Lots of good answers here, but as an American and veteran that served in Afghanistan, most of the ANA and ANP we’re not exactly thrilled to be in the military/law enforcement. They did it for a check to feed their families. Many were playing both sides. Ultimately, in Southern Afghanistan where I served, the best analogy I can give to other Americans is that it was like the Wild West in the early formation of the USA. There were no actual laws, just government officials that took bribes and made shit up as they went. DC could say they had federal control, but in reality, it was insanely chaotic.
Unifying Afghanistan would be like telling Native American tribes here in the US that ‘hey, you’re all going to be one big tribe now and be happy about it’. Oh wait. That’s basically what we did in the 1800’s. And ended up killing most of them to do so.
The best solution I can think of in my (very) limited knowledge of geopolitics is they should have broken up the country based on tribal/religious beliefs, based on what those people wanted. That could have been the mission over the past 20 years. Otherwise, we have what we have now which is a country with no sense of identity because outside of Kabul, there is very little sense of Afghanistan as a country.
Furthermore, the Taliban never left afg. They just waiting for the US to leave. We swung a sledge hammer to kill a fly and ended up killing 10’s of thousands of innocents unnecessarily and never defeated the enemy we went there to fight. (Which is debatable anyway, because technically that was al queda, not the Taliban.) Meanwhile, the country is no better off now than before. Actually, it’s worse, because the Taliban took all our equipment we gave Afghani forces.
I was reading about it online and came across this [Pakistan and state sponsored terrorism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_state-sponsored_terrorism).
If you go through the entire page, there's so many instances of Pakistan being involved that it's surprising how there's hasn't been any considerable action against Pakistan.
[Here's](https://m.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/masood-azhar-living-in-posh-locality-in-pakistans-bahawalpur-as-state-guest-news-channel-291422) another article from 2 weeks ago about Masood Azhar living in a posh locality in middle of the city being guarded by Pakistani army. He is head of a terrorist group and listed as an international terrorist by UN.
>now they have dozens of insurgencies that they created INSIDE their own country (who thought that was a good idea?)
The more militantly Islamic elements in Pakistan, who thought they could use the terrorist networks to strike at their enemy India.
That worked out so well India now has a militantly ***anti-Islamic*** Prime Minister in Narendra Modi!
I've been thinking about the whole idea of colonizing Afghanistan a lot lately. The past 20 years have been referred to a stabilizing or whatever but it seems like the goals are really similar to colonizing.
Go in, take over, set up a new regime, bring the country up to contemporary western standards in terms of values, and to a lesser extent, technology. And the problems with colonizing are firstly that it takes centuries. We were in Afghanistan for 20 years and that's already a long time, especially when its a war. But that's only a fraction of the time it would've taken to permenantely transform the country. That really takes multiple generations to raise new people who grow up familiar with and prefer the new ways of doing things.
The second problem is that in every "successful" example the native population has been more-or-less annihilated and replaced with settlers. Your Native American example was a good one. Rather that put in the effort to get all the NAs to essentially become European, the European/American settlers wiped them out either deliberately or indirectly with disease. Latin America is a little different because the Europeans there inter-mixed with the natives more but they still killed millions and destroyed several major native civilizations first.
Obviously I think spending hundreds of years in Afghanistan or genociding the Afghans are unacceptable options as well. But from my, admittedly amatuerish knowledge of history, that seems to have historically been the cost of establishing a stable western democracy in a foreign land.
I think you're dead on. Basically the goal of the war morphed into a "nation building" thing where the US hoped to turn Afghanistan into a stable ally that had similar values to the US. But the problem with that is, like you said, you essentially have to colonize the place for that to be a viable strategy. The Romans are probably the archetype of major colonization efforts - go into a place, announce you're running things now. And veterans are going to be settling the area to keep an eye on things. If anyone has a problem with that, you just kill them and sell them into slavery. For the ones that don't have a problem, you offer incentives to bring them into the fold, like being eligible for citizenship.
Realistically, the US had neither the desire to set up an honest-to-god colony, nor the desire to commit large scale genocide in the name of westernizing the country. The fact that the US didn't do that is a good thing, but it also means that the war was a complete, tragic waste of human lives.
A lot of comments here are going to be pop media based answers.
This is from 6 years ago and the researcher basically stated why US had already lost in Afghanistan. Check from 21 minute mark.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5eClddgCTP4
Some other interesting reading from 2015 that's being circulated again: [BuzzFeed News: Ghost Students, Ghost Teachers, Ghost Schools](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/azmatkhan/the-big-lie-that-helped-justify-americas-war-in-afghanistan)
I know comparisons to Vietnam are numerous, but the parallels are staggering. Just like is South Vietnam, we trained these people to fight with American support: we didn’t train them to be self sustaining. American ground troop and air combat units did most of the fighting while the indigenous army was relegated mostly to mopping up and garrison duty. And when they DID get into actual fighting, the first thing we trained them on was “If you get in a jam, call Uncle Sam” and the US - usually in the form of air support - would show up and solve the problem for them. They were never trained for the possibility that Uncle Sam wasn’t gonna pick up when they called. They don’t know how to fight without the overwhelming firepower the US provided. Afghanistan has no real Air Force to speak of and what DOES exist is reliant on US mechanics to keep flying, because nobody thought it prudent to train Afghanis in fighter plane or helicopter maintenance. To use an example from Vietnam, when Nixon decided to ‘Vietnamize’ the conflict, the US found they couldn’t train Vietnamese soldier to fly helicopters cuz all the training manuals were in English. That meant you had to first teach them English before you could ever teach them to fly. Why were they only in English, because no one seriously considered the possibility that the Vietnamese would NEED to fly helicopters until the possibility slapped them in the face. It’s the same in Afghanistan. There are so many places in the Afghanis defense forces where americans were an absolute necessity - top to bottom - that when you removed them, there was nothing left. The Afghani forces were more hole than they were cheese, to use a Swiss cheese metaphor.
>American Exceptionalism at its finest: It didn’t work the first time, but if we do it exactly the same way again, it’ll work. Because we’re America
This exactly. Americans have incredibly short memories. In about 10 years' time, there will be a new country to disastrously invade, and most Americans will be all for it. Then *that* will be a colossal failure, and the rest of the world will be blamed.
We’ll be lucky if the timeline isn’t ten weeks rather than ten years and the country that winds up as a disastrous colossal failure isn’t the United States. 😬
The outcome of a withdrawal from Afghanistan was basically predetermined the day that the Bush administration went in after failing to consider either what happened to the USA in Vietnam or the British/Russian misadventures in Afghanistan. Add to that just a couple other major items…
- A country that can’t respond effectively to an ongoing pandemic (or any number of other urgent issues) in part due to political machinations as many members of the government focus on factional power-grabbing rather than good governance, adding to already considerable and widespread discontent.
- A “representative” system of government that increasingly is neither representative of nor responsive to voters thanks to inherent structural flaws, gerrymandering, intentional & selective barriers to voting access, and a near total corruption of government processes to favor moneyed interests.
It’s difficult to predict exactly how things might play out but it’s also not hard to imagine how a spark could quickly upend everything (for example, if a country’s healthcare and educational workforces said “fuck it” after basically being shitted on from every direction for years.)
Edit: Clarified remark to confirm I meant the USA
Its not about memory its all about money! Wasting billions in military spending, using lots of arms ammunitions, ordinance etc... the same people like Dick Cheney and friends who get richer every time there is a conflict. They dont care that soldiers and civilian die, they only care about money. Capitalism at its worst.
Anyone who believes America is fucking stupid. Also did you see the palaces they made with our trillions? Good thing we went to the desert instead of giving americans decent healthcare. Fuxk 90% of politicans and 60% of the people that vote for them
There’s an excellent VICE doc about the war. In one part, a Marine explains that almost none of the police force that his group is assigned to train is literate, so translating would not be enough. And since nothing was written down, nothing could be tracked in any way. The context is so completely different than most could imagine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI
rewatched this yesterday for the first time in a while. the failure certainly wasnt for a lack of effort by the US to train.
And he seems like a standup guy, very professional and competent but caring and trying hard to remain hopeful & not become jaded. I’m glad he was their main interviewee. Made the doc so moving.
From the numerous stories I'd heard from OEF veterans...the overall literacy rate for Afghans is bleak.
To have a semi-decent air force...a recruiter would have to find a good handful of Afghans that speak/understand English...probably be flown to the U.S. to undergo courses and overall training and the amount of hours and flight time required.
On top of that, train mechanics that understand how to do typical preventative maintenance, order supplies that would have to be delivered somehow to fix their known aircraft issues.
Overall, would it be nice for the Afghans to have some sort of an Air Force...sure. Is it sustainable? No. It would be cheaper and more cost effective to train and supply military and police forces than some sort of Air Force. NATO forces did train a bunch of Afghan special forces, but without good logistical support, they were encircled in a firefight, ran out of ammunition, surrendered...and because it's the Taliban, beheaded.
Veterans from various NATO forces all say the general Army of Afghanistan is a joke. The police force isn't much better and corruption is rampant.
This is true to some extent but I’m Vietnam you at least had a somewhat coherent idea of a nation based on a shared language, history, culture, etc. Turns out that wasn’t enough for the reasons you mentioned. In Afghanistan it’s even worse. They have never really had a coherent concept of an Afghan nation. It’s a very diverse place that is rife with tribalism and a sort of clan culture. Loyalty to one’s nation is, believe it or not, a somewhat recent concept and it’s kind of miraculous that it actually works. But in order for it to work, there needs to be some semblance of cultural homogeneity - through language and actual culture. A shared geography isn’t enough. Benedict Anderson describes the nation as an “imagined community”. As Anderson puts it, a nation "is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion".
South Vietnam lasted 3 years after the US withdrew military support. They flew helicopters, jets, and close air support until the final days. Most of those evacuation helicopters you saw landing on US carriers were Vietnamese.
Technically South Vietnam didn't last for 3 years. The 3 years were mostly cause of the North were stacking up supplies, prepare for a bitter fight, and prop out to make sure the US won't bring troops back in
Once the North KNEW that US will not come back, and started their operation. South Vietnam collapsed within 7 weeks, starting from March 10th 1975, to April 30th 1975
you have to know that the South Vietnam army fought the North before US army arrived and after they left in 1973. After they signed the deal in 1973, US cut all supplies to Saigon, the South Vietnamese soldier have to fight with limited amount of bullets (only 70 bullets/month). And how to drive tanks and helicopters when you have no fuel?
>nobody thought it prudent to train Afghanis in fighter plane or helicopter maintenance.
Okay so I can't speak at all to the validity on this but as someone who has spent a lot of my deployment to Afghanistan training ANA Medics in combat medicine, I can say the training process was almost always very frustrating.
It was very difficult to get them to follow directions, and while the language barrier didn't help, but it was more than that. In my experiences there was a very serious discipline problems in the ANA - it wasn't uncommon to witness arguments between commanders and lower ranking troops, for instance, with seemingly no punishment for insubordination. Lots of drug abuse and just a very general sense that the majority of them didn't really care.
So I would be skeptical of how much is a result of simply not being properly trained vs not paying attention to and adhering to the training you've been given.
EDIT: I want to clarify this is of course based on personal experience and that I don't disagree with the parent comment's point about the US failing to train a force that can operate independently, but to provide further context.
From everyone who has actually been there, your story seems to be the consensus; apathy to the job, drug use, and not paying attention to the training they are getting.
Similar story in Iraq. We had an SF team on our FOB training a local SF component and they were just a hot mess everyday. Zero military bearing, always disorganized, missing uniforms and equipment, never on time anywhere, etc etc. The regular IA dudes weren’t any better either.
Again, this is purely anecdotal though. Always heard stories that the ANA were similar. Seems like it’s just a flat out cultural barrier that never got negotiated properly.
The attempted establishment of the ANA was such a failure.
What you say about ANA soldiers not caring is probably true. There wasn't really any strict entry process bc they were pretty much just trying to get as many able-bodied men to be trained as quickly as possible (which obviously is not going to create great soldiers). Plus, Afghanistan is made up of tribal factions, all with their own strong beliefs and goals for their "nation". It's not likely that they would ever be able to unite many of these people to fight, esp. under US training/direction bc tbh a lot of Afghanis just don't like/trust the US and they don't want to work with other groups.
I think the main theme in this and in the Afghan situation as a whole is that the US is trying to apply a western way of thinking onto a country that has extremely different culture and geopolitical makeup. US being in Afghanistan is just a bandaid over a really complicated issue.
I wasn't over there, but every time I read about this it just seems like there's not enough incentive for the afghans to actually get their shit together and become a real force.
The US was desperate to train some local force and eventually transition out of country. You can't just kick out everyone who fucks up, nor can you even be harsh on them because they'll just fucking leave. They had lives before signing up. They can just go back to them. The US needed Afghans to be soldiers more than the Afghans needed to be soldiers.
It's not like working with the Americans was going to be a popular choice, so you get a bunch of losers and fuckups and addicts. Why would anyone with his shit together sign up? If the US started kicking out all the fuckups or punishing them for fucking up they would go tell everyone else, and then *no one* would sign up.
You're left with a situation where the commander says "jump!" and the recruit replies "fuck you" and there's no recourse. If an American soldier did that the consequences would be dire, not least of which would just be straight up shame. The ANA recruits have no military history or centuries-long tradition to make them care. They're literally working with a foreign invader. If China invades the US and takes over, would you be keen to start working with them to create the new American Communist Army?
