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction – later found to be non-existent. 215 Republicans and 82 Democrats voted for this. They paved the way for a war of aggression… and I seem to remember that Americans have previously hanged foreign politicians for precisely that.
Edit: Misread above comment and thought he was talking about Iraq. Point still stands, though.
> After 9/11, the Bush administration national security team actively debated an invasion of Iraq. On the day of the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked his aides for: "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit Saddam Hussein at the same time. Not only Osama bin Laden."[90] President Bush spoke with Rumsfeld on 21 November and instructed him to conduct a confidential review of OPLAN 1003, the war plan for invading Iraq.[91] Rumsfeld met with General Tommy Franks, the commander of US Central Command, on 27 November to go over the plans. A record of the meeting includes the question "How start?", listing multiple possible justifications for a US–Iraq War.[92][93] The rationale for invading Iraq as a response to 9/11 has been refuted, as there was no cooperation between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.[94]
US have an excuse all the time, surprisingly, people who represent educated segment don't either want to look to other side, I remember Taliban tried to have a negotiation with US, they tried to get their voice heard in western media, but failed, because everyone was blind sided, no one wanted to hear them and US anyway launched attack, 20 years later, everything is even more fucked up over there.
Now we should be really worried if there are other extremist groups are training and planning another attack soon, this time everyone would know US don't have a justification and obviously will fail again. (I don't remember if US won any war recently? Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan all are in trouble, all of the wars are started wrongly)
Given the official statements of the Taliban (ie: that Osama Bin Laden didn't cause 9/11), what exactly is your proposal?
Taliban were protecting Bin Laden, period. Their official stance on the subject is clearly false, and they were willing to go to war to provide sanctuary to Bin Laden. The main worry was that any such delays at this point would give Bin Laden more room to get away (and Bin Laden did escape: all the way to Pakistan).
So if anything, we should have pursued Bin Laden even more vigorously back then. The Taliban were successful in buying enough time for him to hide with their false diplomacy.
We were at least successful in destroying the Al Qaeda training centers in Afghanistan (successfully located, blown up, and dismantled). Maybe these bases will return now that we've left Afghanistan, but we at least rendered them unable to train new terrorists for the last 20 years or so (and the new Taliban regime officially doesn't want to sanction any such training sites anymore. They've got an ISIS-K problem because of it too)
agree with you, maybe they tried to protect Bin Laden.
But there are multiple questions which should be answered:
1. are we 110% sure that Bin Laden ordered the attack? I am not trying to defend him, but you know there are many organizations who can do that attack, including multiple organizations funded by CIA (don't forget Bin Laden was initially funded by CIA), maybe government could prevent attack but didn't prevent, because they were also interested in natural resources of Afghanistan?
2. Are we 120% sure we can capture and execute Bin Laden without civilian fatalities? if civilian fatalities can't be avoided, did we have numbers in mind, how many people will get killed?
3. Why western media didn't give enough voice to Taliban at that time? If enough people listened to them, maybe US could make public negotiation and if negotiation fails publicly, then everyone would definitely know Taliban is to blame for this war. In reality, US just said, we are super power, we can do whatever we want.
4. Are we sure war wasn't lobbied? You know, US sells lots of weapons, they sometimes need to test, are we sure that war wasn't lobbied? where did 2T$ go? Do you think all were eaten by corrupt Afghan government? even 10% of it would be 200B which would create 100 billionaires.
I am not defending Taliban or Bin Laden, just showing how decisions made was wrong and I still doubt US can make right decision. Now Afghanistan has lots of uneducated people, who lost their families, children. Do you think they would just forgive? Who can guarantee that they won't come over to US and start killing people?
> So if anything, we should have pursued Bin Laden even more vigorously back then. The Taliban were successful in buying enough time for him to hide with their false diplomacy.
The problem was, real intelligence on the whereabouts of Bin Laden and Al Qaida in general was extremely rare. It was the vigorousness with which we pursued Al Qaida that helped really poison the relationship with local Afghans. You had local elites claiming that their rivals were somehow related to Al Qaida, which usually resulted in innocent people being taken into custody, tortured and/or killed. You had some legitimate leads (but often on mid-level operatives at best) that resulted in extremely risky special forces operations in remote and treacherous terrain - often resulting in both US and civilian casualties. You do this enough and people hate you, you've got an insurgency.
> We were at least successful in destroying the Al Qaeda training centers in Afghanistan (successfully located, blown up, and dismantled).
Real "training centers" were something of a white whale for the military in Afghanistan. A lot of the supposed Al Qaida "training" was taking place in Kunar and Nuristan provinces, in particularly inhospitable terrain. We'd run military operations in these remote Nuristani valleys, US troops would die, we'd almost never capture anything of value, and local people would slowly get fed up with their husbands/children/etc. getting accidentally blown up in airstrikes.
The Battle of Tora Bora, taking place in December 2001, has been subject to US Senate debate and discussion.
Bin Laden wrote his last will and testament on December 14, 2001, coinciding with the battle. The commandos who stormed Tora Bora were met with fierce resistance... not by Taliban, but by US Troops who refused to drop bigger bombs or deploy sufficient forces to attack the mountainous terrain.
