What was there ever to win?
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
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.
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.