U.S. Signs Peace Deal with Taliban
npr.org
npr.org
This is easier said than done, if it is possible at all.
Having recently taken a dive into the U.S.' involvement in Vietnam, this argument rings eerily similar the one that got us into and led to our escalation in Vietnam.
If it were truly an existential threat the US would remove the Taliban very quickly (that doesn't imply a safe orderly society would result).
But Afghanistan, like Vietnam is an optional and non-essential conflict at this point with unclear definitions of victory. Maybe "victory" is packing up and going home at this point.
No, no, no. The Taliban were broadly distributed throughout Southern Afghanistan, and they had a cross border sanctuary in Pakistan.
For its own reasons (Kashmir and the regional rivalry with India), Pakistan didn’t want to alienate the Taliban, and their military and ISI thus had extensive relations with the Taliban.
The US did not have enough leverage to get Pakistan to shut down the Taliban on its side of the border, and likewise did not want the destabilization of a nuclear state with borders on China and India that would accompany violations of Pakistani sovereignty inherent in large scale bombing.
I guess it depends on your definition of "remove". I don't doubt that a Taliban government could be very quickly overthrown by the US military. Probably within weeks. Now, the Taliban as an irregular militia is a completely different manner.
I remember watching a Vice documentary on Afghanistan called "This is what winning looks like". The line that struck me was a US Marine saying something like "the average Taliban fighter fights within 15 yards of their home". If that's anything close to true, no wonder the Taliban have been so hard to defeat.
The US' mistake was not capitalizing on Russia's failure, choosing instead to make exactly the same mistake.
The Soviet Union deployed over 115k for several years. The amount of fortune spent was a serious accelerator for the decline of the USSR.
Afghanistan is a large, dispersed, and landlocked country. With huge amounts of weapons from many sides. Decades of war. Little trust between population groups.
With what, nukes? Or by sending 5 million soldiers using $400/gallon gasoline https://www.cbsnews.com/news/real-cost-of-gas-at-afghan-base... ? Like them or not, the Taliban are in their country and quite a few Afghani think like them. Let them be, with a major caveat--do not let anyone there attack us or our partners. I think they are rational enough to do that since USA did cause them a lot of problems.
They are so many problems in the world, USA cannot fix them. Not even make a dent.
In case of Afghanistan, it is not just "maybe". Packing up and go home - is a clear win for the US in Afghanistan.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2016/07/06/484979294/chart-how-the-u-s-t...
> work with the locals after the initial invasion
1) Isn't it an ongoing meme in the US military that ANA troops are useless and that the government is corrupt to an unimaginable level?
2) Didn't we also originally burn their opium fields, only to allow it to become once again one of there chief economic exports since it was so vital to the local economies?
3) Is it true we had a formal policy of allowing elder tribal leaders to systematically rape young boys in order to be more accommodating to their local customs? Including trading viagra for tips on insurgent activity?
I realize some of these questions are pretty sensitive and may be uncomfortable to answer. It just seems like it needs to be brought up whenever we talk about the Afghan war (while it's usually swept under the rug...).
With Pakistan providing huge financial and logistical support to the Taliban, it would never be eliminated. Geopolitical experts understand that so long as Pakistan has the India problem, Afghanistan will have the Taliban as a buffer state.
This hasn't been true as much recently because the Taliban and other groups became extremely powerful in Pakistan, especially in Pashtun tribal areas, and the Pakistani military was forced to intervene. However, the Pakistani military has never been able to completely corral their intelligence services, which is one reason why there isn't as much cooperation between the US and Pakistan anymore (they were once close allies), with US/India ties becoming closer and closer instead.
Pakistan is between Afghanistan and India. https://www.atlapedia.com/online/maps/political/Afghan_etc.h... I'm confused as to how it would be a buffer. Can you explain?
I think there's pretty good evidence that the ISI has (does?) financed/organized training camps for anti India groups (like Lashkar-e-Taiba) in Afghanistan.