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Donald Rumsfeld himself was worried that too many troops in Afghanistan at this time would fuel anti-American sentiment. Our problem was half-assing it in the early days of the war, when it mattered.
When the Afghan forces complied with the Taliban / Al Qaeda cease fire, there was nothing for US troops to do anymore but let Bin Laden go. There wasn't sufficient strength to attack.
Perhaps intelligence on the ground was insufficient to allow a bigger military footprint at the time. But given the next 20 years of fighting and insurrection, a bit more force used in December 2001 could have prevented a lot of the force we used later.
Yes, we narrowly missed Bin Laden at Tora Bora in 2001. But "just send more troops" and "use bigger bombs" betrays a lack of familiarity with combat in the mountainous and inhospitable parts of Afghanistan. There's only so much air power can do in these places. It's incredibly hard to insert troops into places like these. You need to be able to medevac the WIA and KIA when things go wrong. There were no roads. In 2001, we were often literally using Russian maps. The history of these big mountain operations in Afghanistan is basically one of "let's send more troops/use bigger bombs/etc. etc." and it never got us anywhere. These operations pretty much always failed and we almost never got whoever we were going after.
> The history of these big mountain operations in Afghanistan is basically one of "let's send more troops/use bigger bombs/etc. etc." and it never got us anywhere.
Except in the Battle of Tora Bora, where the commanders on the ground said that the 100 troops deployed to the area were insufficient to push into a heavily fortified mountainous region.
And they're right. If those 100 troops pushed in, they would have been massacred. More troops absolutely would have helped at that time.
Plenty of airplanes dropped plenty of bombs. But the use of air-deployed land mines was not authorized, which could have also helped (GATOR mines self-detonate after 15 days, to minimize risks to the local population after battle. They are further battery-operated, and are designed to run out of battery in case the self-detonation fails)
The gloves were still on. We could have easily used more force in that battle, but decided against it.
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Traditionally, you need to outnumber your opponent 3 to 1 if you wish to lay siege to an enemy in their home territory. At some point, just raw manpower is what you need.
As you said: we dropped plenty of bombs in that battle, but bombs aren't boots on the ground. You need people there to know if the bombs are in fact hitting their mark.
You're getting fixated on the specifics of Tora Bora. Zoom out and look at the other big mountain operations over the following 15 years; you'll hear similar excuses "we needed this technology/we needed more men at this spot." With that context it's easy to see that Tora Bora probably wouldn't have been a success even with GATOR mines or more men.
We are literally talking about a battle that scared Osama Bin Laden so much that he wrote his last will and testament during the battle.
Bin Laden thought he was going to die in that battle. We were close: just a little bit more would have done it.
Sure, we didn't know how close we were until afterwards. But when you consider what we did accomplish with just 100 boots on the ground + air support, it really makes you wonder what we could have done with 800 or 2000 men instead.
I'm not sure this conversation is going anywhere because (again, with context you'd realize this) narrowly missing the target by a day or two was par for the course with these types of engagements.
If you're interested in learning more, I'd strongly recommend Wes Morgan's excellent book "The Hardest Place."
Person who tried to expose what is actually happening is now going to jail, right? I am talking about Julian Assange.
No one needs such "world police", who is trying to build a democracy in other countries, but failing on pillars of democracy by putting journalist to jail in home country.
That's one of the central reasons a regime change op in Saudi Arabia would have been more justified. I think the rational explanation is that Team Bush wanted war, but couldn't directly attack Iraq (the efforts to link Al Qaeda and the anthrax letters to Saddam were largely unsuccessful), so they went into Afghanistan instead.
The complete abandonment of 'nation-building' Afghanistan in 2002 as all efforts shifted to invading Iraq sort of supports this scenario.
They wanted proof bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. Given that they've denied he was responsible as recently as a couple months ago despite him claiming responsibility on video in '04 or so, I don't think this was in good faith.
In this specific case, the Taliban still to this day doesn't believe bin Laden was responsible for 9/11, so their supposed offer to hand over bin Laden back then if they were given proof he was responsible probably wasn't made in good faith.
These can all 3 be true: The Taliban does not believe that bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. They would hand over bin Laden if they saw credible evidence. Their bar for credibility is quite high.
Why isn't bin Laden saying verbatim to the public that he's responsible enough? If that's not enough, what could the coalition forces possibly say that would convince the Taliban?
There isn't high bar to cross. They've already decided what they think. That's what I mean by 'bad faith'.
Unfortunately, true. We humans are still just scary, tribal apes who have brains big enough to feel the need to build elaborate rationalizations for brutish, reprehensible behavior
I cannot conclude logically that evidence sufficient for me means that anyone who disagrees is per se operating in bad faith.
I'm not going to argue for the Taliban. I have no idea whether they're good faith actors or not. Regardless, they're assholes, and I'm pretty sure, as far as I can ever be, that bin Laden is responsible.
But to be fair, "he claimed responsibility" isn't by itself iron-clad proof for anything. All kinds of people claim all kinds of false things for all kinds of reasons. We know this. The Taliban knows this. I could easily come up with a plausible, reasonable explanation why bin Laden would falsely make such a claim. You could too.
