Soldiers watch the US withdrawal from Bagram through the lens of Pokemon Go
stripes.com
stripes.com
Little anecdote: Bagram is quite large, and sometimes I used to run late at night into the places where nobody goes. Well, 'nobody' is a legend of some old contractors from back before the centralized personnel tracking systems, who had set up a shantytown in the junkyard in between contracts, and eventually just 'went native' and made it their home. I can't be sure, but there seemed to be signs of life in strange places. I would have bought property and settled in myself if I could. There were a lot of men I worked with who had been completely replaced by their families, stopped taking leave, and didn't want to go back, ever. I can relate. My fiancee died during my first tour, and out there I could be fully in love with a ghost; it was like a superpower. I think I needed a few more years of that.
I mean I've heard and seen pictures, it seems Afghanistan is beautiful nature wise.
I can get how a place can become home when you feel like your links to other places fade, but a hint that it might be more healthy to move around is that you you're sticking to the "recognizable." It seems like you would always be living in some place from the past (which is an illusion because it never really was what you believed it was and it was always changing) which you feel nostalgic for. At the same time, you're building a new place at your other home. Once the romance with the first place becomes destroyed, then the back-up comes forward. I would bet the back-up could have an even greater hold over you if it's a highly controlled (slower changing) environment such as a military base or a prison.
It felt like focus. I came back to chaos. Jobs where you have no idea what to do or why, but huge pressure to make your boss happy, just some random person that you don’t really know anything about, but they have the power to ruin your career, and you’re all on your own. Shopping. Cooking. Cleaning. Family. Facebook. Cell phones. Internet dating. Interviews. Leases. License. Registration. Insurance. Doctors. Lawyers. Bills. Taxes. Spam. Scams. Outrage politics. These things are not optional. It’s your entire life consumed by other people’s rackets. It all existed before, but every year away, it seems like it’s been put on overdrive when I get back. People have a tendency to infantilize vets by claiming we’re the victims of PTSD or something, but no, seriously, there are some things that really are getting worse in normal American life, and especially politics of the homefront military. Maybe it’s to be expected; a lot of us went forward to get away from that.
I lived overseas for 10 years and can verify that things got a lot shittier around here while I was gone. And the people as a whole got a lot dumber and more gullible. Cell phones. Social media. The 24/7 gossip news cycle. Your experience of a more meaningful, directly engaged, lower-bullshit life is actually the way things are, or were until recently, in a lot of countries. America's a runaway train.
(1) People value going out and having conversations over other forms of entertainment like games, television, social media, etc. Discussions in these conditions tend to be more honest and more nuanced. Wit is admired. I believe America has a pattern of politely lying and then back-stabbing, rather than openly disagreeing - and the UK does even more so - and this enters a vicious cycle on social media that doesn't exist when everyone's around a table.
(2) Tradition is valued over technology. This means more care and quality goes into the real world around you - everything from food preparation to the craftsmanship of an ordinary chair can be treated as a work of art and brings aesthetic beauty and pleasure. Pre-prepared things and plastic crap tend to be shunned. Old things are revered, reused and restored. Wealth is therefore not so much the accumulation of things as it is of the stories that go with them. This creates more depth and gives the world a human scale. America is pretty much the opposite; it worships the new, the fast, the convenient, the disposable, the gigantic. Everywhere looks the same because getting from A to B efficiently on the interstate has hollowed out a local or regional sense of place.
(3) Individuality is set within a larger social fabric. It's unacceptable to be alone on a holiday - even if you want to be. Someone will always come find you and bring you into the fold. Family and friends are sacrosanct - nothing you want to do personally comes before them. This can be heavy sometimes, and hard for an American. But if you let yourself be pulled into it, you get a sense of community that doesn't exist in the US. Maybe it used to exist in small-town America, but small-town America is also extremely conservative, judgmental, religious, and whacked out on opioids and meth.
So, the places I've lived that best met my qualifications were: Rural France, where you can rent a village house for €500 a month, if you can work remotely, chop your own wood in the winter, get your food from the butcher and baker, and spend every evening with stonemasons and hunters at the village pub, or walk country roads for a few miles to the next village; Buenos Aires, where all of life is a series of coffee dates and dinners with new and old friends that stretch late into the night; and mid-sized towns in Spain, similarly (away from the tourist coasts). I'd also say Prague - outside of the city center; and Vietnam (Saigon). The last one is tricky because of the language and the fact that their government doesn't really want you there, but the people are incredibly open, sincere and welcoming. My ex and I hit the road when we were 24, with a couple remote jobs lined up, and lived well for 10 years, mostly on under $2k/mo, by finding out of the way places. Paid no federal income tax because we stayed out. Saved enough to buy a house in the States, and now I'm sitting on my porch going - what am I doing here worrying about maintenance and bills, hardly seeing friends who are all too busy with kids and work? I should be back out there. Anyway, that's my story.
I do think it's dangerous to romanticize what the military does for soldiers without recognizing what it does to our enemies and the innocents caught in the crossfire; especially when we, as a country, cannot fathom "service" (and all the things that flow from that structure, which we can agree can be edifying for one's soul) being anything but that which involves airstrikes and ammunition. As for how to cure the nation of its woes, I feel that a huge part of it is competition run amok. Things are difficult because it's an advantageous condition for those who are able to navigate the rough waters when their neighbors can't.
Perhaps we go the two-birds-one-stone route. I hear that there are some bridges and buildings and roads that may need repair.
Something to think - maybe, talk - about.
But. And I'm not directing this at you, but it jumped out at me ..