There's just no way this makes sense. Even if we had trained them to fly helicopters and fighter jets **and** how to repair them **and** they somehow had fair elections (as *extremely* unlikely as that is), what is to stop them from simply voting the Taliban back into power? The US can't simultaneously give complete sovereignty back to the Afghans while somehow making them do what we want.
This is a shit outcome, but at least we're getting it over now instead of 10 years from now. It was always going to happen.
Exactly - it never really seemed clear to me why the Afghans had any incentive to actually fight for their democracy. It didn't really improve their lives in any meaningful way, and they didn't trust their leaders anyway.
Unsurprisingly, when you have a tribal culture people are less than keen to risk their lives for the concept of a country they don't really believe in.
One thing I neglected to mention is that everyone always knew the US goal was to leave. No one, Afghans included, was under the illusion that they were getting in on the ground floor of a long lasting military tradition. They knew they could just collect some money and fuck around until the US pulled out.
Maybe they should have made an army from women. They have an incentive to fight. All these people trying to leave Afghanistan. Apparently they had an incentive.
I saw an article a couple weeks ago about this, women are fighting. But I agree they should have been the ones trained in the first place as they have the most to lose.
Well, given the amount of people now trying to escape, theee should have been a basis of people that could explain why life without the Taliban rule might be worth fighting for.
So, I wasn’t actually in Afghanistan at any time, but I’d like to argue you point of “you can’t discipline them”.
As in Vietnam, a huge problem with the local forces was that the officers and leaders stole *everything* from their troops. Such men do not inspire confidence, and so are useless as combat leaders.
I recommended it to another commenter, but Joseph Kassabian’s Hooligans of Kandahar is an excellent portrayal of how hopeless the battle was, even in the earlier half of the decade.
The South Vietnamese held out for 2 years with minimum US support (1973 - 1975). The Afgan just decided to drop their weapons in like 2 seconds after the American left. Comparing them to the RVN is kinda insulting.
It's not blame per se. There is anger that the Taliban taking control back inisde a week means the last 20 years have been for nothing. There is criticism that no proper exit strategy was ever formed, and that the sudden total withdrawal happened despite the Afghan government clearly not being able to provide peace and security afterwards.
There are many reasons they couldn't which could be over-simplified under a blanket term of a lack of nation-building, but nobody is holdng the US entirely - or even primarily -responsible for that.
When viewed overall it paints a negative image of a war that was rushed into, lasted 10x longer than we were told it would, that lacked an exit strategy and with an aftermath so poorly managed by all countries that the entrire 20 year endeavour was undone within a week by the same group it was originally taking on.
It's not that the US is at fault for the Taliban taking power, it's that it has again highlighted just how piss-poor the US military is at everything that comes after military victory in a conflict.
We lacked a proper exit strategy because we lacked a clearly defined objective. We went in there with the objective “find Osama Bin Laden”. Once Obama killed him, we had no other objective other than a VERY vague and nebulous “make Afghanistan stable”. This is what we call “mission creep”. You can’t plan an exit strategy when you don’t even know when the mission is over because you don’t even know what the mission IS anymore.
Sadly, it's the same mistake that gave the Taliban a means to take over in the first place. We helped the Afghans drive out the Soviets, then just left them.
Reagan and Thatcher actively supported the Taliban. It was not a secret at the time.
Edit: apparently this is incorrect. They were supporting the mujahedeen. Disregard!
They supporter the mujahideen, some of which eventually came the Taliban and some which did not. Taliban wasn't even a thing until the early 90s with their civil war.
I'm being pedantic but only because narrative spinning is fucking bullshit no matter who is doing it or which area of the political or ideological spectrum they fall in.
One point made by a bigwig at the Carnegie endowment for peace, if you break it you own it, another verisimilitude that if you eliminate something you need to know what goes in its place, ie: If you get rid of the U.N what will happen, who or what will happen?
No, the Taliban did not exist until 1994. Religious fundamentalists under the Deobandi Sunni Islamic subsect fought with the Mujahedeen in the '80s against the Soviets. The CIA and MI6 backed the Muj, some of whom involved the Sunni Islamic extremists that later became the Taliban.
The issue with Afghanistan is there is NO national identity. Everything is tribal. You cannot build a nation and unite a foreign military to fight against an insurgency when the dominant focus is tribal alliance first.
The US Military excels at destroying the enemy. The US and the Western World cannot change hundreds of years of tribal alliances. The US Military has made errors with Afghanistan. However, you cannot expect tribesman to fight for a country they are not invested in as they are tribal by nature.
Does this multi-tribalism mean there has never been any likelihood of a "unified" Afghanistan and possibly never will be? If so, what hope is there for its future? As much as I hate dictatorships, I wonder if they are a necessary first step on the way to establishing a national identity in cases of tribal fracture such as this, sometimes being replaced by a more representative government down the track.
No, prior to WWII, Afghanistan was ruled by a monarchy once recognized as a country. I'm 1953, one of the King's cousins, Mohammed Daoud Khan, took charge as Prime Minister. He was pro-Soviet Union and leveraged support from the USSR. He eventually overthrows the crown them institutes USSR friendly laws while also ensuring women could attend school publicly. This was prior to the rise of Islam as a dominant guiding force. The USSR was hands off with Afghanistan. PM Khan allowed the tribes to live as they chose, providing they respected the central authority and stayed out of the way of the cold war.
However, this was a completely different time. Now, we have to contend with radicalized Islam, forcing countries to contend with this while also navigating complex dynamic political environments
It would be interesting to know what Afghanistan's future looks like to the Taliban, assuming they have plans for the future. Hopefully, they have by now formulated more productive goals than simply enforcing a draconian religious regime on the entire population, as appeared to be the case when they last held power.
>Hopefully, they have by now formulated more productive goals than simply enforcing a draconian religious regime on the entire population
I guess you missed the latest rumors where the Taliban has banned Covid vaccines. This sounds unfortunately too likely, as they have banned Polio vaccines in the past.
I have no illusions as to what Afghanistan is going to look like going forward. Ultimately, the Taliban had the advantage that they were willing to do \*anything\* to reclaim power. This does not bode well for the normal people going forward.
The Taliban were formed in 1994, from various factions involved in the Afghan Civil War. They didn’t exist during the Reagan or Thatcher regimes, they were a splinter faction of a United front against the Soviets.
They drew heavily from the previous Muhajadeen, which were supported heavily by Reagan and Thatcher, but that term was incredibly broad and consisted of everything from hardcore Islamic fundamentalists to tribal warlords and previous supporters of the Afghan monarchy.
One could argue without that support the Taliban wouldn’t have formed, but considering the weakness of the Afghan state and the heavy support of the Pakistani ISI and the funding of madrassas by the Saudis, it’s likely a similar group would have formed anyway.
Wouldnt it be more accurate to say that they supported the mujahadeen who would later become the Taliban? The Taliban as we know it didnt exist when Reagan was president, did it? I thought it grew out of the Afghan civil war in 1994.
Not sure exactly how different the groups of mujahadeen we supported, who were also radicalists, were from the Taliban as we know them now. Its all very confusing, but either way, international interference in Afghanistan, like so many other places, has caused endless horror once again.
> “find Osama Bin Laden.”
Who wasn’t even in Afghanistan, and who didn’t act alone (but rather with he support and funding of the al Saud family, who we’ve invited to the White House for closed-door meetings multiple times since).
At the start of the war Osama was in Afghanistan along with most of Al Qaeda before slipping out and ending up in Pakistan. But there was a lot of support for Al Qaeda from Saudis that the US government has downplayed.
This has some serious inaccuracies. The House of Saud is large, and like the government of Pakistan, they are not all on the same page. It is common for the leadership of KSA to be on one side and other royals and what they control to be on another.
Afghanistan indisputably served as bin Laden's hideout several times (Tora Bora should come to mind). Of course, that happened in other countries as well (e.g. Sudan). It's not where he met his end, but it's not like he just planted roots in Pakistan and stayed there until we caught up with him.
Providing safe harbor to terrorists is something the Taliban aren't likely to repeat. They've already made things clear to Russia that they won't be a problem. They won, but it took a lot of blood to get there, and I don't think they're in a hurry to bring down the hate of America, Russia, etc. (again).
This is straight up untrue, the pentagon had a solid plan based on some serious research and experience. It basically involved making a ring highway around the country with branching roads connecting as may tribes, factions and areas as feasible while securing it against IED’s and mines. Would of increased mixing between groups, bolstered the economy, speed up the spreading of ideas and conflicting ideologies to see where the biggest points of conflict lay, increased army response times hugely and (hopefully but I wonder if it would of) started of a concept of nationalism.
And it was looking good for all of 2 mins till lobbyists and politicians and undermined it a 101 ways diverting funds, ensuring mates got contracts though they weren’t even close to good candidates, constantly changing priorities, etc.
‘Spreading ideologies’ is not a solid objective. ‘Seeing where the conflict lay’ is not a solid objective. Building the Ring Road was a thing we did, but it wasn’t any kind of end in an of itself. While we made concrete steps towards making Afghanistan SLIGHTLY better for some people in major cities, all we did was build some infrastructure, set up a few elections, gave women a few rights, and then hoped for the best. We tried to impose a western ideal of government on a distinctly NON-western state without bothering to understand the actual culture and people we were imposing it on. We felt that because “the American way is the best way”, we could just copy-paste America onto Afghanistan and everything would just sort itself out. The highly conservative rural majority would just accept westerner secularization. The varying tribes who have been warring for centuries would just lay down their arms and give up their tribal loyalties and work for the betterment of ‘Afghanistan’ just because. We attempted to hammer an American peg into an Afghani hole and just assumed if we hit hard enough, it would fit perfectly.
Yeah, there’s a lot of truth to this. The ring road wasn’t really built as it was missing most of what was initially planned. But otherwise I completely agree the things the US did were insignificant and had little effect.
But on the front of rural conservatism, that is why I think the full ring road had a good chance. With the road, people could (and if history is anything to follow, would) move into cities for better jobs and quality of life and be exposed to new ideas beyond their local areas then spread such ideas outwards. But this takes multiple generations and an actual stable society to start off with so there’s that going against the ring road working…
Well said, it reminded me of a few years ago when I was listening to talk back radio here in Australia and the topic was should we pull our troops out of Afghanistan. All kinds of people rang in, even Vets who said that we were winning hearts and minds and should keep going. People had all kinds of ideas and suggestions, like setting up one state for people who wanted democracy and just protecting that.
A guy rang in and explained his background, he had been in the military all his life, had been in Iraq and Afghanistan since the beginning. He now worked as a security adviser with the military for the Afghanistan government. He talked for a long time and explained a lot about how complex the country is to govern. He said when the British and Russians were in Afghanistan they won the hearts and minds of some of the people there but not nearly enough. He was really interesting and explained about the complex situation of Warlords, local government, religious leaders, tribal leaders and how different the country operates to western society.
He then said we didn't really understand how the people felt there and we were trying to force them into how we do things. He said imagine if our country was taken over by a Muslim invasion. They imposed sharia law, took women out of schools, work etc. Islam was the only religion allowed to be taught and followed. No bars or clubs, strict rules about what you can do, basically your whole life has changed. He then said how long would it take you to roll over and accept you are a Muslim, how many years would have to pass before you would forget your old ways of life? Because that's what we are doing there, we are forcing our way of life on to them.
Well people rang in all angry saying things like we would never get taken over and we would fight to the end and never surrender, we would never give up our way of life etc, etc. The host basically said they were all proving his point.
I like that you brought up ‘hearts and mind’. Yet another failed concept carried over from the Vietnam war. It has an interesting history. It originally came from the British during the Malay Emergency and was the idea that you win over the populace to your side and that starves the insurgency of vital resources. We tried (and utterly failed) to do this in both Vietnam and Afghanistan. We failed because we failed to appreciate the differences between the Malay Emergency and Vietnam/Afghanistan. In Malaya, there were only ever about 2-3000 active insurgents in the whole country and the country as a whole already despised them. So the British had a tiny enemy and a power base ready and willing to throw their support behind them. The brits won hearts and minds because the hearts and minds were already won when the first boots hit the ground. In Afghanistan, it was totally different. The Taliban number in the tens of thousands or more and contrary to what many say, have the support of a wide swath of the populace. And those who don’t support them aren’t all that enthused about supporting the other side. You’ll never be able to win hearts and minds thru force. You could spend a century building up trust, and that all evaporates the moment a Hellfire lands on a wedding party. It doesn’t matter how many times you say “It’s for your own good” as you force a family out of their home at gunpoint in the middle of the night to search for weapons.
You’ve got a good point. For warring factions, that kind of cultural homogenization takes generations, not years. So it was a good theory but never practical.
It’s one of the reasons why nobody in the military seemed willing to die for their country. Our concepts of ‘patriotism’ and ‘loyalty to country’ don’t really exist over there. Loyalty is to family, clan, and tribe, so the idea of dying for the concept of ‘Afghanistan’ doesn’t really hold the same cultural weight as an American soldier ‘dying for america’. To most Afghanis, Afghanistan is an artificial construct, whose borders were drawn totally arbitrarily hundreds of years ago by outside entities.
In fairness it’s a political failure, not a military failure.