When someone rejects evidence that you find convincing, don't assume bad faith. Ask them what evidence they would accept no matter how unlikely. If they have something (e.g. "If I had a private meeting with bin Laden and he assured me personally..."), it means they just have a really high bar.
>> If the CIA/US military was sure of his guilt, why didn't they bring him before a court?
Well, they killed him, so there's that. Hard to bring a dead man to trial.
Also... it was Obama's desire to try Osama bin Laden.
“We worked through the legal and political issues that would have been involved, and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantánamo, and to not try him, and Article III.” Obama continues: “I mean, we had worked through a whole bunch of those scenarios. But, frankly, my belief was if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.”
There is no doubt that bin Laden was the mastermind behind the attacks on 9/11. It is not remotely controversial or in any way disputed.
Obama: but why not show the world and his followers likewise, what the US of A all about?
And then you did.
There was a time, btw, when it was not remotely controversial or in any way disputed to claim that Lee Harvey Oswald was the mastermind behind the assassination of JFK.
There's an abundance of other evidence that bin Laden was behind 9/11, his claim of responsibility being only the most blatantly obvious one. Claiming he wasn't responsible for 9/11 genuinely requires conspiracy theorist-levels of contrived argumentation.
The mission was capture or kill. If he had surrendered, he could have been tried and convicted, but realistically that wasn't going to happen, so he ended up dying as expected.
Bin Laden himself claimed responsibility on video in '04. If that isn't credible evidence, no evidence in the world could ever have been credible for them.
And some estimate that the number may be as high as 100,000.
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In contrast, the US sent ~110,000 soldiers at its peak (2011 surge), and lost ~7000. The Afghan Army took the bulk of the attacks by any reasonable analysis.
But is that 'official death count' any more reliable than the total count of 350,000? Let's say I'm a grossly corrupt Afghan general, and I'm diverting pay and equipment money, say 50% of the total, to my private bank accounts. Now someone asks me to account for the smallish number of soldiers in my barracks.
"Oh sir, we have suffered great casualties in our fight against the terrorists, here are the records."
> But is that 'official death count' any more reliable than the total count of 350,000?
No. Because the Afghan security forces would be lying to try to improve their morale.
If anything, the official death count is almost certainly an underestimate. No army likes to admit that their death rates are in the 25%+ level, when you admit such a thing, you won't be able to find recruits.
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Besides, we paid the Afghans on number of soldiers on payroll. Not on number of deaths. So the number they were corrupt on was #-of-soldiers.
Bombing small non-white countries is part of the Ledeen Doctrine and this would fit that bill.
"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,"
> Taliban refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden for his central role in 9/11 terrorism
If we put in mind what we know post hoc about the torture and inhumane interrogation techniques used in both Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, wouldn't you agree that it's reasonable to assume that there was a high risk of torture?
and isn't torture a well-accepted reason to block extradition.
In fact, let's take it even a step further in light of the fabrication of evidence seen in Iraq. The general atmosphere of hate at the time. not to mention that we now know that bin Laden not only was not tried but was thrown in a bag with the fish. How can we be so sure that he would have had received a fair trial? How would you even find an unbiased jury[1]?
Do we deem it ok to extradite someone to a place with a high risk of torture and unfair trial?
[1] - this is a rhetorical question but I'm actually curious how would one find such a jury that hasn't already made its mind?
If that were the real situation then the taliban could have taken Bin Laden into custody and hand him over for trial in a neutral country (say the Netherlands alike Lockerbie trial, or somewhere like China or India)
Given the context of also asking for bombing to stop, that seems like they were trying to stop the US from using military pressure to force their will on Afghanistan. The deal wasn't even considered, who knows what they were actually trying to negotiate.
>I don't see what's so unreasonable about handing him over to the US tbh
History has now shown the US was willing to torture people associated with al Qaeda, and execute Bin Laden then desecrate his corpse. They were absolutely right to distrust the US there.
Yeah and the Taliban were willing to protect the guy who committed one of the worst terrorist atrocities in memory. Funny how it's totally understandable according to you why the Taliban wouldn't trust America, but somehow America isn't afford the same understanding by people like you.... Utterly transparent from you I'm afraid.
If Afghanistan trusted the US and the US proceeded to torture and execute Bin Laden, they would have no recourse. If the US trusted Afghanistan and Afghanistan proceeded to not cooperate then the US could then start the invasion.
Afghanistan wasn't more trustworthy, the amount of trust necessary was far lower.
I think that addresses your accusation. I barely understand what you consider "utterly transparent" in my comment.
>and isn't torture a well-accepted reason to block extradition.
When you rule the way Taliban did the idea that you're not extraditing someone because you're worried about them getting hooked up to a car battery or beaten with a rubber hose is laughable.
To your first paragraph, there is no ethically sound reason to invade another country. That is where these conversations should begin and end. It also has the added benefit now of not just being ethically correct, but economically correct when it comes to the interest of a nation state.
> The whole 'Special Forces' fetishization is also pretty ridiculous. The best of the best of the best, la-dee-dah.
