Of course, the right answer was that we couldn't take on all of those burdens, not even one, really, not for long. But in the aftermath of WWII, I think it's not surprising that this wasn't understood.
Then what's our excuse this time?
Think about all the people there who view the US poorly because of our actions there.
Not sure killing one person really makes up for that.
So in hindsight, why was there an army in Afghanistan? 15/19 of the terrorists involved were former Saudi nationals, so it isn't like the Afghans were obviously churning out radicals.
Whole thing was bizarre.
Why the US public isn't angry at Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is a mystery to me.
Be serious. Deterrence may or may not always work, but it works enough of the time. Even when it doesn't work, the alternative (leaving them alone) almost certainly wouldn't work either. People who do these awful things don't need new grievances -- all the old ones will suffice for them.
Yeah, a US policy of destructive interference in Afghanistan without stabilization after the immediate aim is acheived has never had any serious adverse long-term consequences that would militate against that.
(Neither, I suppose, in your world, has the same thing in Iraq caused problems with merely completely botched stabilization ignoring everything we've ever learned about that topic instead of no stabilization at all.)
- do nothing
- go in, do what you can to get the bad guys and deter future attachs
- go in and attempt nation-building for as long as the public will stand it, then skip town
There are no other cases like 9/11, except maybe Pearl Harbor.
The third option worked pretty well there.
> The third option is the one we always try. It also always fails. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.
Vietnam was actually an example of the second option failing. While there was some effort at nation-building, it was as a means to defeating the “bad guys” (the so-called “hearts and minds” campaign), not rebuilding after taking care of the “bad guys”.
The third option also isn't what we tried in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It was more the second: get the Russians out, and don't worry about what happens after. There's a pretty direct line from that to the development of al-Qaeda (though the US option-2 intervention in the Middle East in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait also contributed. Notably, the idea that “the third option is what we always try” is completely false.)
> Intervention in the Balkans did work in the 90s, but we didn't occupy
The US was deeply involved in post-conflict peacekeeping and nation-building in the Balkans. In fact, it was still involved in that well into the time of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
> There are no other cases like 9/11, except maybe Pearl Harbor.
> The third option worked pretty well there.
That was total war, with existential threats all around. 9/11 did not lead to total war.
> Vietnam was actually an example of the second option failing. While there was some effort at nation-building, it was as a means to defeating the “bad guys” (the so-called “hearts and minds” campaign), not rebuilding after taking care of the “bad guys”.
A distinction without much difference. Also true of Iraq (we engaged in nation-building both, for its own sake and to help pacify the place). We didn't stay very long after pacifying Iraq, and some would argue we never did pacify it.
> > Intervention in the Balkans did work in the 90s, but we didn't occupy
> The US was deeply involved in post-conflict peacekeeping and nation-building in the Balkans. In fact, it was still involved in that well into the time of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
Yeah, but there once the Serbians lost, and once a deal was reached with Russia, there was no source of further conflict, and this all happened fairly early on after U.S. intervention began, so the American public's patience was never tried, and we did not occupy either. That's not the case in Afghanistan.
If anything the Balkans experience shows when we can nation-build: when the conflict ends decisively. (We didn't end the conflict. The Croats and Bosnians did, with our help, yes, but they did the heavy fighting.)
No, in Vietnam the nation-building effort was a strategy to defeat the original enemy we intervened to defeat; pure option-2 get the bad guy.
In Iraq, the completely bungled attempt at nation-building was an attempt to acheive a new objective that followed defeat of the original targeted enemy (part of that, sure, was targeting the enemies that emerged in the power vacuum created when we defeated the original target and disbanded the military and security services—a mistake we did not make in the post-WWII occupations and which was immediately and roundly denounced by experts across the political spectrum when it was done in Iraq—but just because it was defeating an enemy doesn't change that it was not part of the original “get the bad guy” effort.)
There's money in them-thar hills (of Afghanistan). War money: your nation can't survive without it.
Especially when most of the money, and all the future interest on the new public debt, comes from the domestic taxpayer. Imagine all the trouble the average citizen would cause if they could spend their own money on scientific pursuits, entrepreneurship and educating their children instead of debt service. It would practically be a revolution in the making.
Not as extreme as North Korea? No, but even the Soviet Union wasn't as extreme as North Korea. The subjugation of South Vietnam under North Vietnam was pretty brutal though — the Boat People didn't spring from nothing.
I wonder if that implies that the world should've gone full communist. That the attempts to stop that was just delaying the inevitable, even though the delay seems very successful right now.
I wonder if socialism would've ended up as authoritarian as it did if it hadn't been fought like it was.
As far as I can see, there are two countries in Europe on that list: Portugal and Greece.
Wasn't Allende's Chile pretty much brought down by external forces, i.e. CIA? Calling it survivorship bias is a bit premature if the said countries are antagonised by the most powerful nation on the planet :)
(There's also Nazi Germany. The Nazis were socialists, really, and they also had no civil war and no foreign power intervention, and that ended pretty badly too.)
I think the answer to your question is: yes, yes, of course it would have.
Now, you might point to post-war Western European socialism, but there we have a number of stabilizing factors (e.g., NATO, U.S. troops on the ground) limiting the freedom of socialist politicians to be as extreme as they might want to. As a result, post-war Western European socialism mostly means just high taxes and large welfare states.
Generally, socialism outside post-war Western Europe ends badly. There have been left-wing presidents in Brazil and others where it didn't end badly, but they didn't impose socialism -- they ruled more like Western European social democrats, not like Chavez, Castro, or Maduro.