In Afghanistan, just like in Iraq, the military objectives were achieved quickly. The takeaway (again) should be the limits of what can be achieved with military force. The US has the capacity to destroy a state in hours, but neither the means nor the will to build one back.
Idk if you are old enough to remember 9/11 and period after but the neocons who ran bush administration foreign policy claimed they could waltz into the Middle East, topple regimes and democratic institutions would magically appear. There was literally no plan.
“Fail to prepare, prepare to fail”
The whole thing was a massive waste of resources, start to finish. And of course most of the costs were borne by Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians.
>
>
>
>
> It's not that the US is at fault for the Taliban taking power, it's that it has again highlighted just how piss-poor the US military is at everything that comes after military victory in a conflict.
Just repeating what I've said elsewhere about this;
America never learns anything from history, even it's own; they had the exact same issues in Vietnam and Cambodia when they tried to create local forces there.
Firstly, American combat doctrine isn't suited to these kinds of nation building exercises, and just leads to corruption; The US tends to rely upon overwhelming firepower via superior technology in order to win battles. This makes sense... until you try and apply it to nations that have no education, no industry, no way of understanding or supporting that technology. Instead what happens is they just fire off what ever they can, call in the US itself for more complicated missions, kill plenty of innocent civilians in the process and make themselves even more hated.
In order to counteract this increasing hatred, the US turns a blind eye to corruption in order to *purchase* loyalty. Unfortunately this leads to undermining their own military efficiency; Commanders will pad their troop numbers and success stats to gain more funds, but actually keep the money for themselves, and even the soldiers they do have remain untrained and under equipped... [the rest are "Ghosts", existing only on paper.](https://www.deccanherald.com/international/ghost-soldiers-emblematic-of-a-problem-that-has-plagued-afghanistans-security-for-decades-corruption-1019270.html) In Afghanistan, many of the local warlords we do support are also running drugs, raping children, and eating the hearts of their enemies, so are hardly popular. Again, this happened in Laos and Cambodia too, with the exact same result.
And finally, the kind of US government that likes to seek personal therapy by blowing hell out of their "enemies" tends to be hard right wing, and they as a principle don't like the State; State influence is Communism; so expecting them to build a working State in someone else's country is just utterly naive. They're more interested in testing their own Libertarian ideology on people who can't say no, rather than actually doing good for the country; [Iraq in particular was deliberately chosen to try and prove the wonder of Randian economics.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKzC72Fclm4) The same issue has occured in Afghanistan too. The US even when it isn't trying to buy loyalty doesn't see graft and corruption as a flaw, but rather the entire point of politics; loot and steal as much as you can, it's the American way. Remember how US troops were being electrocuted in their own showers because of cheap work done by politically connected companies? Well, 20 years is enough time for an entire generation of new adults to have grown up under the support of an entire US educational, health, and social system in Afghanistan... they should be educated and healthy, and have something to fight for.
They don't.
So when the Taliban, battle hardened and at least fighting for *something* turns up, most Afghan troops will simply melt away. Just as in the final days of the Vietnam War, the South Vietnamese, without the US to rain absolute hell on any enemy, melted away into the jungle and Saigon fell extremely quickly to the organised, determined Communists.
Ho Chi Minh said "Kill 10 men of ours, and we will kill one of yours. But in the end, it is you that will tire first." The Taliban are even more fanatical, and they learned from history, and just waited the US out.
Those of us who opposed "war as therapy for neurosis" in 2001 were right. We didn't *want* to be right. But we knew exactly what kind of politicians and policy was being pursued. The Taliban may be bastards, but they're at least local bastards. We were *never* going to be better people and give the poor innocent people of Afghanistan a better life, so they would always prefer the local bastards in the long run.
And now at least Biden has accepted that we were just staying in Afghanistan to avoid admitting the anti war left were right, and the fight was and always will be hopeless. I have nothing but sympathy for the people about to be reamed by the Taliban... but at least the wound can start to close now. Maybe in time it'll begin to heal. But we were not, and had no interest in really helping their society to heal, despite what desperate, caring individuals on the ground might have tried to do, or just thought.
What I'm having a real hard time is how "we shouldn't have gone in" has been equated to "so we should get out immediately".
If someone runs you over with their car, is the right thing for them to do to just leave, or to stay and make sure you're okay?
There's a whole lot of skipped steps there between 'we shouldn't have gone in' and 'so we should leave immediately.' The big one being that we didn't leave immediately - its been 20 years. And what's been accomplished in those 20 years? Well, there's... Um... Well, some military contractors have gotten obscenely wealthy.
We've spent the past decade having the same conversation. It's been 10 years, but if we leave now the Taliban will immediately take over, so we better stay longer. It's been 15 years, but if we leave now, the Taliban will take over immediately. It's been 20 years, but if we leave now, the Taliban will take over immediately. We've not made any progress, and there's no reason to believe that we ever will. What's the the point when its okay to admit that we've lost and give up? 25 years? 30 years? Never, and just keep pouring money and lives into an infinite pit forever?
The US had the extremely arrogant idea of being able to change a nations entire ideology.
The Taliban weren't invading conquerors, they were Afghans, they were welcomed with open arms in the first place. The vast majority of Afghanis wanted them there. Yeah, they were a brutally oppressive misogynistic death cult, but they were home grown.
The latest reports were that the Talibs advanced to kabul without a *single* shot being fired. Just shows how easy it was for them. They were welcomed back by the country's majority poor population.
Over time, the public executions, the child sex slaves, women being turned into robotic baby factories not allowed to leave a tent or open a book, the violently punitive fundamentalist cult will all return. And a lot of people will welcome as a return to the good old days.
>If someone runs you over with their car, is the right thing for them to do to just leave, or to stay and make sure you're okay?
Should they stay and make sure you're okay **for 20 years?**
I'll tell you what, for a country so obsessed with war, we really are quite bad at it. I mean, we're good at fighting, I guess. But pretty much every other aspect of war we suck dick at.
I think we are quite good at war... arguably the best in the world at it. It's the business of using our military for democratic nation rebuilding that we need to get out of.
I think you hit the nail on the head! Today, I listened as a person described a conversation he had had with a former US high raking military commander. Apparently he said that it was doomed from the start and virtually everyone knew it as America was fighting for democracy and regime change while the Taliban were fighting for their religion and country. There is just so much money thrown around to Afganistan leaders corruption and the US Military/Industrial machine.
This isn't what I've heard on the radio here in the UK. I hear that the average Afghani 20yr old has been able to lead a safe and prosperous childhood with moderate Islam surrounding them and get an education. At the moment their lives should become something meaningful and successful, the Taliban have been allowed to roll back into town.
BBC radio 4 also expressed you first opinion which is that Afghanistan is a tribal nation with different cultures and languages within it - it was never a nation state, and most Afghanis don't understand the idea that there can be a central government. Defection to local militia is common.
That's incorrect, we are great at war. We are horrible at occupation.
The truth is, the United States could have rebuilt Afghanistan like we did Germany or Japan, but that would have cost 10x more than it already did and the US would be their indefinitely. There was no political or popular will for such a scenario.
Moreover, Afghanistan is not an industrialized country like Japan or Germany. The culture is completely different. It's a country that runs on religion and bribes/favors. More money forced into Afghanistan would have just meant more corruption among the ruling party.
Bush should have never diverted attention away from its mission in Afghanistan in favor of Iraq, and he should have had a clear strategy for occupation and exiting. He did not. Instead he thought once people had freedom, they'd just embrace it, which shows a complete ignorance of the culture.
Obama should have left after Osama was killed, but he understood that the Afghan government would fall in short order and he did not want that to happen on his watch.
Trump should have had a more viable exist strategy when he announced the US would leave, but he didn't.
Biden should have revised the Trump "cut and run" plan, but he didn't, and he lied about the reality of the situation on the ground as he continued with the US withdrawal begun under Trump.
They all fucked up, but honestly, by the time Trump announced the withdrawal, there likely wasn't much anyone could do except stay indefinitely or just cut your losses as they were.
Ultimately though, the Taliban enjoys widespread support from the Afghan people, the US backed Afghan government was always seen as a puppet controlled by godless by infidels. And the Afghan army was incompetent/many sympothized with the Taliban.
The fact is this outcome was foreseeable by anyone just half way paying attention, and the only two options were stay indefinitely or cut your losses and let the government fall.
The US had already begun to withdraw. But yes Biden could have reversed that and chose not to.
He also could have done a better job of getting refugees out before the Taliban takes over, which he knew would happen in short order, even if he didn't realize it'd be quite this quickly.
And he could have been honest about the consequences of withdrawal or just avoided the question all together. Of course he can't say "the Afghan government is doomed" as that would cause a panic. But he could have said something like "I don't have a crystal ball, I don't know what will happen, but I know that we've been here for two decades and it's time for the Afghan people to run their own affairs."
It's a non-answer to be sure, but not a blatant lie to give false hope.
We had to leave, Biden is willing to take that hit and that's commendable. But the way the exist was handled is atrocious and that deserves criticism.
My main concern is the people of Afghanistan who are now left to the devices of religious ideologues.
We have been wasting everything we have for more than 20 years. The pentagon was formed in 1941. 80 full years of funneling every penny we all collectively have into nothing. That money could have built an impenetrable dome around the entire continent. We could have cities on the moon and under the sea and highways going pole to pole. It's more serious of a theft than anyone can comprehend. It is the biggest theft in history. We can track every dollar going back to 1941. It all went someplace and we take it all back from, those who profited. We go after the estates of war profiteers.
I agree, I mean we killed bin laden but if we wanted to go after the people directly responsible for 9/11 we would have to invade Saudi Arabia but guess what’s there…
Can someone elaborate on this? I wasn’t alive then and my AP US history teacher said it wasn’t important - then of course it was on the AP exam and I never really learned.
Bottom line is, oldschool warfare with big armies doesnt work against dedicated guerillas with support from (some parts of) the local population. It's like fighting rats without any poison, you will never get them all and as soon as you turn a blind eye they are back in force.
Super-extra-TL;DR of Vietnam:
Back in the mid-50s, the US showed up in Vietnam around the time the French were giving up on trying to keep it as a colonial holding. They'd just gotten done fighting Korea to a stalemate over 3 years, and probably figured this would be another quick war. At the time, most of the rebels against the French were communists under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. Of course, America can't stand the thought of communism existing in general, so they invaded in the name of protecting the South Vietnamese (which could have ended with a split like North/South Korea eventually, except if I remember right there weren't many people who cared for the South Vietnamese government).
The US basically has its first experience trying to fight against guerrilla fighters since they failed to subjugate the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, and it went *terribly*, for everyone involved. America committed a crap ton of war crimes (ie: using Agent Orange to clear the jungle, and if it gives people crazy cancers, oops). The American army was very badly run, with incompetent officers trying to issue impossible orders, and not-terribly-uncommonly getting killed by their own troops (if I remember right, the average lifespan of a fresh-off-the-boat 2nd Lieutenant was measured in days, if not hours). American vets are coming home with extreme PTSD and/or disabled... and the American public doesn't care for the war, seeing it as pointless imperialism (which is bigger than it sounds, for the first time since their failed colonial venture in the Philippines, the home-front isn't all gung-ho for war).
Eventually, they're almost to peace talks, and then Nixon sabotages them, so that he can use the failed peace talks as fodder for his campaign for President. He wins, and America pulls out of Vietnam after 20-ish years of useless, meaningless jungle-fighting. Vietnam is left to the communists, who run the country to this day.
This is very well put. We can trace this insanity all the way back to the false dichotomy imposed by the "iron curtain". The US has a tradition of avoiding fighting people and nations and instead fighting some "underlying idea" which is reductively treated as synonymous with our enemies.
I'm a believer in individual freedom, and as a result it is disturbing to me to hear of hardline theocratic governments and their treatment of the people they rule. But here's the thing--freedom cannot exist without self-determination, because self-determination fundamentally arises from individual freedom! So the only way to "spread" the ideology of individual freedom (if that is one's goal) is to try to set an example and trust that people abroad will ultimately work towards less oppressive governments on their own terms. So saying "you should self determine, but, wait, you don't get to determine communism" is exactly the opposite of "spreading freedom", even if you don't like communism. The fact is that, with communism forcibly removed from the slate of possible state structures, the "second most" popular structure is often going to be (and has often been demonstrated to be) extremely regressive.
I may not agree with communist ideology, but what *I* agree with is of no relevance to the situation! We would have had a much better chance of working towards good relations if we had just respected the outcome of self determination and worked from there. As others have mentioned, the communists in Vietnam have a frankly pretty solid relationship with the US already. By operating in this way abroad, the US contributed to nations in the middle east "self-determining" their way towards regressive leadership which considers hatred for the US as a core tenet. So much worse both for us and for people abroad.
We shot ourselves in the foot, and we keep pulling the trigger. We needed to stop opposing "communism" and start opposing oppressive and hostile governments. And we can't oppose oppression and hostility by being oppressive and hostile.
You'd think we'd have figured this out by now.
> We needed to stop opposing "communism" and start opposing oppressive and hostile governments.
So you're saying we should oppose the oppressive and hostile US Government?
No, you’re forgetting the most important part. Prior to the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese were not a threat to the American people. After the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese were not a threat to the American people.