1) Fear of Indian sponsored proxies and being squeezed from both sides. An India friendly Afghanistan presents an existential danger to Pakistan's interests. Pakistan does not want to be encircled by hostile powers.
2) An unstable Afghanistan means possible anti-Pakistan elements taking root. Better to sponsor known "pakistan friendly" elements like the Taliban instead of unknowns.
3) Defense in depth. Pakistani military and political doctrine would use Afghanistan as a redoubt. Most of Pakistan is extremely flat until you get to the Hindu Kush/Pamir mountains. The idea would be, let India steamroll the flat lands, retreat into the mountains and cross the durand line, coordinate the response from Afghanistan.
Re Obama: there clearly was a lot wrong with the Afghanistan policy. But I'm not sure I really buy the "low troop level" argument. Even at peak deployment levels (pretty darn high) under Obama the military operations weren't going particularly well. And that wasn't sustainable.
https://warontherocks.com/2015/03/the-bush-wars-ellis-on-ame...
https://warontherocks.com/2015/03/the-bush-wars-ellis-on-pop...
We then saw this play out to devastating effect with the de-Baathication agenda in Iraq.
I am extremely skeptical that any feasible amount of troops on the ground could have achieved such a goal.
1. Of course the military would ask for this, and complain after the fact.
2. It's easy for generals to make promises, but I have zero confidence that they would have actually delivered any results.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
This is of course true but you can play this fallacy out forever. The right thing to do in the 80s was not to meddle. Then after that we should have cut our losses and stopped meddling. And now 40 years later we are cleaning up failed clean up attempts on failed clean up attempts.
At every point in this chain, the correct move is to admit you can't be world police and stop meddling.
So much contained in this one sentence. People need to go look at what backing an insurgency against a repressive but modernising government does and ask questions.
(Anyone remember the Living Daylights where James Bond teams up with the Oxford-educated Afghan head of the local islamists to beat the Russians together?)
Iran, the oil backed coup of the 1950s led to Pahlavi, hatred and fear which in turn led to Kohmeni in Paris. Simply letting the Iranians nationalise the oil industry would probably have been better long-term.
1953 to 2020, US oil interests stuffing up peace...
A few counter examples: Greece, [South] Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia.
Chile is another well known example, though IMO U.S. involvement is wildly exaggerated. AFAIU, it was conservatives in the Chilean Congress that engineered and pushed for the coup. The prospect of American support (e.g. a wink from the CIA) simply made it a marginally easier sell among the people whose heads might roll if it failed.
None of which is a defense of the Domino Theory or a comment on the merits of intervention. The take away from all of this, IMO, is to avoid grand strategic theories and goals--context matters.
Both of those countries would have had systemic corruption and massive structural issues either way, just as they had before. U.S. intervention doesn't really figure into it. Anyhow, the goal was to stop the spread of communism, not lift people out of poverty.
The genocide of "communists" (i.e. Chinese and other outgroups) in Indonesia was absolutely abhorrent and a gross moral failure on the part of the U.S. But from the perspective of American geopolitical interests intervention wasn't a failure. It almost certainly wasn't even necessary, either, but that's beside the point.
Non-intervention has its own problems, too, as exemplified by Cambodia, Rwanda, and Syria[1]. Intervention vs non-intervention is a false dichotomy. To reiterate, context matters.
[1] I've said before on HN that I think Obama's refusal to directly intervene in Syria showed exceptional leadership, notwithstanding his about-face; indeed, because of his about-face. But that doesn't absolve the U.S. of its sins for having created the conflagration in the Middle East that resulted in the Syrian conflict. What Obama finally accepted, but everybody else refused to admit (including his own advisors), was that the U.S. was politically incapable of making the necessary commitments. Had the U.S. been capable--i.e. if the context were different--then greater intervention would have been the correct thing. What makes his decision so profound to me was that he accepted that reality at a moment when denial was easiest--when everybody felt it was the morally righteous thing to do (and arguably was), everybody wanted it, and when after it inevitably led to more bloodshed nobody would have ever blamed him, neither contemporaneously nor in the future.