This is a pretty common misunderstanding by civilians. Special forces come in tiers and usually they're designated for certain kinds of work. It doesn't mean they're "best of the best", just special training that may or may not be useful in a place like Afghanistan. Historically they're used for training foreign fighters. From what I read in this article, this looks like work that line companies should have been doing.
> Oh, and the "Afghan Army Training Program" - at a cost of something like $10 billion to train and equip 350,000 Afghan Army members who'd be the nucleus of the new independent government...
I don't think that money went any conspicuous. I served in 2012, when a lot of that ANA training and colocation was going on. You're absolutely right that it was a failure. The problem was that the President was telling the American people things were going well, when in reality troops were getting shot in the back on patrol by their counterparts, people were deserting post while high on hash, and most ANA were paid over four years the equivalent of a dowery.
> Getting in bed with heroin-shipping warlords because they were anti-Taliban?
This was surprising to me when I was in country, but I get it. Most of these dudes are the equivalent of governors and own their own armies. They just didn't want to follow the Talibans rules, so "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Quite complicated, but I don't know how it'd be different.
> made them quite willing to hand over power to the Taliban without a fight this year.
The most ridiculous I saw from your post:
A reasonable citizen, who saw from the very beginning the ridiculousness of the whole thing, in the end, seems to suggest the whole thing should not end so abruptly?
Most of the civilian casualties aren't even documented in a war. If you think the military you support invades a country and only kills the bad guys, you are watching too many hollywood movies.
I don't think most people do; you've lived through the pandemic, you've seen how people are. They don't know anything at all. (for some large group of "They")
It is encouraging to see this kind of in-depth reporting on the incident. I wonder for how much longer that's possible, given the declining revenue possible for news organizations.
the US political system is completely broken, and it's destroying a great country. it's a leadership problem, and needs someone who is capable of detaching and acting in the best interest of the country, not themselves or their party.
they need a complete reboot. rewrite the constitution (it's overdue). rebuild the democratic voting functions (they're a mess and don't work).
What’s your proposal? How do you find that altruistic leader, and if you find them, how do you get them elected, and if you do, how do you arrange to get them enough support in Congress?
I don’t like democracy that much, and it looks like Churchill didn’t either. But neither Churchill nor me can come up with anything better.
As a non-american, for all the lauded military professionalism of the USAF, I personally find them to be a bumbling organisation that can't seem to even do basic research before dropping bombs on people.
There have been dozens of incidents of non-combatants bombed to paste over the last decade and it seems USAF will just simply not fix what it is doing wrong.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadJust imagine what would happen if Russian or Chinese military lawyers or journalists tried to do something similar.
I'd prefer if they just not did them in the first place. I consider the alleged transparency simply to be a more subtle form of propaganda. It simply exists to give more credibility to warfare. It's in a sense how everything around American society is structured. When you make everyone belief they can be a millionaire they're not going rebel although they won't, when you get people to voluntarily fight they'll do it eagerly, etc
Also as a psychological mechanism it is a kind of reverse version of what Adorno called secondary antisemitism. Which is the kind of antisemitism where someone will use the crimes committed against the Jews against them. (for example "I hate them, they've ruined the idea of German nationalism!"). Arguing to take American war-crimes as an opportunity to appreciate American virtue in dealing with them is to relegate the victim to an object, and to basically declare the American moral character the most important thing in the world, which is very bizarre.
I watched the reporting quite closely at the time.
At least now I know how to interpret the reports from reporters embedded with US coalition in the past that they were not allowed into some area before it was cleaned. This article paints a clear picture of what might have been happening.
Imagine saying the same thing about 9/11 and watch your life be torn to pieces.
Claiming otherwise is the best example of "noise".
You should read this. https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Maybe you need to travel more? You hear "Americans are hated" by.... Americans mostly. And, I would guess, Americans of a certain political bent that say it more as a badge of their identity rather than it being an honest belief in the truth(literally "America's #1!!!", but for liberals). It's a grade school level understanding of the world(as is "America #1") and I find it a fair indicator of stereotype-oriented thought patterns when I hear it.
By the way, I am not an American and I don't live in the US. So I have a perspective on this which you probably don't have.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you have a long history of posting like this. We've already warned you more than once:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513278
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858996
- and you've continued repeatedly to do it, including recently. If you keep this up, we will have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so please stop abusing HN in this way.
No one will be punished for this, ever, except the people who wouldn't let go of the incident internally, and anyone who leaked to a journalist.
I actually think that if it were China, we would see prosecution and punishment. It absolutely could never happen in the US.
These justifications for the bombing were disputed by the owners of the plant, the Sudanese government, and other governments. American officials later acknowledged "that the evidence that prompted President Clinton to order the missile strike on the Shifa plant was not as solid as first portrayed. Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of Khartoum in the 1980s." The attack took place a week after the Monica Lewinsky scandal and two months after the film Wag the Dog, prompting some commentators to describe the attack as a distraction for the public from the scandal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_pharmaceutical_factor...
This hubris that we are somehow better, more moral, or more able to investigate and correct mistakes is a long disproven farce that needs to die.