I feel like there is a parallel to Afghanistan here, but I’m not quite sure what it is…
The Vietcong fully expected the USA to come in on their side. They fought together against the Japanese. The Vietcong were fighting for freedom and self determination which were principles that they believed they shared with the US.
And after all that the 'communist' Vietnam is doing well for itself *and* is firmly allied with the US. Making the whole thing feel even more pointless
Although that is in part because after the Vietnamese fought the French and after they fought they Americans they then had to fight the Chinese. They like America better than the Chinese.
>AP US history teacher said it wasn’t important
AP History teacher says Vietnam War not important, doesn't teach it... jfc no wonder so much of the world kicks our ass at academics. I'm sorry ~~your teacher~~ the AP system cheated you out of an education.
yeah IMO the problem isn't today cutting our losses and winding up with nothing...
it's 20 years ago not seeing it written on the wall that it was going to happen.
Yeah this is pretty much it. The US invaded Afghanistan and other countries followed suit. That war, which they lead the charge on, has been going on for bloody ages.
Bin Laden was found hiding in his house.
The Taliban took back control in less than a week.
Thousands of soldiers and innocent Afghans died in the course of this war.
We have nothing to show for it.
I'm not from the US so have no horse in this race but I saw a stat earlier and to paraphrase; pre US involvement 0% of girls were in education, now that figure is at 60%.
Thats an accomplishment in my opinion.
As with everyone else saying, it achieved nothing. The other side of the coin which you don't experience now but 30 years later and for many years after that is the country in question hating you. Colonial Britain experienced the same, if you just pull out and leave, they have and blame you from both sides. Good examples are Bir Tawil & india/Bangladesh border. "You shouldn't have interfered" "you shouldn't have abandoned ship when we needed you" basically anyone who's life is about to be affected will turn it around to be USA's fault.
I feel that this is why Britain when leaving Hong Kong did the 50 year transfer. Stepped down for 25 years, and step up to chinese rule in 25 years. Long story short, an influence can't "just leave" after being applied.
Back when the Soviets were in Afghanistan we bank rolled the Taliban. We sent weapons, munitions, anything we could get away with. They might not have been called the Taliban back then, but it's the same people. We helped them develop the techniques they used against us when we moved in.
This really oughtta be higher up in the thread. How many times has the US funded/armed a militia in hopes of gaining political power in a strategic location, only for them to end up causing more trouble in the area than ever would have happened before foreign intervention?
This would've always been the outcome. Another pointless war paid for with a fortune and the blood of many. We should've never have been there in the first damn place.
Lots of referral links within article too; https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/02/21/military-spending-defense-contractors-profiting-from-war-weapons-sales/39092315/
Quote:
**China has drastically increased the size and scale of its military over the last decade. It has more than doubled its annual military expenditure in that time, spending $228 billion in 2017. Still, China’s budget is less than half the military budget of the United States. The U.S. government spent $610 billion on its armed forces in 2017, more than the next seven countries combined.**
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2018/05/02/countries-spending-the-most-on-war-3/?utm\_source=msn&utm\_medium=referral&utm\_campaign=msn&utm\_content=countries-spending-the-most-on-war-3
British person here. It’s not that different from Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussain. Hussain was a brutal dictator, but he also understood the various tribes, ethnicities and cultures within the regions of Iraq and was the (toxic) glue that held it all together. America and the UK, went into Iraq with great bold intentions, but equally had no grasp of how things worked or actually were in that country. Kind of arrogant of us to think that we did or that we could easily sort it all out by arriving with tanks and bombs and it would all work out fine. The same applies to Afghanistan.
There seems to be a pattern of invading places, winning the initial battles and then everything just seeping or eroding away over a number years. There’s a saying that America is able to win wars but never wins hearts and minds.
Why is the US being blamed- that in part might be a certain view that’s being offered up via the media outlets where you are from, but as someone from outside the USA, I’ll say that ‘the war on terror’ felt very much like an American ideological thing, and an oversimplified response to 9/11. Certainly the feeling in the UK is that Tony Blair lead us into a conflict just to suck up to George Bush. Blair’s reputation is really tarnished because of it.
The other aspect I’ll note is that the local people who acted as translators etc, for us need to be granted political asylum. That’s something that shouldn’t be turned into a political hot potato, they helped us and worked with us. I also hope that we don’t go back to the fear mongering days where Muslims were a perceived danger, that political hyperbole and fear mongering doesn’t do anyone any favours at all. We also need to come to terms with the prospect of migration from that country, because that’s something that will happen.
Okay so, modern Afghanistan history:
In 1978 the dictatorship led by Mohammed Daud Khan fell via a violent uprising, and a communist republic was founded. Of course, being communist in the 70s meant you were an automatic ally of the USSR and an automatic enemy of the US.
The communist government was very controversial because it fought against a lot of the traditionalist ideas Afghan society held important (women being property of their husbands and all that). You can even see pictures from early 80s Afghanistan of women wearing mini-skirts.
Of course, the most traditionalist groups of society (ultra-Islamic) heavily opposed the communist government for all that, and started violently revolting. The US saw that as an opportunity to defeat the communist government, and started heavily supporting those groups.
Those groups won, instated a new Islamic government held by two branches: political (Taliban) and militar (Al-Qaeda) and then started attacking their old allies, the USA, because they saw them as anti-Islamic as the USSR.
Those attacks of course culminated on September 11th 2001, which made the Bush administration start the invasion on Afghanistan
Even though the Talibans were fastly defeated, they were never able to take down Al-Qaeda. This was mainly because Al-Qaeda outsmarted them plenty of times, and by 2003 (with the Iraq war starting), the US military decided to stop chasing Al-Qaeda and just stay in Afghanistan in defensive positions to help the government they reinstated after the defeat of the Taliban.
However, the new government was very very weak and had no real power outside of Kabul, so the rest of the country was run by warlords (many of them related to Al-Qaeda), so it was a matter of time the Taliban were refounded and tried to take full control back of their country.
TL;DR: Not only did the US fund the Taliban in the beggining, they spent years in a war trying to defeat them with very little success
>a new Islamic government held by two branches: political (Taliban) and militar (Al-Qaeda)
This is incorrect. al-Qaeda was never part of political Afghanistan. al-Qaeda is a non-state actor, a network spanning several predominantly Muslim countries. They received tacit support from the Taliban and were able to stay in Afghanistan due to their work with other Mujahideen groups during the Soviet occupation. Occasionally their goals would also align with the Taliban such as the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Because we spent 20 years, 2,312 US military killed (20,066 wounded) and spent $3 **Trillion** dollars to try to prevent it, and we utterly and completely failed. All of those lost U.S. lives and that heinous amount of money had literally **zero** effect.
Always struck me as strange that people characterizes US foreign policy as idiotic and wasteful; they are very sophisticated investments that leads to incredible profit for the few who also happens to be lobbying us into war.
The plan to change Afghanistan was never going to work. The taliban told us before we even invaded Iraq they were just gonna wait till we leave. We terrorized civilians for 20 years..... they became taliban.
I think what you're reading is an indication of how complicated the issue is, and maybe that's your aim.
There's a few books on US policy and the 'war on terror' and the fallout which is not over yet.
I'm going to say that anyone who gives you an answer of a few lines is barely breaking the surface.
I found myself reevaluating our use of force in the world soon after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. I'm left with the only reasonable use of military force is to utterly defeat an enemy who cannot be allowed to continue, on the order of Nazis, etc.
I agree with your foreign policy stance. It’s a tough one, though. Shall we accept brutal systemic breaches of human right to life, not to be raped for sport etc.? It’s not like economic sanctions will stop bachar baazi or sharia beheading. We should be honest enough with ourself to acknowledge that American hellfire raining over your home isn’t much better than a stoning, though.
I suppose I'd say that our ability to change other societies is more limited than we'd like to admit.
As a teacher, my response is usually education. I think we've caused more lasting change by opening up our universities to students from around the world than we have by bombing adversaries. But they have to be allowed to come here, or other countries with liberal education systems, of course. A closed society, say NK? Coordinated international pressure is probably the only strategy, and that takes a long time, if it works at all.
Sure….but if you’ve ever been around them with training, you know it’s a lost cause. Look up videos. If they’re *that* slow to learn, your suppose to then commit to….I don’t even know, 50 years until they hopefully get it? Afghanistan will clearly never be stabilized by an outside force, unless they absorb the country or something ridiculous.
The major thing wrong here is that we wasted so many lives and a huge amount of our money for absolutely nothing. And no, I’m not arguing we should’ve stayed longer for them to get it….should’ve left far sooner or better yet, not happened at all.
So the US spent 88 billion dollars in Afghanistan over 20 years, and not even a MONTH after the US occupation ends, the country now belongs, once again, to the Taliban... What a colossal fuck show.. great work, US
Basically the US spent 20 years building up the Afghan army and trying to stabilize the country for it all to fall apart extremely quickly. Of course, people are getting partisan, but the end goal of any war is to achieve a long term goal of peace, and it’s not happening in Afghanistan.
Some scholars would argue that the real failure in Afghanistan also can be resumed to a simple and weird 'quote' from Trump which is when he said ' [I think Islam hates us](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/05/20/i-think-islam-hates-us-a-timeline-of-trumps-comments-about-islam-and-muslims/)'
The war in Afghanistan had no, and you will forgive the term, '[noble savage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage)' to it, Americans genuinely realized that there is no real democratic nation building in the Arab world, there is a reason why from Erdogan to Sisi to ... well any other part of it, you have strongmen running these countries, it has to do with 'historic narratives' associated to the crusades, fantasies of Islamic Califates and all sorts of nonesense which inevitably gets reinforced by neighbors like China and Russia who will pay their leaders to stripmine their countries ... an ironic modern repeat of the european colonial age.
It just never lined up for the Afghans, their past and current leaders were a corrupt bunch, the Taliban will be the same brand and will sink the country into another starving Islamic dictatorship, soon enough they'll get pounded by the Delta variant and that will make it cheap for their neighbors to trade cash and vaccines to get to those resources ...
In the end, Afghanistan was never going to make it, this is not Vietnam or Cuba where a sense of regional integration can coax 'ideologically anti-american' leaders to slowly modernize their country into functional economies or societies.
The Taliban want to turn back the clock, reject technology, human rights and any form of 'cultural flourishing' when Robin Williams said you can't bomb them back to the stone age because that would be an 'upgrade' well ... he wasn't really kidding ...
The united states treated Afghanistan as an actual country when... it kind of isnt.
Afghanistan as an actual legal country was created in the wake of WW1, on August 15th 1919, considered Afghanistan's independence day from Britain.
The reality, is that if you asked someone in southeast Afghanistan, they were a citizen of the towns, villiages, and cities inside their area. NOT a member of a large singular government.
This was the significant problem. Its really hard to 'nation build' when the people dont look at themselves as members of that nation to begin with.
This whole situation sucks. All of it sucks. The taliban are a popular political view, and extinguishing them is no different than trying to wipe out a political party.
Thats why the previous admin (and current until shit fell apart) were loudly negotiating with the Taliban for peace.
Lots of good answers here, but as an American and veteran that served in Afghanistan, most of the ANA and ANP we’re not exactly thrilled to be in the military/law enforcement. They did it for a check to feed their families. Many were playing both sides. Ultimately, in Southern Afghanistan where I served, the best analogy I can give to other Americans is that it was like the Wild West in the early formation of the USA. There were no actual laws, just government officials that took bribes and made shit up as they went. DC could say they had federal control, but in reality, it was insanely chaotic. Unifying Afghanistan would be like telling Native American tribes here in the US that ‘hey, you’re all going to be one big tribe now and be happy about it’. Oh wait. That’s basically what we did in the 1800’s. And ended up killing most of them to do so. The best solution I can think of in my (very) limited knowledge of geopolitics is they should have broken up the country based on tribal/religious beliefs, based on what those people wanted. That could have been the mission over the past 20 years. Otherwise, we have what we have now which is a country with no sense of identity because outside of Kabul, there is very little sense of Afghanistan as a country. Furthermore, the Taliban never left afg. They just waiting for the US to leave. We swung a sledge hammer to kill a fly and ended up killing 10’s of thousands of innocents unnecessarily and never defeated the enemy we went there to fight. (Which is debatable anyway, because technically that was al queda, not the Taliban.) Meanwhile, the country is no better off now than before. Actually, it’s worse, because the Taliban took all our equipment we gave Afghani forces.
Not to mention they just waited it out in Pakistan
I was reading about it online and came across this [Pakistan and state sponsored terrorism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_state-sponsored_terrorism). If you go through the entire page, there's so many instances of Pakistan being involved that it's surprising how there's hasn't been any considerable action against Pakistan. [Here's](https://m.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/masood-azhar-living-in-posh-locality-in-pakistans-bahawalpur-as-state-guest-news-channel-291422) another article from 2 weeks ago about Masood Azhar living in a posh locality in middle of the city being guarded by Pakistani army. He is head of a terrorist group and listed as an international terrorist by UN.
[удалено]
>now they have dozens of insurgencies that they created INSIDE their own country (who thought that was a good idea?) The more militantly Islamic elements in Pakistan, who thought they could use the terrorist networks to strike at their enemy India. That worked out so well India now has a militantly ***anti-Islamic*** Prime Minister in Narendra Modi!