Off topic, but the whole concept of "world police" is just spin. A police force is one that enforces equally laws established by others. You cannot be at the same time the one who establishes the rules and who decides when and where to use force against those who break them. This is just arbitary use of violence.
>At that point you can't just ignore them and hope they stop; they'd been escalating violence for years.
If you can't ignore the problem, then drastically escalate the violence on your own?
USA has certainly done a good job of pretending to be the good guy, whilst simultaneously arming bad guys and killing to support Capitalist and tyrannical goals.
In hindsight, withdrawing from Iraq left a void that ISIS filled.
I mean, if you drill a hole in the bottom of a bathtub and then stand there with your thumb in it to hold the water in, you don't blame the fact that it drained on your getting tired and pulling out your hand.
When the US invaded Iraq, there were a decent amount of protests against it, and generally, Americans grew to see it as a mistake. What's different here is this connection gets a lot less attention, and it was arguably worse for the region.
We didn’t make ISIS... we just armed them very well (via Iraqi “security”).
Found the two Afghanistan books by Steve Coll interesting. Certainly not flattering of any group involved.
Did Mattis also disagree with bombing weddings and assassnating "males of fighting age"?
Graveyard of empires.
Alexander of Macedon[2], British, Soviets and now USA have failed because they all have had unrealistic objectives.
But Afghanistan had been ruled by "foreign" rulers for most of it's history. They all had one thing in common - they have kept multiple forces in balance and limited their rule to the capital.
> He shows how governing these peoples was relatively easy when power was concentrated in a small dynastic elite, but how this delicate political order broke down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Afghanistan's rulers mobilized rural militias to expel first the British and later the Soviets. Armed insurgency proved remarkably successful against the foreign occupiers, but it also undermined the Afghan government's authority and rendered the country ever more difficult to govern as time passed.
> Afghanistan is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how a land conquered and ruled by foreign dynasties for more than a thousand years became the "graveyard of empires" for the British and Soviets, and what the United States must do to avoid a similar fate.
Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History by Thomas Barfield [1]
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7718203-afghanistan
> Recounting the plight of the most powerful leader of the time as he led the most sophisticated army of its day into the treacherous world of tribal warlords, Holt describes those grueling campaigns and the impact they had on Alexander, his generals, their troops, and the world. Into the Land of Bones also examines the conflict from the point of view of the local warlords who pushed the invading Greeks to the limits of their endurance—and sometimes beyond, into mania and mutiny.
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1584212.Into_the_Land_of...
As Kissinger pointed out in World Order (love or hate the man, it's a good read) - military force is a political tool to achieve political goals. And just like Kissinger's abject failure to achieve any meaningful political goals other than endless, meaningless war and death, it's because he could never define goals that could be achieved in the first place.
And that's the story of American foreign policy in the middle east. Our leaders and political theorists can't even agree on what goals should be or even goals that can be reached - just meaningless diatribe about "presence" and "if we're not there someone else will step in."
If you try and apply a consistent morality onto geopolitics you're going to see everyone is hypocritical. But geopolitics is not a debate between philosophers on morality and political theory. It's applied game theory closer to what Sun Tzu wrote than Hobbes or Locke.
> Turning Iraq, Libya, and Syria into failed states runs contrary to just about any goal you can imagine for the U.S
All of them had publicly defied the US at some point. It's the insult that matters to the establishment.
What if the win condition is actually having a constant percieved threat, and thus a war to act on said threat.
From someone not from the US, american politics is dominated with who is right and who is wrong. The entire political spectrum seems to be divided between "winners and losers" and the politics seem very black and white compared to my experience with politics from other countries.
What if the wars the US have started are merely a political tool to rally the population for party support?
