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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

A well-armed militia took on the most powerful military in the world and won?

In what sense did they take on the US military or win? Some of them continue to exist, I suppose, but that's rather like a defeated boxer claiming to have won simply for surviving the bout.

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.

It looks like even before this peace deal, they managed to wrest back control of much of the country, especially the rural Pashtun-majority areas.

Territory control map in December 2019: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...

The Afghans win because they successfully repelled the invaders after a long and terrible war. Repelling the invaders is a winning end state in a war where the start state was invasion by a foreign country.

Repelling the invaders may be a victory, but just enduring occupation, bombing, attacks, etc until your occupiers decide to leave isn't.

Here's another victory: caused 2 trillion in damages to the enemy and thoroughly demoralized them.

Primitive stone age goat herders vs the "world's most powerful" military. Who will win?

This is as poor a "victory" as the others suggested in this thread. "We won because you spent so much money on bombs and missiles exploding on us, and soldiers occupying us" is a line I'd expect from Zap Brannigan and not anyone residing in reality. They didn't inflict anywhere near that dollar amount in damages, instead it was paid to American soldiers and contractors.

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.

You believe the US won?

> 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?

That's not what I said, but I certainly don't think Afghanistan or the Taliban won.

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.

> The war had no clear objectives.

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.

Not at all. It was our choice to withdraw and we did. That's not winning the war, that's our interests aligning.

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.

"There is no doubt we have won the war. This is why they are signing a peace treaty." - Chief Taliban negotiator Abbas Stanikzai

Well, they disagree with you.

They disagree with simple reality. As I laid out before, they won no significant battles, killed a relatively small amount of our people (relative to the number of theirs we killed, but also to something like the regular suicide rate). The damage they did, as you alluded to earlier, was almost entirely in the form of making us detonate expensive ordinance on them and pay people to occupy their country for decades. At every moment it was US decision makers deciding what would happen, from deciding that the invasion would start, that the occupation would continue, until the US decided the occupation would cease.

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.

The Taliban quite likely will be back to their goal quite quickly: the ruling power of an islamist state Afghanistan. If that's the "aligned interest" the US fought for, it could have had that a lot cheaper.

Well-armed militias have a storied history against powerful militaries. Not just US history, either.

War's changed. We don't line up on either side of the battlefield and run at eachother. Guerrilla warfare gives smaller numbers the advantage. All out blowing something up and paying the civilian penalty is a non-starter.

I'm not sure I believe any of the numbers I've seen, but I strongly doubt the Taliban can be described as "smaller numbers" in Afghanistan.

Agreed. At some point the Taliban and Pashtun nationalism become quite intertwined (even in areas of Pakistan). This made it so that probably not a insignificant porition of the Pashtun people sympathize with the Taliban if nothing else.

Well it's not changed that much, The Battle of Teutoburg Forest (9AD) was basically massive powerful army thinks it can win anywhere, guerrilla tactics (and maybe some luck) show that's not how war works.

History, repeating; make your own aphorism.

Isn't that how America was founded?

I like how the US Department of Defense became the US Department of War right about the time it changed its name from the Department of War to the Department of Defense.

Newspeak, attack is defense, war is peace.

And arbitrary armed violence is "world police". And militias we decide to back are "rebels", the ones we don't are "terrorists". And governments we don't like are "regimes". And acts of terrorism from our side are "targeted killings". And killed civilians are "collateral damage". The list is endless.

Watched Vice[0] recently starring Christian Bale as a corpulent power-grabbing[1] vengeful, power-behind-the-throne, Dick Cheney; Amy Adams as his steely missus; Sam Rockwell as a likable "W"; and Steve Carell (of all people) playing Donald "Don" Rumsfeld.

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 where empires go to die.

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