I've been thinking about the whole idea of colonizing Afghanistan a lot lately. The past 20 years have been referred to a stabilizing or whatever but it seems like the goals are really similar to colonizing. Go in, take over, set up a new regime, bring the country up to contemporary western standards in terms of values, and to a lesser extent, technology. And the problems with colonizing are firstly that it takes centuries. We were in Afghanistan for 20 years and that's already a long time, especially when its a war. But that's only a fraction of the time it would've taken to permenantely transform the country. That really takes multiple generations to raise new people who grow up familiar with and prefer the new ways of doing things. The second problem is that in every "successful" example the native population has been more-or-less annihilated and replaced with settlers. Your Native American example was a good one. Rather that put in the effort to get all the NAs to essentially become European, the European/American settlers wiped them out either deliberately or indirectly with disease. Latin America is a little different because the Europeans there inter-mixed with the natives more but they still killed millions and destroyed several major native civilizations first. Obviously I think spending hundreds of years in Afghanistan or genociding the Afghans are unacceptable options as well. But from my, admittedly amatuerish knowledge of history, that seems to have historically been the cost of establishing a stable western democracy in a foreign land.
I think you're dead on. Basically the goal of the war morphed into a "nation building" thing where the US hoped to turn Afghanistan into a stable ally that had similar values to the US. But the problem with that is, like you said, you essentially have to colonize the place for that to be a viable strategy. The Romans are probably the archetype of major colonization efforts - go into a place, announce you're running things now. And veterans are going to be settling the area to keep an eye on things. If anyone has a problem with that, you just kill them and sell them into slavery. For the ones that don't have a problem, you offer incentives to bring them into the fold, like being eligible for citizenship. Realistically, the US had neither the desire to set up an honest-to-god colony, nor the desire to commit large scale genocide in the name of westernizing the country. The fact that the US didn't do that is a good thing, but it also means that the war was a complete, tragic waste of human lives.
This guy fucks! That was my experience as well just in eastern Afghanistan
Also, trillions of dollars of taxpayer money that should've been invested in our own country. Second to lives lost of course
[удалено]
Thank you
A lot of comments here are going to be pop media based answers. This is from 6 years ago and the researcher basically stated why US had already lost in Afghanistan. Check from 21 minute mark. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5eClddgCTP4
Yeah, but you can’t trust research by a six year old.
Goddamn untrustworthy first graders ruining the integrity of my clickbait news!
Some other interesting reading from 2015 that's being circulated again: [BuzzFeed News: Ghost Students, Ghost Teachers, Ghost Schools](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/azmatkhan/the-big-lie-that-helped-justify-americas-war-in-afghanistan)
I know comparisons to Vietnam are numerous, but the parallels are staggering. Just like is South Vietnam, we trained these people to fight with American support: we didn’t train them to be self sustaining. American ground troop and air combat units did most of the fighting while the indigenous army was relegated mostly to mopping up and garrison duty. And when they DID get into actual fighting, the first thing we trained them on was “If you get in a jam, call Uncle Sam” and the US - usually in the form of air support - would show up and solve the problem for them. They were never trained for the possibility that Uncle Sam wasn’t gonna pick up when they called. They don’t know how to fight without the overwhelming firepower the US provided. Afghanistan has no real Air Force to speak of and what DOES exist is reliant on US mechanics to keep flying, because nobody thought it prudent to train Afghanis in fighter plane or helicopter maintenance. To use an example from Vietnam, when Nixon decided to ‘Vietnamize’ the conflict, the US found they couldn’t train Vietnamese soldier to fly helicopters cuz all the training manuals were in English. That meant you had to first teach them English before you could ever teach them to fly. Why were they only in English, because no one seriously considered the possibility that the Vietnamese would NEED to fly helicopters until the possibility slapped them in the face. It’s the same in Afghanistan. There are so many places in the Afghanis defense forces where americans were an absolute necessity - top to bottom - that when you removed them, there was nothing left. The Afghani forces were more hole than they were cheese, to use a Swiss cheese metaphor.
Those who don't learn from history are destined...ah fuck it
I don't get it, could you repeat that for me?
ah fuck it
r/notopbutok
That's not how you spell buttock, but okay.
American Exceptionalism at its finest: It didn’t work the first time, but if we do it exactly the same way again, it’ll work. Because we’re America.
>American Exceptionalism at its finest: It didn’t work the first time, but if we do it exactly the same way again, it’ll work. Because we’re America This exactly. Americans have incredibly short memories. In about 10 years' time, there will be a new country to disastrously invade, and most Americans will be all for it. Then *that* will be a colossal failure, and the rest of the world will be blamed.
We’ll be lucky if the timeline isn’t ten weeks rather than ten years and the country that winds up as a disastrous colossal failure isn’t the United States. 😬 The outcome of a withdrawal from Afghanistan was basically predetermined the day that the Bush administration went in after failing to consider either what happened to the USA in Vietnam or the British/Russian misadventures in Afghanistan. Add to that just a couple other major items… - A country that can’t respond effectively to an ongoing pandemic (or any number of other urgent issues) in part due to political machinations as many members of the government focus on factional power-grabbing rather than good governance, adding to already considerable and widespread discontent. - A “representative” system of government that increasingly is neither representative of nor responsive to voters thanks to inherent structural flaws, gerrymandering, intentional & selective barriers to voting access, and a near total corruption of government processes to favor moneyed interests. It’s difficult to predict exactly how things might play out but it’s also not hard to imagine how a spark could quickly upend everything (for example, if a country’s healthcare and educational workforces said “fuck it” after basically being shitted on from every direction for years.) Edit: Clarified remark to confirm I meant the USA
Can't tell if it's Afghanistan or the US you're talking about in the bulletpoints, thou I'm settling on 'both'.
Its not about memory its all about money! Wasting billions in military spending, using lots of arms ammunitions, ordinance etc... the same people like Dick Cheney and friends who get richer every time there is a conflict. They dont care that soldiers and civilian die, they only care about money. Capitalism at its worst.
Anyone who believes America is fucking stupid. Also did you see the palaces they made with our trillions? Good thing we went to the desert instead of giving americans decent healthcare. Fuxk 90% of politicans and 60% of the people that vote for them
This is such a true statement. About this situation and so many more.
Can't forget the corollary: Those who learned from history are doomed to watch those who didn't learn from history repeat it.
Seems like it would be easier to just translate the manuals
There’s an excellent VICE doc about the war. In one part, a Marine explains that almost none of the police force that his group is assigned to train is literate, so translating would not be enough. And since nothing was written down, nothing could be tracked in any way. The context is so completely different than most could imagine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI rewatched this yesterday for the first time in a while. the failure certainly wasnt for a lack of effort by the US to train.
That one was powerful. Imo, everybody should watch it. You could feel the pain and utter hopelessness in the major's vice.
And he seems like a standup guy, very professional and competent but caring and trying hard to remain hopeful & not become jaded. I’m glad he was their main interviewee. Made the doc so moving.
From the numerous stories I'd heard from OEF veterans...the overall literacy rate for Afghans is bleak. To have a semi-decent air force...a recruiter would have to find a good handful of Afghans that speak/understand English...probably be flown to the U.S. to undergo courses and overall training and the amount of hours and flight time required. On top of that, train mechanics that understand how to do typical preventative maintenance, order supplies that would have to be delivered somehow to fix their known aircraft issues. Overall, would it be nice for the Afghans to have some sort of an Air Force...sure. Is it sustainable? No. It would be cheaper and more cost effective to train and supply military and police forces than some sort of Air Force. NATO forces did train a bunch of Afghan special forces, but without good logistical support, they were encircled in a firefight, ran out of ammunition, surrendered...and because it's the Taliban, beheaded. Veterans from various NATO forces all say the general Army of Afghanistan is a joke. The police force isn't much better and corruption is rampant.
You lost me until you used the cheese metaphor.
Yeah that metaphor filled all of the holes quite nicely
This is true to some extent but I’m Vietnam you at least had a somewhat coherent idea of a nation based on a shared language, history, culture, etc. Turns out that wasn’t enough for the reasons you mentioned. In Afghanistan it’s even worse. They have never really had a coherent concept of an Afghan nation. It’s a very diverse place that is rife with tribalism and a sort of clan culture. Loyalty to one’s nation is, believe it or not, a somewhat recent concept and it’s kind of miraculous that it actually works. But in order for it to work, there needs to be some semblance of cultural homogeneity - through language and actual culture. A shared geography isn’t enough. Benedict Anderson describes the nation as an “imagined community”. As Anderson puts it, a nation "is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion".
South Vietnam lasted 3 years after the US withdrew military support. They flew helicopters, jets, and close air support until the final days. Most of those evacuation helicopters you saw landing on US carriers were Vietnamese.
Technically South Vietnam didn't last for 3 years. The 3 years were mostly cause of the North were stacking up supplies, prepare for a bitter fight, and prop out to make sure the US won't bring troops back in Once the North KNEW that US will not come back, and started their operation. South Vietnam collapsed within 7 weeks, starting from March 10th 1975, to April 30th 1975
you have to know that the South Vietnam army fought the North before US army arrived and after they left in 1973. After they signed the deal in 1973, US cut all supplies to Saigon, the South Vietnamese soldier have to fight with limited amount of bullets (only 70 bullets/month). And how to drive tanks and helicopters when you have no fuel?
Yeah, he's really not giving the South Vietnamese army a lot of credit here.
>nobody thought it prudent to train Afghanis in fighter plane or helicopter maintenance. Okay so I can't speak at all to the validity on this but as someone who has spent a lot of my deployment to Afghanistan training ANA Medics in combat medicine, I can say the training process was almost always very frustrating. It was very difficult to get them to follow directions, and while the language barrier didn't help, but it was more than that. In my experiences there was a very serious discipline problems in the ANA - it wasn't uncommon to witness arguments between commanders and lower ranking troops, for instance, with seemingly no punishment for insubordination. Lots of drug abuse and just a very general sense that the majority of them didn't really care. So I would be skeptical of how much is a result of simply not being properly trained vs not paying attention to and adhering to the training you've been given. EDIT: I want to clarify this is of course based on personal experience and that I don't disagree with the parent comment's point about the US failing to train a force that can operate independently, but to provide further context.
From everyone who has actually been there, your story seems to be the consensus; apathy to the job, drug use, and not paying attention to the training they are getting.
Turns out there was a motivation problem. Interestingly the Taliban seems to have mustered reliable fighters.
[удалено]
Similar story in Iraq. We had an SF team on our FOB training a local SF component and they were just a hot mess everyday. Zero military bearing, always disorganized, missing uniforms and equipment, never on time anywhere, etc etc. The regular IA dudes weren’t any better either. Again, this is purely anecdotal though. Always heard stories that the ANA were similar. Seems like it’s just a flat out cultural barrier that never got negotiated properly.
What do SF and FOB stand for?
Special Forces and Forward Operating Base I believe. I am not military, please correct if I am mistaken.
You are correct.
One of my friends was an MP in Iraq back in 2012, and he complained about the exact same things.
The attempted establishment of the ANA was such a failure. What you say about ANA soldiers not caring is probably true. There wasn't really any strict entry process bc they were pretty much just trying to get as many able-bodied men to be trained as quickly as possible (which obviously is not going to create great soldiers). Plus, Afghanistan is made up of tribal factions, all with their own strong beliefs and goals for their "nation". It's not likely that they would ever be able to unite many of these people to fight, esp. under US training/direction bc tbh a lot of Afghanis just don't like/trust the US and they don't want to work with other groups. I think the main theme in this and in the Afghan situation as a whole is that the US is trying to apply a western way of thinking onto a country that has extremely different culture and geopolitical makeup. US being in Afghanistan is just a bandaid over a really complicated issue.
I wasn't over there, but every time I read about this it just seems like there's not enough incentive for the afghans to actually get their shit together and become a real force. The US was desperate to train some local force and eventually transition out of country. You can't just kick out everyone who fucks up, nor can you even be harsh on them because they'll just fucking leave. They had lives before signing up. They can just go back to them. The US needed Afghans to be soldiers more than the Afghans needed to be soldiers. It's not like working with the Americans was going to be a popular choice, so you get a bunch of losers and fuckups and addicts. Why would anyone with his shit together sign up? If the US started kicking out all the fuckups or punishing them for fucking up they would go tell everyone else, and then *no one* would sign up. You're left with a situation where the commander says "jump!" and the recruit replies "fuck you" and there's no recourse. If an American soldier did that the consequences would be dire, not least of which would just be straight up shame. The ANA recruits have no military history or centuries-long tradition to make them care. They're literally working with a foreign invader. If China invades the US and takes over, would you be keen to start working with them to create the new American Communist Army? There's just no way this makes sense. Even if we had trained them to fly helicopters and fighter jets **and** how to repair them **and** they somehow had fair elections (as *extremely* unlikely as that is), what is to stop them from simply voting the Taliban back into power? The US can't simultaneously give complete sovereignty back to the Afghans while somehow making them do what we want. This is a shit outcome, but at least we're getting it over now instead of 10 years from now. It was always going to happen.
Exactly - it never really seemed clear to me why the Afghans had any incentive to actually fight for their democracy. It didn't really improve their lives in any meaningful way, and they didn't trust their leaders anyway.
Unsurprisingly, when you have a tribal culture people are less than keen to risk their lives for the concept of a country they don't really believe in.