The problem is that those that get elected or rise through the ranks of military and our government tend to be the exact people that shouldn't. That's not necessarily just an American thing, since selfish and proud people exist everywhere.
What it leads to is not some conspiracy to keep endless wars going to stay in power. To the contrary, the endless wars are a product of the continuous flux of people who believe they are right and arrogantly refuse to believe they can be wrong at all. If you speak with those in the civil service or those educated by our thought leaders in foreign policy, a consistent notion in why we continue these pointless wars is not because we have some absolute objective. It's because we believe that if we aren't there, someone else will be, and better us than them. That is the deep arrogance and stubbornness of America at work, that we are always right, even in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.
Sorry for the rambling. It's just that some of this deeply upsets me and I've had this debate many times with family members and friends who have more direct influence and experience.
Of course, since OBL was being sheltered in Pakistan by the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, and much of the support for extreme Islamism was coming from Saudi Arabia (as were some of the hijackers), and those countries were untouchable, the reprisals had to be carried out against the two Arab Muslim countries that were least popular with the US instead.
(Much of the supplies for Afghanistan had to be driven across a thousand miles of lawless Pakistani frontier and were occasionally attacked there; the Afghan occupation was also hampered by being unable to pursue or fire across the Pakistani border.)
On the ground, victory or defeat weren’t on the table. When we were there, we just wanted to come home in one piece.
In fact, they increased production and got a host of veterans hooked on the junk.
Truth is treason in an empire of lies.
I'm not fully sure how to structure this, so I'm just going to dive into a list of potential answers to the original question: What was/is there to win? While I am aiming at the question about Afghanistan, general region topics and Iraq factor in very much as well.
1. Destabilization: Much of the problem in the GWOT was and is due to the confusion of purpose. Some saw it as to defeat Al Qaeda. Some as revenge for 9/11 (despite the fact that most of the hijackers were Saudi Wahhabists, even if they had been in the Afghan training camps. That eventually evolved over time to issues with the Taliban, and it's various networks like the Haqqani and the Quetta councils in Pakistan. The problem is that while certain groups like the military leadership (such as Petraeus) bought into this, they didn't understand or weren't empowered to counter the underlying desire for instability at the political and above level. When I say above I mean what I call the political "shadow players", the ones that exist through multiple presidencies and have a huge influence over top-down decision trees in government. I like to use Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger as prime examples. They in turn influenced the top level political entities to make moves often counter to the surface purpose of the war(s). A great example of this would be when Ian Bremmer and Rumsfeld, despite protestation from the military, decided to tell the Iraqi commander with 40k troops asking what to do with them to go fuck off. In the end, much of actions of that type were very much geared towards keeping things unstable, for reasons I will go into further, and it's worth noting that's pretty much exactly what has happened.
2. Containment: Let's be frank. Iran is sandwiched in between Iraq and Afghanistan and it has been in the crosshairs for quite some time now. Also worth remembering in context is that much of Saddams power was increased when we quietly backed him in the Iran-Iraq war. The joke on the ground used to be "How do we know Saddam has WMDs? Because we still have the receipts!" Not much actually changed from the 90's and destabilization of the region plays into keeping Iran busy there instead of elsewhere such as in Lebanon and Syria, at least to a degree. It's more than that, but Iran is the main target of containment. It also was used as a draw to get fighters to show up there instead of in western countries, another form of containment. Lots of foreign fighters started showing up the body count.
3. Presence: By establishing and expanding the middle east and western asian connections, infrastructure, bases, etc, we have closer inroads for conflicts in the future, and that's not even necessarily geared towards ME countries. It could be China, Russia, Africa, etc. Africa in particular happened to play this out with Libya, Sudan, etc, and it continues to this day.
4. Combat hardiness: at a more Machiavellian level, the relatively tame conflict(s) on blue-side were seen as a good proving ground to refine modern combat techniques, tools, tactics and strategies. Lots of think-tank analysis after the fact to help gear up towards conflicts in a future that might be more tri-polar conflict likely. It's a dirty business to be a general and have to think like that, but it is what it is.