Let's not give TFA too much credit, however. In 12 pages of reporting on USA military action in Syria, they couldn't find space to mention the fact that right now in mid-November 2021 USA military still occupies the oil- and agriculturally-rich eastern third of this nation, thus ensuring that while they can't buy food due to sanctions they're also not allowed to eat their own food because "fuck you"? In order for this brutality to end, it must be reported upon.
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/05/tulsi-gabbard-calls-out-t...
There is no record of an investigation of how the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 got shot down. Whereas the incident with the Iranian airliner almost looks like it was provoked by the Iranian side.
There doesn't seem to be English language publication to establish if similar internal criticism occurs in other countries or not. For all we know Daesh PR did a through analysis of burning Jordanian pilots alive in cages [0] and found it unhelpful to their cause. Given that any large enough human organization has internal conflict it would stand to reason that similar internal criticism occurs.
It's not as if US whistleblowers live carefree lives. The NYT associates Mr. Tate's job loss with criticism of the US' internal response to the bombing.
Mr. Tate, a former Navy officer who had worked for years as a civilian analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center before moving to the inspector general’s office, said he criticized the lack of action and was eventually forced out of his job.
0. https://www.albawaba.com/development-iraq/breaking-daesh-bur...
I mean... ISIS-K / Daesh is still murdering people in Afghanistan, even after we've left.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/world/asia/afghanistan-mo...
Considering that the Daesh / ISIS-K organization is so freakishly violent that they're attacking the _TALIBAN_ for being too moderate, gives you everything you need to know about that group.
For better or worse, ISIS-K is the Taliban's problem for now. But I do worry that the Taliban are going to be toppled by ISIS-K, and once ISIS-K is in power they'll use Afghanistan as a training center to launch international attacks from.
Or Syria, or Iraq. ISIS-K has strength in a fair number of regions. They clearly don't care "which" land they get, they just want some land / safe havens to train up and grow in strength.
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Brutally killing civilians is their modus operandi. USA hides it when we do it because we're at least embarrassed about it and nominally against that sort of thing..
Unfortunately, we have more important things to worry about and prepare for.
Who's embarrassed by it and who's hiding it?
The civilian Afghans killed by ISIS- K are terrified because that is the point. The civilian Afghans killed by Americans are still terrified because they are largely irrelevant to Americans. Which is its own point. These deaths aren't being hidden from Afghans by Afghan media. They are being ignored by US media. The killings are chocked up as "accidents" and the machine moves on.
1) there are systems in place to stop this happening.
2) there are system in place to investigate if it happens.
3) the systems in 1) are circumvented
4) the systems in 2) are stymied
This means the systems have been corrupted. It means the US military can claim to care about those things but actually acts entirely contra to those stated principles. This is more cynical than not pretending to care.
Not to mention that the US military force is also the only military force that is in the business of invasion and dropping bomb ALL THE TIME, which translates to more and more casualties.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/politics/kabul-drone-strike-u...
One of at least five NYT stories about the strike.
I'm still waiting for the big apology from Biden and the actual retaliation to ISIS, murdering 10 innocent people including 7 children doesn't count.
I heard from him we still had great intel and over-the-horizon capability. That seemed to be a lie.
The term used by any American imbued with the option of extrajudicial killings is only to - at best - match your pre-existing agreement with the action or your likelihood of agreeing with authority. “Justified”, for these people, does not mean “other actions were evaluated in a hierarchy and we were in a circumstance that this greater level of force was necessary” such as how a civilian is evaluated, it means “this choice was in a catalog of equally weighted choices, any of the choices including inaction would be justified”. I don’t view this as good enough, as it makes investigations and courts a waste of time and energy, when the only resolution can be to say “and now I present as evidence: the catalogue of choices that happens to list the choice taken” acquitting all.
like, a lot of support comes from evaluating each event in isolation from more neutral people, but I think even more hawkish as well as bigoted people would say "hm this is not okay for domestic or foreign policy"
> What of the many deadly, the many pestilential statutes which nations put in force? These no more deserve to be called laws than the rules a band of robbers might pass in their assembly. For if ignorant and unskillful men have prescribed deadly poisons instead of healing drugs, these cannot possibly be called physicians’ prescriptions; neither in a nation can a statute of any sort be called a law, even though the nation, in spite of being a ruinous regulation, has accepted it.
Cicero
- Special task force ordered strike. They didn't have to go through normal checks and balances because they were doing it under emergency provisions apparently due to an emergency request from arab allies on the ground.
- They claim they didn't see the civilians because they were relying on SD quality drone feed.
- The group is accused of falsifying log records afterwards.
Who is lying about the surveillance quality?
>A 5th Special Forces Group officer in the task force looked at the drone footage and didn’t see any civilians, a task force officer said. But the drone he relied on had only a standard-definition camera. Central Command said there were no high-definition drones in the area that could get a better view of the target...In fact, a high-definition drone was available. The task force did not use it.
We once had a TF call in requesting a strike on military-aged males carrying rifles. In the strike cell, we had a newer drone on station and checked out what they were calling in. I'm glad we did. With higher fidelity video, we could see that it was actually teenaged males with fishing poles. The strike request was (of course) denied. In our case, it worked out the way one would hope, but with aging equipment and poor networking, it's definitely a "there but for the grace of God go I" moment.