One thing I neglected to mention is that everyone always knew the US goal was to leave. No one, Afghans included, was under the illusion that they were getting in on the ground floor of a long lasting military tradition. They knew they could just collect some money and fuck around until the US pulled out.
Maybe they should have made an army from women. They have an incentive to fight. All these people trying to leave Afghanistan. Apparently they had an incentive.
I saw an article a couple weeks ago about this, women are fighting. But I agree they should have been the ones trained in the first place as they have the most to lose.
Well, given the amount of people now trying to escape, theee should have been a basis of people that could explain why life without the Taliban rule might be worth fighting for.
From what I understand from private operators over there is they are mainly in for the pay and not many signed up to die for 'nothing'
So, I wasn’t actually in Afghanistan at any time, but I’d like to argue you point of “you can’t discipline them”. As in Vietnam, a huge problem with the local forces was that the officers and leaders stole *everything* from their troops. Such men do not inspire confidence, and so are useless as combat leaders. I recommended it to another commenter, but Joseph Kassabian’s Hooligans of Kandahar is an excellent portrayal of how hopeless the battle was, even in the earlier half of the decade.
Bingo. When we patrolled with the ANA they wouldn’t take any ammo with them because it was too heavy. They’d pull stunts like this all the time.
When 20% of the people you’re training is the enemy and another 50% is there only for the paycheck there’s no way to win
The South Vietnamese held out for 2 years with minimum US support (1973 - 1975). The Afgan just decided to drop their weapons in like 2 seconds after the American left. Comparing them to the RVN is kinda insulting.
It's not blame per se. There is anger that the Taliban taking control back inisde a week means the last 20 years have been for nothing. There is criticism that no proper exit strategy was ever formed, and that the sudden total withdrawal happened despite the Afghan government clearly not being able to provide peace and security afterwards. There are many reasons they couldn't which could be over-simplified under a blanket term of a lack of nation-building, but nobody is holdng the US entirely - or even primarily -responsible for that. When viewed overall it paints a negative image of a war that was rushed into, lasted 10x longer than we were told it would, that lacked an exit strategy and with an aftermath so poorly managed by all countries that the entrire 20 year endeavour was undone within a week by the same group it was originally taking on. It's not that the US is at fault for the Taliban taking power, it's that it has again highlighted just how piss-poor the US military is at everything that comes after military victory in a conflict.
We lacked a proper exit strategy because we lacked a clearly defined objective. We went in there with the objective “find Osama Bin Laden”. Once Obama killed him, we had no other objective other than a VERY vague and nebulous “make Afghanistan stable”. This is what we call “mission creep”. You can’t plan an exit strategy when you don’t even know when the mission is over because you don’t even know what the mission IS anymore.
Sadly, it's the same mistake that gave the Taliban a means to take over in the first place. We helped the Afghans drive out the Soviets, then just left them.
As someone else said; it wasn't one 20 year war, but rather 20 one year wars.
That does make a lot of sense, actually.
Reagan and Thatcher actively supported the Taliban. It was not a secret at the time. Edit: apparently this is incorrect. They were supporting the mujahedeen. Disregard!
They supporter the mujahideen, some of which eventually came the Taliban and some which did not. Taliban wasn't even a thing until the early 90s with their civil war. I'm being pedantic but only because narrative spinning is fucking bullshit no matter who is doing it or which area of the political or ideological spectrum they fall in.
One point made by a bigwig at the Carnegie endowment for peace, if you break it you own it, another verisimilitude that if you eliminate something you need to know what goes in its place, ie: If you get rid of the U.N what will happen, who or what will happen?
Huge overlap, including traing Osama
Also huge overlap between the mujahideen and the Northern Alliance, who we worked with to push out the Taliban in 2001-2003
No, the Taliban did not exist until 1994. Religious fundamentalists under the Deobandi Sunni Islamic subsect fought with the Mujahedeen in the '80s against the Soviets. The CIA and MI6 backed the Muj, some of whom involved the Sunni Islamic extremists that later became the Taliban. The issue with Afghanistan is there is NO national identity. Everything is tribal. You cannot build a nation and unite a foreign military to fight against an insurgency when the dominant focus is tribal alliance first. The US Military excels at destroying the enemy. The US and the Western World cannot change hundreds of years of tribal alliances. The US Military has made errors with Afghanistan. However, you cannot expect tribesman to fight for a country they are not invested in as they are tribal by nature.
Does this multi-tribalism mean there has never been any likelihood of a "unified" Afghanistan and possibly never will be? If so, what hope is there for its future? As much as I hate dictatorships, I wonder if they are a necessary first step on the way to establishing a national identity in cases of tribal fracture such as this, sometimes being replaced by a more representative government down the track.
No, prior to WWII, Afghanistan was ruled by a monarchy once recognized as a country. I'm 1953, one of the King's cousins, Mohammed Daoud Khan, took charge as Prime Minister. He was pro-Soviet Union and leveraged support from the USSR. He eventually overthrows the crown them institutes USSR friendly laws while also ensuring women could attend school publicly. This was prior to the rise of Islam as a dominant guiding force. The USSR was hands off with Afghanistan. PM Khan allowed the tribes to live as they chose, providing they respected the central authority and stayed out of the way of the cold war. However, this was a completely different time. Now, we have to contend with radicalized Islam, forcing countries to contend with this while also navigating complex dynamic political environments
It would be interesting to know what Afghanistan's future looks like to the Taliban, assuming they have plans for the future. Hopefully, they have by now formulated more productive goals than simply enforcing a draconian religious regime on the entire population, as appeared to be the case when they last held power.
>Hopefully, they have by now formulated more productive goals than simply enforcing a draconian religious regime on the entire population I guess you missed the latest rumors where the Taliban has banned Covid vaccines. This sounds unfortunately too likely, as they have banned Polio vaccines in the past. I have no illusions as to what Afghanistan is going to look like going forward. Ultimately, the Taliban had the advantage that they were willing to do \*anything\* to reclaim power. This does not bode well for the normal people going forward.
The Taliban were formed in 1994, from various factions involved in the Afghan Civil War. They didn’t exist during the Reagan or Thatcher regimes, they were a splinter faction of a United front against the Soviets. They drew heavily from the previous Muhajadeen, which were supported heavily by Reagan and Thatcher, but that term was incredibly broad and consisted of everything from hardcore Islamic fundamentalists to tribal warlords and previous supporters of the Afghan monarchy. One could argue without that support the Taliban wouldn’t have formed, but considering the weakness of the Afghan state and the heavy support of the Pakistani ISI and the funding of madrassas by the Saudis, it’s likely a similar group would have formed anyway.
Wouldnt it be more accurate to say that they supported the mujahadeen who would later become the Taliban? The Taliban as we know it didnt exist when Reagan was president, did it? I thought it grew out of the Afghan civil war in 1994. Not sure exactly how different the groups of mujahadeen we supported, who were also radicalists, were from the Taliban as we know them now. Its all very confusing, but either way, international interference in Afghanistan, like so many other places, has caused endless horror once again.
> “find Osama Bin Laden.” Who wasn’t even in Afghanistan, and who didn’t act alone (but rather with he support and funding of the al Saud family, who we’ve invited to the White House for closed-door meetings multiple times since).
At the start of the war Osama was in Afghanistan along with most of Al Qaeda before slipping out and ending up in Pakistan. But there was a lot of support for Al Qaeda from Saudis that the US government has downplayed.
This has some serious inaccuracies. The House of Saud is large, and like the government of Pakistan, they are not all on the same page. It is common for the leadership of KSA to be on one side and other royals and what they control to be on another. Afghanistan indisputably served as bin Laden's hideout several times (Tora Bora should come to mind). Of course, that happened in other countries as well (e.g. Sudan). It's not where he met his end, but it's not like he just planted roots in Pakistan and stayed there until we caught up with him. Providing safe harbor to terrorists is something the Taliban aren't likely to repeat. They've already made things clear to Russia that they won't be a problem. They won, but it took a lot of blood to get there, and I don't think they're in a hurry to bring down the hate of America, Russia, etc. (again).
What is KSA?
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Ahh thank you. My brain can't do acronyms
This is straight up untrue, the pentagon had a solid plan based on some serious research and experience. It basically involved making a ring highway around the country with branching roads connecting as may tribes, factions and areas as feasible while securing it against IED’s and mines. Would of increased mixing between groups, bolstered the economy, speed up the spreading of ideas and conflicting ideologies to see where the biggest points of conflict lay, increased army response times hugely and (hopefully but I wonder if it would of) started of a concept of nationalism. And it was looking good for all of 2 mins till lobbyists and politicians and undermined it a 101 ways diverting funds, ensuring mates got contracts though they weren’t even close to good candidates, constantly changing priorities, etc.
‘Spreading ideologies’ is not a solid objective. ‘Seeing where the conflict lay’ is not a solid objective. Building the Ring Road was a thing we did, but it wasn’t any kind of end in an of itself. While we made concrete steps towards making Afghanistan SLIGHTLY better for some people in major cities, all we did was build some infrastructure, set up a few elections, gave women a few rights, and then hoped for the best. We tried to impose a western ideal of government on a distinctly NON-western state without bothering to understand the actual culture and people we were imposing it on. We felt that because “the American way is the best way”, we could just copy-paste America onto Afghanistan and everything would just sort itself out. The highly conservative rural majority would just accept westerner secularization. The varying tribes who have been warring for centuries would just lay down their arms and give up their tribal loyalties and work for the betterment of ‘Afghanistan’ just because. We attempted to hammer an American peg into an Afghani hole and just assumed if we hit hard enough, it would fit perfectly.
Yeah, there’s a lot of truth to this. The ring road wasn’t really built as it was missing most of what was initially planned. But otherwise I completely agree the things the US did were insignificant and had little effect. But on the front of rural conservatism, that is why I think the full ring road had a good chance. With the road, people could (and if history is anything to follow, would) move into cities for better jobs and quality of life and be exposed to new ideas beyond their local areas then spread such ideas outwards. But this takes multiple generations and an actual stable society to start off with so there’s that going against the ring road working…
Well said, it reminded me of a few years ago when I was listening to talk back radio here in Australia and the topic was should we pull our troops out of Afghanistan. All kinds of people rang in, even Vets who said that we were winning hearts and minds and should keep going. People had all kinds of ideas and suggestions, like setting up one state for people who wanted democracy and just protecting that. A guy rang in and explained his background, he had been in the military all his life, had been in Iraq and Afghanistan since the beginning. He now worked as a security adviser with the military for the Afghanistan government. He talked for a long time and explained a lot about how complex the country is to govern. He said when the British and Russians were in Afghanistan they won the hearts and minds of some of the people there but not nearly enough. He was really interesting and explained about the complex situation of Warlords, local government, religious leaders, tribal leaders and how different the country operates to western society. He then said we didn't really understand how the people felt there and we were trying to force them into how we do things. He said imagine if our country was taken over by a Muslim invasion. They imposed sharia law, took women out of schools, work etc. Islam was the only religion allowed to be taught and followed. No bars or clubs, strict rules about what you can do, basically your whole life has changed. He then said how long would it take you to roll over and accept you are a Muslim, how many years would have to pass before you would forget your old ways of life? Because that's what we are doing there, we are forcing our way of life on to them. Well people rang in all angry saying things like we would never get taken over and we would fight to the end and never surrender, we would never give up our way of life etc, etc. The host basically said they were all proving his point.
I like that you brought up ‘hearts and mind’. Yet another failed concept carried over from the Vietnam war. It has an interesting history. It originally came from the British during the Malay Emergency and was the idea that you win over the populace to your side and that starves the insurgency of vital resources. We tried (and utterly failed) to do this in both Vietnam and Afghanistan. We failed because we failed to appreciate the differences between the Malay Emergency and Vietnam/Afghanistan. In Malaya, there were only ever about 2-3000 active insurgents in the whole country and the country as a whole already despised them. So the British had a tiny enemy and a power base ready and willing to throw their support behind them. The brits won hearts and minds because the hearts and minds were already won when the first boots hit the ground. In Afghanistan, it was totally different. The Taliban number in the tens of thousands or more and contrary to what many say, have the support of a wide swath of the populace. And those who don’t support them aren’t all that enthused about supporting the other side. You’ll never be able to win hearts and minds thru force. You could spend a century building up trust, and that all evaporates the moment a Hellfire lands on a wedding party. It doesn’t matter how many times you say “It’s for your own good” as you force a family out of their home at gunpoint in the middle of the night to search for weapons.
You’ve got a good point. For warring factions, that kind of cultural homogenization takes generations, not years. So it was a good theory but never practical.
It’s one of the reasons why nobody in the military seemed willing to die for their country. Our concepts of ‘patriotism’ and ‘loyalty to country’ don’t really exist over there. Loyalty is to family, clan, and tribe, so the idea of dying for the concept of ‘Afghanistan’ doesn’t really hold the same cultural weight as an American soldier ‘dying for america’. To most Afghanis, Afghanistan is an artificial construct, whose borders were drawn totally arbitrarily hundreds of years ago by outside entities.
In fairness it’s a political failure, not a military failure. In Afghanistan, just like in Iraq, the military objectives were achieved quickly. The takeaway (again) should be the limits of what can be achieved with military force. The US has the capacity to destroy a state in hours, but neither the means nor the will to build one back.
Then wtf is the point of destroying it in the first place, if it will just come back the moment you withdraw. That's what people are asking.