5. Black markets: Just as in Vietnam, the destabilization and control offered a great opportunity for certain organizations to participate in black markets. See, for example, congress is supposed to have purse string control of the CIA... but if they can pull some Iran-Contra esque gun-drug running on a suddenly booming opium producing country that has almost no rule of law and is swarming with military who don't ask too many questions, they can essentially remove themselves from congressional oversight. Just look at the growth of the opioid epidemic in America in time with Afghanistan. Ignoring the pharma part, a huge percentage of tested heroin in America traces it's origins too... yep, Afghanistan. It's an age old playbook the 3-letters have been using for a while. (Cocaine cowboys like Barry Seal into Arkansas... who was the governor there again?)
6. Kickbacks: You also have to realize that a lot of the policy influencers tend to be old white guys who own or on the boards of defense companies in Virginia (or oil companies like Halliburton), and those good ol boys have lots of power. Lots of what happened was just plain old money laundering from taxpayers/the treasury into their pockets. There is a reason a few counties in Virginia have had the highest growth of millions in the country since the GWOT started.
7. Resource control: along with presence and control of these places, comes the ability to influence resource flow routes (and who gets those contracts, see above). This is one of the most important and oft overlooked aspects of the whole thing. See cries that the wars were about us taking the oil weren't quite true. It was more about controlling who the oil did go to. Even in the modern context a lot of the action in say Syria has a lot of hidden resource control route justifications the public never hears about. On the Afghanistan side one thing it does is help prevent natural gas and oil from reaching China to the east and Russia to the north. I saw the current Russia-gate hysteria coming many years ago because the shadow players like ZB telegraphed it so much... always talking about the return to a tri-polar world.
8. Banking: Banks and economies tend to boom in times of war (until the war is over and things contract, or if you are in the country the war actually happens in). This is also highly under-analyzed.
9. The elephant(s) in the room: Israel and Suadi Arabia. Much of the actions in ME have been due to a large level of influence they both have over policy makers in the US. Many of the above reasons seem to benefit them more than the US, especially when the repeat blowback comes home to roost in another 20 years.
10. Destruction of rights at home: when the people cried out for a response, the military congressional academic think-tank complex immediately used the opportunity to further undermine individual rights at home. They have constantly moved the overton window further and further towards acceptance of a dystopian semi-totalitarian state. Just look at any topic in HN, a forum full of hackers, to see the excuses and servile placations for these things. There are multiple reasons, some of which are a bit over the top to get into, but the more reasonable justification is that technology has changed the threat model away from nation states and more and more towards single actors being able to pull off big things (bio-engineering, infrastructure hacking, etc). Many of the MICC/good ol boys in DC/VA buy into this reasoning on the surface, despite really understanding they are undermining the foundational principles of America (and lining their pockets at the same time). A prime example of this would be William Binney's report that he had designed a surveillance program called ThinThread that would have protected American's privacy and still enabled the gov to track threats, and implimentation would costed in the 10s of millions. The program was scrapped in favor of a multi-billion dollar program that didn't protect Americans privacy and lost threats in the haystack of information.
Just a few off the top of my head. Hanlon's razor just can't account for all these things. Yes incompetence runs rampant, but incompetence in these cases is often just as bad as malice, or is easily manipulable by those with malice.
Sovereignty and economic stability for their communities? Or do you imagine their goal involves hurting the West rather than improving their lives?
Can we talk about things that happened in the last 70 years please
Germany was a success as well. We changed a culture that had war as an ingrained part into one that has been peaceful for generations. And the Berlin Wall was not the fault of America or the west.
As for Korea... we continue to be there, not because we're trying to change their culture, but because we are trying to deter invasion from North Korea.