Everything since then has been ridiculous. Getting in bed with heroin-shipping warlords because they were anti-Taliban? Not that the Taliban got over $100 million from the USA in 1999-2001 for opium poppy eradication efforts, which were quite successful, although TAPI pipeline talks didn't go as well in this period.
The whole 'Special Forces' fetishization is also pretty ridiculous. The best of the best of the best, la-dee-dah. Lots of nightime raids, which only pissed off the local population and made them quite willing to hand over power to the Taliban without a fight this year. Didn't 'US leaders' learn that from Vietnam? If the locals all hate you they're not going to support your remotely installed puppet government.
Oh, and the "Afghan Army Training Program" - at a cost of something like $10 billion to train and equip 350,000 Afghan Army members who'd be the nucleus of the new independent government... all that cash just went into Dubai bank accounts, didn't it? Or McMansions in Kabul. Gross blatant corruption (and the 'infrastructure projects' oh god... for a million bucks you get a chain of ten subcontractors backed up by one guy digging a ditch with a worn-out shovel... get used to it, that's coming here now).
American foreign policy in the 21st century - what an absolute disaster. Reminiscent of say, France and Britain in the Middle East from oh 1945-1954. Similar long-term results are to be expected.
That would _not_ be a good justification to wage a war, but I think the actual casus belli was Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction – later found to be non-existent. 215 Republicans and 82 Democrats voted for this. They paved the way for a war of aggression… and I seem to remember that Americans have previously hanged foreign politicians for precisely that.
Edit: Misread above comment and thought he was talking about Iraq. Point still stands, though.
Afghanistan War was 2001. Iraq War was 2003. Your history is off by about 1.5 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
That's not entirely true. They wanted to negotiate his extradition. As any sovereign nation would.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...
US have an excuse all the time, surprisingly, people who represent educated segment don't either want to look to other side, I remember Taliban tried to have a negotiation with US, they tried to get their voice heard in western media, but failed, because everyone was blind sided, no one wanted to hear them and US anyway launched attack, 20 years later, everything is even more fucked up over there.
Now we should be really worried if there are other extremist groups are training and planning another attack soon, this time everyone would know US don't have a justification and obviously will fail again. (I don't remember if US won any war recently? Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan all are in trouble, all of the wars are started wrongly)
Taliban were protecting Bin Laden, period. Their official stance on the subject is clearly false, and they were willing to go to war to provide sanctuary to Bin Laden. The main worry was that any such delays at this point would give Bin Laden more room to get away (and Bin Laden did escape: all the way to Pakistan).
So if anything, we should have pursued Bin Laden even more vigorously back then. The Taliban were successful in buying enough time for him to hide with their false diplomacy.
We were at least successful in destroying the Al Qaeda training centers in Afghanistan (successfully located, blown up, and dismantled). Maybe these bases will return now that we've left Afghanistan, but we at least rendered them unable to train new terrorists for the last 20 years or so (and the new Taliban regime officially doesn't want to sanction any such training sites anymore. They've got an ISIS-K problem because of it too)
But there are multiple questions which should be answered:
1. are we 110% sure that Bin Laden ordered the attack? I am not trying to defend him, but you know there are many organizations who can do that attack, including multiple organizations funded by CIA (don't forget Bin Laden was initially funded by CIA), maybe government could prevent attack but didn't prevent, because they were also interested in natural resources of Afghanistan?
2. Are we 120% sure we can capture and execute Bin Laden without civilian fatalities? if civilian fatalities can't be avoided, did we have numbers in mind, how many people will get killed?
3. Why western media didn't give enough voice to Taliban at that time? If enough people listened to them, maybe US could make public negotiation and if negotiation fails publicly, then everyone would definitely know Taliban is to blame for this war. In reality, US just said, we are super power, we can do whatever we want.
4. Are we sure war wasn't lobbied? You know, US sells lots of weapons, they sometimes need to test, are we sure that war wasn't lobbied? where did 2T$ go? Do you think all were eaten by corrupt Afghan government? even 10% of it would be 200B which would create 100 billionaires.
I am not defending Taliban or Bin Laden, just showing how decisions made was wrong and I still doubt US can make right decision. Now Afghanistan has lots of uneducated people, who lost their families, children. Do you think they would just forgive? Who can guarantee that they won't come over to US and start killing people?
Bin Laden attacked the USA in the 90s (the original twin tower attacks). Then issued a Fatwa declaring a Holy War against the USA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fataw%C4%81_of_Osama_bin_Laden).
Bin Laden's writings on 9/11 are well published, even on Western Media (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver).
There's no doubt in anybody's mind that Bin Laden was involved in 9/11.
> 2. Are we 120% sure we can capture and execute Bin Laden without civilian fatalities?
Of course not. We would have preferred for the Afghan government (aka: the Taliban) to cooperate with us. But they didn't.
> 3. Why western media didn't give enough voice to Taliban at that time?
We have Bin Laden's writings published and the Taliban's writings published. What exactly is missing from their argument that you want published?
> 4. Are we sure war wasn't lobbied?
Oh, Cheney was definitely a Warmonger. But that doesn't make the Afghan War a wrong move.