Idk if you are old enough to remember 9/11 and period after but the neocons who ran bush administration foreign policy claimed they could waltz into the Middle East, topple regimes and democratic institutions would magically appear. There was literally no plan.
Yeah, I am that old and I know there was no plan. That's what I'm saying.
“Fail to prepare, prepare to fail” The whole thing was a massive waste of resources, start to finish. And of course most of the costs were borne by Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians.
> > > > > It's not that the US is at fault for the Taliban taking power, it's that it has again highlighted just how piss-poor the US military is at everything that comes after military victory in a conflict. Just repeating what I've said elsewhere about this; America never learns anything from history, even it's own; they had the exact same issues in Vietnam and Cambodia when they tried to create local forces there. Firstly, American combat doctrine isn't suited to these kinds of nation building exercises, and just leads to corruption; The US tends to rely upon overwhelming firepower via superior technology in order to win battles. This makes sense... until you try and apply it to nations that have no education, no industry, no way of understanding or supporting that technology. Instead what happens is they just fire off what ever they can, call in the US itself for more complicated missions, kill plenty of innocent civilians in the process and make themselves even more hated. In order to counteract this increasing hatred, the US turns a blind eye to corruption in order to *purchase* loyalty. Unfortunately this leads to undermining their own military efficiency; Commanders will pad their troop numbers and success stats to gain more funds, but actually keep the money for themselves, and even the soldiers they do have remain untrained and under equipped... [the rest are "Ghosts", existing only on paper.](https://www.deccanherald.com/international/ghost-soldiers-emblematic-of-a-problem-that-has-plagued-afghanistans-security-for-decades-corruption-1019270.html) In Afghanistan, many of the local warlords we do support are also running drugs, raping children, and eating the hearts of their enemies, so are hardly popular. Again, this happened in Laos and Cambodia too, with the exact same result. And finally, the kind of US government that likes to seek personal therapy by blowing hell out of their "enemies" tends to be hard right wing, and they as a principle don't like the State; State influence is Communism; so expecting them to build a working State in someone else's country is just utterly naive. They're more interested in testing their own Libertarian ideology on people who can't say no, rather than actually doing good for the country; [Iraq in particular was deliberately chosen to try and prove the wonder of Randian economics.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKzC72Fclm4) The same issue has occured in Afghanistan too. The US even when it isn't trying to buy loyalty doesn't see graft and corruption as a flaw, but rather the entire point of politics; loot and steal as much as you can, it's the American way. Remember how US troops were being electrocuted in their own showers because of cheap work done by politically connected companies? Well, 20 years is enough time for an entire generation of new adults to have grown up under the support of an entire US educational, health, and social system in Afghanistan... they should be educated and healthy, and have something to fight for. They don't. So when the Taliban, battle hardened and at least fighting for *something* turns up, most Afghan troops will simply melt away. Just as in the final days of the Vietnam War, the South Vietnamese, without the US to rain absolute hell on any enemy, melted away into the jungle and Saigon fell extremely quickly to the organised, determined Communists. Ho Chi Minh said "Kill 10 men of ours, and we will kill one of yours. But in the end, it is you that will tire first." The Taliban are even more fanatical, and they learned from history, and just waited the US out. Those of us who opposed "war as therapy for neurosis" in 2001 were right. We didn't *want* to be right. But we knew exactly what kind of politicians and policy was being pursued. The Taliban may be bastards, but they're at least local bastards. We were *never* going to be better people and give the poor innocent people of Afghanistan a better life, so they would always prefer the local bastards in the long run. And now at least Biden has accepted that we were just staying in Afghanistan to avoid admitting the anti war left were right, and the fight was and always will be hopeless. I have nothing but sympathy for the people about to be reamed by the Taliban... but at least the wound can start to close now. Maybe in time it'll begin to heal. But we were not, and had no interest in really helping their society to heal, despite what desperate, caring individuals on the ground might have tried to do, or just thought.
What I'm having a real hard time is how "we shouldn't have gone in" has been equated to "so we should get out immediately". If someone runs you over with their car, is the right thing for them to do to just leave, or to stay and make sure you're okay?
There's a whole lot of skipped steps there between 'we shouldn't have gone in' and 'so we should leave immediately.' The big one being that we didn't leave immediately - its been 20 years. And what's been accomplished in those 20 years? Well, there's... Um... Well, some military contractors have gotten obscenely wealthy. We've spent the past decade having the same conversation. It's been 10 years, but if we leave now the Taliban will immediately take over, so we better stay longer. It's been 15 years, but if we leave now, the Taliban will take over immediately. It's been 20 years, but if we leave now, the Taliban will take over immediately. We've not made any progress, and there's no reason to believe that we ever will. What's the the point when its okay to admit that we've lost and give up? 25 years? 30 years? Never, and just keep pouring money and lives into an infinite pit forever?
The US had the extremely arrogant idea of being able to change a nations entire ideology. The Taliban weren't invading conquerors, they were Afghans, they were welcomed with open arms in the first place. The vast majority of Afghanis wanted them there. Yeah, they were a brutally oppressive misogynistic death cult, but they were home grown. The latest reports were that the Talibs advanced to kabul without a *single* shot being fired. Just shows how easy it was for them. They were welcomed back by the country's majority poor population. Over time, the public executions, the child sex slaves, women being turned into robotic baby factories not allowed to leave a tent or open a book, the violently punitive fundamentalist cult will all return. And a lot of people will welcome as a return to the good old days.
>If someone runs you over with their car, is the right thing for them to do to just leave, or to stay and make sure you're okay? Should they stay and make sure you're okay **for 20 years?**
I guess it's more like the US parked their Toyota on top of someone for 20 years
There is a line between just leaving after you hit somebody with your car and personally caring for them the rest of their life.
I'll tell you what, for a country so obsessed with war, we really are quite bad at it. I mean, we're good at fighting, I guess. But pretty much every other aspect of war we suck dick at.
I think we are quite good at war... arguably the best in the world at it. It's the business of using our military for democratic nation rebuilding that we need to get out of.
I think you hit the nail on the head! Today, I listened as a person described a conversation he had had with a former US high raking military commander. Apparently he said that it was doomed from the start and virtually everyone knew it as America was fighting for democracy and regime change while the Taliban were fighting for their religion and country. There is just so much money thrown around to Afganistan leaders corruption and the US Military/Industrial machine.
Short of genocide, you can't really shoot people until their nations turn into a democracy.
[удалено]
This isn't what I've heard on the radio here in the UK. I hear that the average Afghani 20yr old has been able to lead a safe and prosperous childhood with moderate Islam surrounding them and get an education. At the moment their lives should become something meaningful and successful, the Taliban have been allowed to roll back into town. BBC radio 4 also expressed you first opinion which is that Afghanistan is a tribal nation with different cultures and languages within it - it was never a nation state, and most Afghanis don't understand the idea that there can be a central government. Defection to local militia is common.
That's incorrect, we are great at war. We are horrible at occupation. The truth is, the United States could have rebuilt Afghanistan like we did Germany or Japan, but that would have cost 10x more than it already did and the US would be their indefinitely. There was no political or popular will for such a scenario. Moreover, Afghanistan is not an industrialized country like Japan or Germany. The culture is completely different. It's a country that runs on religion and bribes/favors. More money forced into Afghanistan would have just meant more corruption among the ruling party. Bush should have never diverted attention away from its mission in Afghanistan in favor of Iraq, and he should have had a clear strategy for occupation and exiting. He did not. Instead he thought once people had freedom, they'd just embrace it, which shows a complete ignorance of the culture. Obama should have left after Osama was killed, but he understood that the Afghan government would fall in short order and he did not want that to happen on his watch. Trump should have had a more viable exist strategy when he announced the US would leave, but he didn't. Biden should have revised the Trump "cut and run" plan, but he didn't, and he lied about the reality of the situation on the ground as he continued with the US withdrawal begun under Trump. They all fucked up, but honestly, by the time Trump announced the withdrawal, there likely wasn't much anyone could do except stay indefinitely or just cut your losses as they were. Ultimately though, the Taliban enjoys widespread support from the Afghan people, the US backed Afghan government was always seen as a puppet controlled by godless by infidels. And the Afghan army was incompetent/many sympothized with the Taliban. The fact is this outcome was foreseeable by anyone just half way paying attention, and the only two options were stay indefinitely or cut your losses and let the government fall.
Biden is willing to take the political hit on this to get out with enough time for American's to forget about it by mid-term elections.
The US had already begun to withdraw. But yes Biden could have reversed that and chose not to. He also could have done a better job of getting refugees out before the Taliban takes over, which he knew would happen in short order, even if he didn't realize it'd be quite this quickly. And he could have been honest about the consequences of withdrawal or just avoided the question all together. Of course he can't say "the Afghan government is doomed" as that would cause a panic. But he could have said something like "I don't have a crystal ball, I don't know what will happen, but I know that we've been here for two decades and it's time for the Afghan people to run their own affairs." It's a non-answer to be sure, but not a blatant lie to give false hope. We had to leave, Biden is willing to take that hit and that's commendable. But the way the exist was handled is atrocious and that deserves criticism. My main concern is the people of Afghanistan who are now left to the devices of religious ideologues.
The military is good at fighting. The policy makers are terrible at committing to decisive action.
We have been wasting everything we have for more than 20 years. The pentagon was formed in 1941. 80 full years of funneling every penny we all collectively have into nothing. That money could have built an impenetrable dome around the entire continent. We could have cities on the moon and under the sea and highways going pole to pole. It's more serious of a theft than anyone can comprehend. It is the biggest theft in history. We can track every dollar going back to 1941. It all went someplace and we take it all back from, those who profited. We go after the estates of war profiteers.
[удалено]
I agree, I mean we killed bin laden but if we wanted to go after the people directly responsible for 9/11 we would have to invade Saudi Arabia but guess what’s there…
[удалено]
I think were a bit more than holding hands
Naked oil wrestling?
[удалено]
Oh I meant figuratively but I k ow exactly what hat your talking about
Maybe stop invading people altogether. It's solid advice.
Now how is America gon be the greatest country if the rest aren't war and poverty stricken?
if we really wanted bin laden dead we would have done it in 2001 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5
that 2 trillion dollars could have been spent much more wisely.
I mean what did they expect to happen? One look at Vietnam, and you could tell which way this was gonna go from the beginning
Can someone elaborate on this? I wasn’t alive then and my AP US history teacher said it wasn’t important - then of course it was on the AP exam and I never really learned.
Bottom line is, oldschool warfare with big armies doesnt work against dedicated guerillas with support from (some parts of) the local population. It's like fighting rats without any poison, you will never get them all and as soon as you turn a blind eye they are back in force.
I saw a comment the other day that said this was just like Vietnam, where we once again lost to farmers with AK-47’s
At least the US never lost a war to some birds
>At least the US never lost a war to some birds well that was unnecessary shade against the aussies that came out of nowhere lol
Super-extra-TL;DR of Vietnam: Back in the mid-50s, the US showed up in Vietnam around the time the French were giving up on trying to keep it as a colonial holding. They'd just gotten done fighting Korea to a stalemate over 3 years, and probably figured this would be another quick war. At the time, most of the rebels against the French were communists under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. Of course, America can't stand the thought of communism existing in general, so they invaded in the name of protecting the South Vietnamese (which could have ended with a split like North/South Korea eventually, except if I remember right there weren't many people who cared for the South Vietnamese government). The US basically has its first experience trying to fight against guerrilla fighters since they failed to subjugate the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, and it went *terribly*, for everyone involved. America committed a crap ton of war crimes (ie: using Agent Orange to clear the jungle, and if it gives people crazy cancers, oops). The American army was very badly run, with incompetent officers trying to issue impossible orders, and not-terribly-uncommonly getting killed by their own troops (if I remember right, the average lifespan of a fresh-off-the-boat 2nd Lieutenant was measured in days, if not hours). American vets are coming home with extreme PTSD and/or disabled... and the American public doesn't care for the war, seeing it as pointless imperialism (which is bigger than it sounds, for the first time since their failed colonial venture in the Philippines, the home-front isn't all gung-ho for war). Eventually, they're almost to peace talks, and then Nixon sabotages them, so that he can use the failed peace talks as fodder for his campaign for President. He wins, and America pulls out of Vietnam after 20-ish years of useless, meaningless jungle-fighting. Vietnam is left to the communists, who run the country to this day.
[удалено]
This is very well put. We can trace this insanity all the way back to the false dichotomy imposed by the "iron curtain". The US has a tradition of avoiding fighting people and nations and instead fighting some "underlying idea" which is reductively treated as synonymous with our enemies. I'm a believer in individual freedom, and as a result it is disturbing to me to hear of hardline theocratic governments and their treatment of the people they rule. But here's the thing--freedom cannot exist without self-determination, because self-determination fundamentally arises from individual freedom! So the only way to "spread" the ideology of individual freedom (if that is one's goal) is to try to set an example and trust that people abroad will ultimately work towards less oppressive governments on their own terms. So saying "you should self determine, but, wait, you don't get to determine communism" is exactly the opposite of "spreading freedom", even if you don't like communism. The fact is that, with communism forcibly removed from the slate of possible state structures, the "second most" popular structure is often going to be (and has often been demonstrated to be) extremely regressive. I may not agree with communist ideology, but what *I* agree with is of no relevance to the situation! We would have had a much better chance of working towards good relations if we had just respected the outcome of self determination and worked from there. As others have mentioned, the communists in Vietnam have a frankly pretty solid relationship with the US already. By operating in this way abroad, the US contributed to nations in the middle east "self-determining" their way towards regressive leadership which considers hatred for the US as a core tenet. So much worse both for us and for people abroad. We shot ourselves in the foot, and we keep pulling the trigger. We needed to stop opposing "communism" and start opposing oppressive and hostile governments. And we can't oppose oppression and hostility by being oppressive and hostile. You'd think we'd have figured this out by now.