Back in World War II, we didn't initiate the "forcing". Once we won, what did you want us to do? Leave Germany and Japan to nurse their grievances, rebuild their militaries, and come back 20 years later for another round? (Note the pattern of Germany between World Wars I and II.) Having won, we (quite rightly in my view) decided that they were going to be transformed. Don't want your society transformed by outsiders by force? Don't start wars with them that you're going to lose in the end.
If you want to say that Iraq is a less justified case, I might agree. If you want to say that going to war to remove him was the wrong thing to do, that's a reasonable position. But having removed him, what should we do next? Just help the people set up any semblance of a government, and walk away?
It may be that secular can't work in some place like Iraq. That's possible. It may be that democratic can't work, either, not without preparing people for a generation. But what would you shoot for instead? Who should be the non-democratic leader, and why should it be them? And why do you think that way would work better?
Iraq was invaded by the US and its allies, especially in 2003, under the guise of baseless WMD. Yet, the political leaders in the US and its allies never faced any ramifications for their actions, that directly resulted in the deaths and mutilations of hundreds of thousands of people over time. But hey, they're just "brown people", so who cares, right?
> not without preparing people for a generation
"Preparing" meaning brainwashing, correct? Again, what gives the US the right to "prepare" people of other states and countries, especially since we see the failures of US-style "democracy" and "secularism". Face the facts, people in the Middle East are generally conservative and religious, and they don't see Western style democracy or secularism as a solution, particularly when many aspects of those directly contradict their religion and culture. Furthermore, we saw what happens when the local population elects someone not in line with US's interests (see Morsi, etc.).
The US is now forced to declare peace with the Taliban, after all it's put Afghanistan and its people through. Countless lives and trillions of dollars later, and it's back to where things started (almost).
> "Preparing" meaning brainwashing, correct?
Well, take Japan. The people there had been brainwashed into a cult of the emperor and militarism. So the choice is, leave them brainwashed into something that sees no problem with trying to kill massive numbers of foreigners, or brainwash them into something else.
Again, what gives us the right to choose to do so? That they attacked us, and that we won.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
If your neighborhood has termites, sooner or later they will destroy your property too. It wouldn't matter if they started from the house of your friend or your enemy. If you have a neighbor who is deliberately raising termites, you forget about termites and neutralize that neighbor first.
America, both parties really, deliberately side with the bad guys and later give excuses when things work out against them.
I wouldn't name names but it's not hard to guess who in this particular context is the neighbor raising termites.
If only, the US had destroyed Pakistan’s air bridge out of Kunduz in 2001 allowing thousands to escape by air to Pakistani safe areas.
If only, the US had kept the mission to light footprint special operations only, a la the very successful Central America model in the 80’s/90’s.
If only, Pakistan couldn’t guarantee the perpetual failure of Afghanistan.
There was a need to intervene 19.5 years ago like there was a need for Iran to intervene 20.5 years ago(Taliban liquidated Iranian Shi’a diplomats).
Few know US and Iranian forces actually worked together briefly capturing Herat in 2001.
I once had the chance to grill a former US ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009-2011, unfortunately I handled it poorly.
Time to decisively end the sunk cost fallacy bias.
Or am I missing a something like "these are apples and oranges"?
If you can work out how supporting food stamps can make those same people filthy rich, and maintain their hegemony, then I'm sure they'll go for it.
The US is currently quietly supporting Saudi Arabi in their war against the Houthis.
The rebel groups on the other hand would have profited very much from international intervention, so they could have an motive to stage it. And since ISIS and alike rose from the rebels, there surely were many cynical enough to do this "for the greater cause".
But it is proven that the West used this lie to justify committing yet more atrocities in Syria.
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/confirmed-chemical-weapon...
Let me give my point of view: if NATO countries had avoided supporting, training, financing and arming the "rebels", the war would have been over in six months- it probably wouldn't even have started. The refugees, the destroyed cities and the hundreds of thousands of deaths are fully on the conscience of the West.
If the war had been over in 6 months it could only have been so by genocide.