Thought it was the "other guy"..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramzi_Yousef
Bin Laden made a video in '04 regarding the US presidential election at the time in which he implicitly claimed responsibility.
The problem was, real intelligence on the whereabouts of Bin Laden and Al Qaida in general was extremely rare. It was the vigorousness with which we pursued Al Qaida that helped really poison the relationship with local Afghans. You had local elites claiming that their rivals were somehow related to Al Qaida, which usually resulted in innocent people being taken into custody, tortured and/or killed. You had some legitimate leads (but often on mid-level operatives at best) that resulted in extremely risky special forces operations in remote and treacherous terrain - often resulting in both US and civilian casualties. You do this enough and people hate you, you've got an insurgency.
> We were at least successful in destroying the Al Qaeda training centers in Afghanistan (successfully located, blown up, and dismantled).
Real "training centers" were something of a white whale for the military in Afghanistan. A lot of the supposed Al Qaida "training" was taking place in Kunar and Nuristan provinces, in particularly inhospitable terrain. We'd run military operations in these remote Nuristani valleys, US troops would die, we'd almost never capture anything of value, and local people would slowly get fed up with their husbands/children/etc. getting accidentally blown up in airstrikes.
Bin Laden wrote his last will and testament on December 14, 2001, coinciding with the battle. The commandos who stormed Tora Bora were met with fierce resistance... not by Taliban, but by US Troops who refused to drop bigger bombs or deploy sufficient forces to attack the mountainous terrain.
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Donald Rumsfeld himself was worried that too many troops in Afghanistan at this time would fuel anti-American sentiment. Our problem was half-assing it in the early days of the war, when it mattered.
https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/S%20Prt%20111-3...
When the Afghan forces complied with the Taliban / Al Qaeda cease fire, there was nothing for US troops to do anymore but let Bin Laden go. There wasn't sufficient strength to attack.
Perhaps intelligence on the ground was insufficient to allow a bigger military footprint at the time. But given the next 20 years of fighting and insurrection, a bit more force used in December 2001 could have prevented a lot of the force we used later.
Except in the Battle of Tora Bora, where the commanders on the ground said that the 100 troops deployed to the area were insufficient to push into a heavily fortified mountainous region.
And they're right. If those 100 troops pushed in, they would have been massacred. More troops absolutely would have helped at that time.
Plenty of airplanes dropped plenty of bombs. But the use of air-deployed land mines was not authorized, which could have also helped (GATOR mines self-detonate after 15 days, to minimize risks to the local population after battle. They are further battery-operated, and are designed to run out of battery in case the self-detonation fails)
The gloves were still on. We could have easily used more force in that battle, but decided against it.
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Traditionally, you need to outnumber your opponent 3 to 1 if you wish to lay siege to an enemy in their home territory. At some point, just raw manpower is what you need.
As you said: we dropped plenty of bombs in that battle, but bombs aren't boots on the ground. You need people there to know if the bombs are in fact hitting their mark.
Bin Laden thought he was going to die in that battle. We were close: just a little bit more would have done it.
Sure, we didn't know how close we were until afterwards. But when you consider what we did accomplish with just 100 boots on the ground + air support, it really makes you wonder what we could have done with 800 or 2000 men instead.
If you're interested in learning more, I'd strongly recommend Wes Morgan's excellent book "The Hardest Place."
Person who tried to expose what is actually happening is now going to jail, right? I am talking about Julian Assange.
No one needs such "world police", who is trying to build a democracy in other countries, but failing on pillars of democracy by putting journalist to jail in home country.
The complete abandonment of 'nation-building' Afghanistan in 2002 as all efforts shifted to invading Iraq sort of supports this scenario.
These can all 3 be true: The Taliban does not believe that bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. They would hand over bin Laden if they saw credible evidence. Their bar for credibility is quite high.
There isn't high bar to cross. They've already decided what they think. That's what I mean by 'bad faith'.
I'm not going to argue for the Taliban. I have no idea whether they're good faith actors or not. Regardless, they're assholes, and I'm pretty sure, as far as I can ever be, that bin Laden is responsible.
But to be fair, "he claimed responsibility" isn't by itself iron-clad proof for anything. All kinds of people claim all kinds of false things for all kinds of reasons. We know this. The Taliban knows this. I could easily come up with a plausible, reasonable explanation why bin Laden would falsely make such a claim. You could too.
When someone rejects evidence that you find convincing, don't assume bad faith. Ask them what evidence they would accept no matter how unlikely. If they have something (e.g. "If I had a private meeting with bin Laden and he assured me personally..."), it means they just have a really high bar.
> it means they just have a really high bar.
Nope.
Truth does not require meeting everyone's bar for evidence.
Motive, Opportunity, Means, Confession. Done. Unquestionably culpable, even if only through negligence (in controlling his own messaging).
Just as the US is for various "mistakes" made in targeted attacks.
If the CIA/US military was sure of his guilt, why didn't they bring him before a court?
Well, they killed him, so there's that. Hard to bring a dead man to trial.
Also... it was Obama's desire to try Osama bin Laden.