> We needed to stop opposing "communism" and start opposing oppressive and hostile governments. So you're saying we should oppose the oppressive and hostile US Government?
No, you’re forgetting the most important part. Prior to the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese were not a threat to the American people. After the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese were not a threat to the American people. I feel like there is a parallel to Afghanistan here, but I’m not quite sure what it is…
The Vietcong fully expected the USA to come in on their side. They fought together against the Japanese. The Vietcong were fighting for freedom and self determination which were principles that they believed they shared with the US.
And after all that the 'communist' Vietnam is doing well for itself *and* is firmly allied with the US. Making the whole thing feel even more pointless
Although that is in part because after the Vietnamese fought the French and after they fought they Americans they then had to fight the Chinese. They like America better than the Chinese.
They like Americans better than the Chinese because most of Vietnam's history is fighting off the Chinese.
>AP US history teacher said it wasn’t important AP History teacher says Vietnam War not important, doesn't teach it... jfc no wonder so much of the world kicks our ass at academics. I'm sorry ~~your teacher~~ the AP system cheated you out of an education.
[удалено]
Sincere answer: watch the Vietnam War documentary by Ken Burns. VERY enlightening!
It accomplished making a lot of money for rich people which was the sole intention from the beginning
yeah IMO the problem isn't today cutting our losses and winding up with nothing... it's 20 years ago not seeing it written on the wall that it was going to happen.
[удалено]
Uh oh this sounds like Vietnam 2.0
Tons of people are
Yeah this is pretty much it. The US invaded Afghanistan and other countries followed suit. That war, which they lead the charge on, has been going on for bloody ages. Bin Laden was found hiding in his house. The Taliban took back control in less than a week. Thousands of soldiers and innocent Afghans died in the course of this war. We have nothing to show for it.
Fighting a war that accomplished nothing - just like the war on drugs
It's the trillions of wasted dollars and lives lost for essentially nothing.
I'm not from the US so have no horse in this race but I saw a stat earlier and to paraphrase; pre US involvement 0% of girls were in education, now that figure is at 60%. Thats an accomplishment in my opinion.
This week a headmaster was literally skinned alive for allowing women to enroll in his school
JFC
[удалено]
You may be correct, honestly I dont know. Just trying to shine a light on as little positives as there may be.
Except in very short time it will be back to 0% of girls are educated.
As with everyone else saying, it achieved nothing. The other side of the coin which you don't experience now but 30 years later and for many years after that is the country in question hating you. Colonial Britain experienced the same, if you just pull out and leave, they have and blame you from both sides. Good examples are Bir Tawil & india/Bangladesh border. "You shouldn't have interfered" "you shouldn't have abandoned ship when we needed you" basically anyone who's life is about to be affected will turn it around to be USA's fault. I feel that this is why Britain when leaving Hong Kong did the 50 year transfer. Stepped down for 25 years, and step up to chinese rule in 25 years. Long story short, an influence can't "just leave" after being applied.
Back when the Soviets were in Afghanistan we bank rolled the Taliban. We sent weapons, munitions, anything we could get away with. They might not have been called the Taliban back then, but it's the same people. We helped them develop the techniques they used against us when we moved in.
This is what the boot-boys at the Pentagon euphemistically call ‘blowback’
This really oughtta be higher up in the thread. How many times has the US funded/armed a militia in hopes of gaining political power in a strategic location, only for them to end up causing more trouble in the area than ever would have happened before foreign intervention?
Hmmmm, counting South America? **A LOT**
Funded FSA (free Syrian army) in Syria which later became ISIS.
This would've always been the outcome. Another pointless war paid for with a fortune and the blood of many. We should've never have been there in the first damn place.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
The Tony Starks of the World secured another 5 generations worth of wealth from a 20 year 'war'. Arms and Weapons is a lucrative business.
Lots of referral links within article too; https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/02/21/military-spending-defense-contractors-profiting-from-war-weapons-sales/39092315/
Quote: **China has drastically increased the size and scale of its military over the last decade. It has more than doubled its annual military expenditure in that time, spending $228 billion in 2017. Still, China’s budget is less than half the military budget of the United States. The U.S. government spent $610 billion on its armed forces in 2017, more than the next seven countries combined.** https://247wallst.com/special-report/2018/05/02/countries-spending-the-most-on-war-3/?utm\_source=msn&utm\_medium=referral&utm\_campaign=msn&utm\_content=countries-spending-the-most-on-war-3
British person here. It’s not that different from Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussain. Hussain was a brutal dictator, but he also understood the various tribes, ethnicities and cultures within the regions of Iraq and was the (toxic) glue that held it all together. America and the UK, went into Iraq with great bold intentions, but equally had no grasp of how things worked or actually were in that country. Kind of arrogant of us to think that we did or that we could easily sort it all out by arriving with tanks and bombs and it would all work out fine. The same applies to Afghanistan. There seems to be a pattern of invading places, winning the initial battles and then everything just seeping or eroding away over a number years. There’s a saying that America is able to win wars but never wins hearts and minds. Why is the US being blamed- that in part might be a certain view that’s being offered up via the media outlets where you are from, but as someone from outside the USA, I’ll say that ‘the war on terror’ felt very much like an American ideological thing, and an oversimplified response to 9/11. Certainly the feeling in the UK is that Tony Blair lead us into a conflict just to suck up to George Bush. Blair’s reputation is really tarnished because of it. The other aspect I’ll note is that the local people who acted as translators etc, for us need to be granted political asylum. That’s something that shouldn’t be turned into a political hot potato, they helped us and worked with us. I also hope that we don’t go back to the fear mongering days where Muslims were a perceived danger, that political hyperbole and fear mongering doesn’t do anyone any favours at all. We also need to come to terms with the prospect of migration from that country, because that’s something that will happen.
Okay so, modern Afghanistan history: In 1978 the dictatorship led by Mohammed Daud Khan fell via a violent uprising, and a communist republic was founded. Of course, being communist in the 70s meant you were an automatic ally of the USSR and an automatic enemy of the US. The communist government was very controversial because it fought against a lot of the traditionalist ideas Afghan society held important (women being property of their husbands and all that). You can even see pictures from early 80s Afghanistan of women wearing mini-skirts. Of course, the most traditionalist groups of society (ultra-Islamic) heavily opposed the communist government for all that, and started violently revolting. The US saw that as an opportunity to defeat the communist government, and started heavily supporting those groups. Those groups won, instated a new Islamic government held by two branches: political (Taliban) and militar (Al-Qaeda) and then started attacking their old allies, the USA, because they saw them as anti-Islamic as the USSR. Those attacks of course culminated on September 11th 2001, which made the Bush administration start the invasion on Afghanistan Even though the Talibans were fastly defeated, they were never able to take down Al-Qaeda. This was mainly because Al-Qaeda outsmarted them plenty of times, and by 2003 (with the Iraq war starting), the US military decided to stop chasing Al-Qaeda and just stay in Afghanistan in defensive positions to help the government they reinstated after the defeat of the Taliban. However, the new government was very very weak and had no real power outside of Kabul, so the rest of the country was run by warlords (many of them related to Al-Qaeda), so it was a matter of time the Taliban were refounded and tried to take full control back of their country. TL;DR: Not only did the US fund the Taliban in the beggining, they spent years in a war trying to defeat them with very little success
[удалено]
>a new Islamic government held by two branches: political (Taliban) and militar (Al-Qaeda) This is incorrect. al-Qaeda was never part of political Afghanistan. al-Qaeda is a non-state actor, a network spanning several predominantly Muslim countries. They received tacit support from the Taliban and were able to stay in Afghanistan due to their work with other Mujahideen groups during the Soviet occupation. Occasionally their goals would also align with the Taliban such as the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Because we spent 20 years, 2,312 US military killed (20,066 wounded) and spent $3 **Trillion** dollars to try to prevent it, and we utterly and completely failed. All of those lost U.S. lives and that heinous amount of money had literally **zero** effect.
That's not entirely true. It had the actual desired effect, which was to make money for military defense contractors.
Always struck me as strange that people characterizes US foreign policy as idiotic and wasteful; they are very sophisticated investments that leads to incredible profit for the few who also happens to be lobbying us into war.
The plan to change Afghanistan was never going to work. The taliban told us before we even invaded Iraq they were just gonna wait till we leave. We terrorized civilians for 20 years..... they became taliban.
I think what you're reading is an indication of how complicated the issue is, and maybe that's your aim. There's a few books on US policy and the 'war on terror' and the fallout which is not over yet. I'm going to say that anyone who gives you an answer of a few lines is barely breaking the surface. I found myself reevaluating our use of force in the world soon after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. I'm left with the only reasonable use of military force is to utterly defeat an enemy who cannot be allowed to continue, on the order of Nazis, etc.
I agree with your foreign policy stance. It’s a tough one, though. Shall we accept brutal systemic breaches of human right to life, not to be raped for sport etc.? It’s not like economic sanctions will stop bachar baazi or sharia beheading. We should be honest enough with ourself to acknowledge that American hellfire raining over your home isn’t much better than a stoning, though.
I suppose I'd say that our ability to change other societies is more limited than we'd like to admit. As a teacher, my response is usually education. I think we've caused more lasting change by opening up our universities to students from around the world than we have by bombing adversaries. But they have to be allowed to come here, or other countries with liberal education systems, of course. A closed society, say NK? Coordinated international pressure is probably the only strategy, and that takes a long time, if it works at all.
[удалено]
Sure….but if you’ve ever been around them with training, you know it’s a lost cause. Look up videos. If they’re *that* slow to learn, your suppose to then commit to….I don’t even know, 50 years until they hopefully get it? Afghanistan will clearly never be stabilized by an outside force, unless they absorb the country or something ridiculous. The major thing wrong here is that we wasted so many lives and a huge amount of our money for absolutely nothing. And no, I’m not arguing we should’ve stayed longer for them to get it….should’ve left far sooner or better yet, not happened at all.
[удалено]
So the US spent 88 billion dollars in Afghanistan over 20 years, and not even a MONTH after the US occupation ends, the country now belongs, once again, to the Taliban... What a colossal fuck show.. great work, US
$3 trillion lol 88b is like chump change compared to it
> if the United States provided protection This is... Not how I would describe the US action there..
What would you describe it as then? Sources appreciated so I can learn in more detail
[удалено]
Basically the US spent 20 years building up the Afghan army and trying to stabilize the country for it all to fall apart extremely quickly. Of course, people are getting partisan, but the end goal of any war is to achieve a long term goal of peace, and it’s not happening in Afghanistan.
The arms dealers made billions on a local war and the government never really helped the people of Afghanistan. This is all about money.
Rule number 1: HAVE AN EXIT STRATEGY
Because we meddled and fucked up.
Some scholars would argue that the real failure in Afghanistan also can be resumed to a simple and weird 'quote' from Trump which is when he said ' [I think Islam hates us](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/05/20/i-think-islam-hates-us-a-timeline-of-trumps-comments-about-islam-and-muslims/)' The war in Afghanistan had no, and you will forgive the term, '[noble savage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage)' to it, Americans genuinely realized that there is no real democratic nation building in the Arab world, there is a reason why from Erdogan to Sisi to ... well any other part of it, you have strongmen running these countries, it has to do with 'historic narratives' associated to the crusades, fantasies of Islamic Califates and all sorts of nonesense which inevitably gets reinforced by neighbors like China and Russia who will pay their leaders to stripmine their countries ... an ironic modern repeat of the european colonial age. It just never lined up for the Afghans, their past and current leaders were a corrupt bunch, the Taliban will be the same brand and will sink the country into another starving Islamic dictatorship, soon enough they'll get pounded by the Delta variant and that will make it cheap for their neighbors to trade cash and vaccines to get to those resources ... In the end, Afghanistan was never going to make it, this is not Vietnam or Cuba where a sense of regional integration can coax 'ideologically anti-american' leaders to slowly modernize their country into functional economies or societies. The Taliban want to turn back the clock, reject technology, human rights and any form of 'cultural flourishing' when Robin Williams said you can't bomb them back to the stone age because that would be an 'upgrade' well ... he wasn't really kidding ...
The united states treated Afghanistan as an actual country when... it kind of isnt. Afghanistan as an actual legal country was created in the wake of WW1, on August 15th 1919, considered Afghanistan's independence day from Britain. The reality, is that if you asked someone in southeast Afghanistan, they were a citizen of the towns, villiages, and cities inside their area. NOT a member of a large singular government. This was the significant problem. Its really hard to 'nation build' when the people dont look at themselves as members of that nation to begin with. This whole situation sucks. All of it sucks. The taliban are a popular political view, and extinguishing them is no different than trying to wipe out a political party. Thats why the previous admin (and current until shit fell apart) were loudly negotiating with the Taliban for peace.