“Add 100,000 troops and blast them all”, “get our boys home now”, “get revenge for 9/11”, “don’t repeat Soviet mistakes”. There’s a lot of clamoring at home, and a lot of long-standing tensions abroad.
We can assume for both the Bush and Obama administrations that most people were basically trying to do the best they could to solve intractable problems.
Foreign policy is really hard.
And despite my concern about the political motivations surrounding this deal, hints of peace are welcome.
Sadly no one will be held accountable.
The various militas of Afghanistan were bombed and engaged haphazardly for years and now, it seems, we're withdrawing. That's hardly an Afghani victory in my mind.
One reason I have a problem with this kind of statement is that we should encourage the cessation of pointless wars, and not try to equate ending them with losing or being defeated.
Territory control map in December 2019: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...
Primitive stone age goat herders vs the "world's most powerful" military. Who will win?
The simple fact is that the US occupied their country for years. Bombed and killed with complete impunity, and then decided to withdrawal. It's absurd to call that a victory for the Taliban or Afghanistan. Their claim to victory is that they aren't entirely dead at the time we wanted to withdraw and the reason for that is that we knew it would be immoral to use the force required to completely kill them, not any strategy or cunning from them.
It's bad rhetorically and morally to pretend like this is an American loss because that implicitly says that in order to "win" we'd need to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. We shouldn't have been there anywhere near as long as we were, we shouldn't have done anywhere near as much as we did, and it's great news that we're withdrawing. Calling it a loss, or a Taliban victory, isn't just immoral because it implicitly argues for perpetuation of the war, it's also completely delusional.
> we wanted to withdraw and the reason for that is that we knew it would be immoral to use the force required to completely kill them
We won because we didn't commit total genocide, only partial genocide? Due to our very high sense of morality and goodness?
The war had no clear objectives. It just continued until people decided to stop it and stopping it is a good thing.
Regarding your question about why we didn't commit genocide, yes, it's because we realize that would be immoral and the American people wouldn't support it.
True for the US side, and thus was unwinnable.
Not true for the Afghan side. Their goal was to expel the invaders. Their goal accomplished, the only possible conclusion is they won the war.
Again, Afghanistan didn't force the US to withdraw - they survived because we chose to let them. We decided to withdraw not because of fierce Afghanistan resistance, more military personal committed suicide than were killed by enemy action, but instead because we elected a politician who thought the war was a waste of time.
This is not a time to lament with absurd claims like "Afghanistan won the war". Instead, we should be happy that a needless war is coming to an end.
Well, they disagree with you.
The Taliban may say whatever they like, but that doesn't make it so. It's simply wrong to claim they won or the US lost. It is good that our interests have aligned and the war will stop.
History, repeating; make your own aphorism.
They get to the part post 9/11 where the gloves come off and they sit down with corrupt legal advisers (Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo), many who are advocates of the Unitary Executive Theory[2], to concoct a legal firewall around their actions. The twisted logic is: The US does not torture therefore the varieties of "enhanced interrogation" being used cannot, ipso facto, be torture.
Alongside "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture) we have those other Newspeak euphemisms[3] "extraordinary rendition" (state-sponsored kidnapping) and "enemy combatants" (any fighting-age male present in a combat zone).
Then there's the legal limbo that is Guantanamo Bay, the suspension of habeas corpus[4] (a foundational legal right in modern democracies), and the frankly draconian USA PATRIOT Act.
Ah, good times.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6266538/
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/etc/networ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory
[3] https://vizettes.com/kt/american_empire/pages/euphemisms-glo...
[4] https://www.thoughtco.com/bush-lincoln-both-suspended-habeas...
Afghanistan is a country that has been in a civil war for over 40 years. It’s a tragedy for sure, especially when you compare photos of Kabul in 1979[0] to today, but ultimately no one is going to impose a peace there. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans could.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview/18bumiller.h...
I'll be there will still be US presence/monitoring in Afghanistan for some time to come.