“We worked through the legal and political issues that would have been involved, and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantánamo, and to not try him, and Article III.” Obama continues: “I mean, we had worked through a whole bunch of those scenarios. But, frankly, my belief was if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.”
There is no doubt that bin Laden was the mastermind behind the attacks on 9/11. It is not remotely controversial or in any way disputed.
Obama: kill him or try him?
CIA: kill him
Military: kill
Obama: but why not show the world and his followers likewise, what the US of A all about?
And then you did.
There was a time, btw, when it was not remotely controversial or in any way disputed to claim that Lee Harvey Oswald was the mastermind behind the assassination of JFK.
Why, then, didn't they bring him before a court? It would have been awkward of course, logistically, but judicially, so worth it.
"Afghanistan's ghost soldiers undermined fight against Taliban" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59230564
IIRC there were complaints being published at least as far back as 2009 about that problem.
And some estimate that the number may be as high as 100,000.
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In contrast, the US sent ~110,000 soldiers at its peak (2011 surge), and lost ~7000. The Afghan Army took the bulk of the attacks by any reasonable analysis.
"Oh sir, we have suffered great casualties in our fight against the terrorists, here are the records."
No. Because the Afghan security forces would be lying to try to improve their morale.
If anything, the official death count is almost certainly an underestimate. No army likes to admit that their death rates are in the 25%+ level, when you admit such a thing, you won't be able to find recruits.
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Besides, we paid the Afghans on number of soldiers on payroll. Not on number of deaths. So the number they were corrupt on was #-of-soldiers.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...
Bombing small non-white countries is part of the Ledeen Doctrine and this would fit that bill.
"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,"
If we put in mind what we know post hoc about the torture and inhumane interrogation techniques used in both Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, wouldn't you agree that it's reasonable to assume that there was a high risk of torture? and isn't torture a well-accepted reason to block extradition.
In fact, let's take it even a step further in light of the fabrication of evidence seen in Iraq. The general atmosphere of hate at the time. not to mention that we now know that bin Laden not only was not tried but was thrown in a bag with the fish. How can we be so sure that he would have had received a fair trial? How would you even find an unbiased jury[1]?
Do we deem it ok to extradite someone to a place with a high risk of torture and unfair trial?
[1] - this is a rhetorical question but I'm actually curious how would one find such a jury that hasn't already made its mind?
Maybe for blocking from the UK to US, but Afghanistan legally tortured/tortures so not sure why they would care about that regarding extradition.
I don't see what's so unreasonable about handing him over to the US tbh.
Given the context of also asking for bombing to stop, that seems like they were trying to stop the US from using military pressure to force their will on Afghanistan. The deal wasn't even considered, who knows what they were actually trying to negotiate.
>I don't see what's so unreasonable about handing him over to the US tbh
History has now shown the US was willing to torture people associated with al Qaeda, and execute Bin Laden then desecrate his corpse. They were absolutely right to distrust the US there.
Afghanistan wasn't more trustworthy, the amount of trust necessary was far lower.
I think that addresses your accusation. I barely understand what you consider "utterly transparent" in my comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
I believe the above post wanted to drill down why it was hard for Afghanistan to give him over.
After that the Pakistan discussion can happen if energy exists.
When you rule the way Taliban did the idea that you're not extraditing someone because you're worried about them getting hooked up to a car battery or beaten with a rubber hose is laughable.
This is a pretty common misunderstanding by civilians. Special forces come in tiers and usually they're designated for certain kinds of work. It doesn't mean they're "best of the best", just special training that may or may not be useful in a place like Afghanistan. Historically they're used for training foreign fighters. From what I read in this article, this looks like work that line companies should have been doing.
> Oh, and the "Afghan Army Training Program" - at a cost of something like $10 billion to train and equip 350,000 Afghan Army members who'd be the nucleus of the new independent government...
I don't think that money went any conspicuous. I served in 2012, when a lot of that ANA training and colocation was going on. You're absolutely right that it was a failure. The problem was that the President was telling the American people things were going well, when in reality troops were getting shot in the back on patrol by their counterparts, people were deserting post while high on hash, and most ANA were paid over four years the equivalent of a dowery.
> Getting in bed with heroin-shipping warlords because they were anti-Taliban?
This was surprising to me when I was in country, but I get it. Most of these dudes are the equivalent of governors and own their own armies. They just didn't want to follow the Talibans rules, so "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Quite complicated, but I don't know how it'd be different.
The most ridiculous I saw from your post:
A reasonable citizen, who saw from the very beginning the ridiculousness of the whole thing, in the end, seems to suggest the whole thing should not end so abruptly?
It's a war - it's chaotic by nature.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BXtgq0Nhsc
they need a complete reboot. rewrite the constitution (it's overdue). rebuild the democratic voting functions (they're a mess and don't work).
time for democracy 2.0
What’s your proposal? How do you find that altruistic leader, and if you find them, how do you get them elected, and if you do, how do you arrange to get them enough support in Congress?
I don’t like democracy that much, and it looks like Churchill didn’t either. But neither Churchill nor me can come up with anything better.
There have been dozens of incidents of non-combatants bombed to paste over the last decade and it seems USAF will just simply not fix what it is doing wrong.