> On the bigger FOBs, the jet engines ran constantly in idle
.. using a considerable quantity of fuel, every drop of which had be trucked from Karachi through unfriendly territory. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11463490 Of course it was comfortable, the kind of comfort only the incredible profligacy of the war machine can offer.
Total cost: https://apnews.com/article/asia-pacific-afghanistan-middle-e... $800bn over 20 years. Let's say $40bn a year.
Peak troop numbers: ~100k. So at least $400,000 per troop per year.
No wonder it was so great, I'd be disappointed if you didn't enjoy it if it cost that much. It's all the Americans grinding away in the home system that made it possible for you. $120/year/American.
Did anyone ever say "we can't do that, we don't have the budget"?
There were multiple supply routes used in Afghanistan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_logistics_in_the_Afghan_W...
In particular, the Pakistan routes were not used at all for many months after the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_NATO_attack_in_Pakistan and "by February 2012 85% of coalition fuel supplies were being shipped through the northern routes".
My brother today asked me if I had an opinion on the withdrawal from Afghanistan when we did our weekly gaming session (tonight was Hearts Of Iron), and I told him "no, why would I? The war was over years before I even got there".
Don't get me wrong, it's sad, but the USA is not what it used to be, and we need to target our borrowed money resources.
(I have no idea as to the real reason we stayed so long there. I'm beginning to think it was military practice. I wouldn't be suprised if some defense guy said, we have to build up our the iron in our military in order to keep our lead on China's expanding fleet of war machines. (I used "iron" because I'm lazy, and figured it was ok because of what Xi just said.)
I don’t think too many people care out of compassion for individual Afghans, but the original reason we “liberated“ them was because the Taliban was providing a safe haven for Al Qaeda to train and launch terrorist attacks. The USA created a democratic government in the hopes that the troops could be withdrawn and the local Afghan government would maintain its own affairs and keep terrorists from operating in its country. There are many Americans that care that after 20 years the Taliban will take over again shortly after the troops are gone. Nothing changed, the next OBL could be operating out of Afghanistan and Americans got nothing for their 20 years of wasted tax money except thousands of casualties and a lot of broken families.
So I don’t know if too many Americans care exactly which government Afghanistan adopts, but I’m pretty sure anyone paying attention is disappointed that they didn’t get literally anything different.
Edit: to be clear, this wasn't me critiquing the plan, saying whether it would or wouldn't work. This was me responding to GP's prompt about whether America cared about what style of government Afghanistan adopted. Yes America cares, not so much about the style of government but about the outcome. They were told that Afghanistan was going to get a new government that wouldn't allow terrorists free reign to operate as they please; as a result America and the world would be safer. They didn't get that. Yes there are other places that terrorists could operate from, but removing Afghanistan from the list would have been nice. Yes, democracy would be nice, but America would have accepted if Afghanistan had adopted a limited monarchy ran by a Grand Poobah. What we're about to end up with is the Taliban running the government again and probably handing a few of the recently vacated facilities to terrorists as new training camps.
It was impossible to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan because they could retreat to, operate from, and occasionally bomb US fuel supplies in, Pakistan.
The quest for revenge after 9/11 just gave the US two more Vietnams.
Unfortunately it does. Hasn't been called up since the Vietnam War but the system is still in place and people are still required to register.
No, it doesn't.
> Hasn't been called up since the Vietnam War
Right, because there is no draft law.
> but the system is still in place and people are still required to register.
No, the registration system is in place, but it would take a change in law for there to be a draft.
Democracy in the USA is based upon directly elected local government and a local property tax on landowners. We never tried to establish anything resembling american style democracy in Afghanistan.
Imagine if after each contentious national election the President appointed all of the state governors, all the county and city executives were also appointed by the governors or the President, that there was no direct property tax on corporate and individual land owners, and that the national government levied an internal sales tax.
The USA wouldn't survive more than a few years under Afghanistan style democracy.
Lemme stop you right there. Even the idea of "voting" was foreign to them. You have to understand, we can provide security, but if they think democracy is stupid what do we do? Tell them democracy isn't stupid?
>There are many Americans that care that after 20 years the Taliban will take over again shortly after the troops are gone.
Yeah, No. I mean, psychologically it's weird to see the place we were at for 11 months get overrun by Islamists but at some point we've just realized that Afghanistan is their country. If they want to run it that way, with an Islamist political party running the entire government then that's their right. The US should stay out of it.
I agree to that, but it is really not that simple.
There are many more foreign nations and groups involved in Afghanistan than just the US.
The Taliban are very alien to many afghan people, too and considered a foreign force.
The solution?
No simple one that I can see.
Saying this is kinda insulting to actually democratic countries. Why would exactly the country with the most broken democracy feel to spread that? Did they ask for that? Did other countries ask the US to break Afghanistan the way they did?
I live far from both, and I do not really care. But bringing democracy simply sounds like a empty blanket statement that from a democratic perspective doesn't make much sense.
The blatantly false narrative about Al Qaeda should have died years ago.
The US has invaded Iraq and Afghanistan because this was in the interests of Israel (to control the countries bordering Iran), and US foreign affairs are largely influenced, if not straight up controlled, by israelis and/or jews (to the point that US soldiers in Iraq were simply called "the jews" by the population, according to Thomas Friedman).
The idea that Afghanistan was going to adopt democracy and western liberalism is so absurd on its face that I won't even discuss it.
Some people are just delusional thinking implementing a broken half baked American forced democracy would simply replace thausands of years of history that lead the the current country.
Afghanistan probably had a better shot at a flawed democracy than Iraq. The country is decentralized by the very nature of the geographical obstacles it sports, and the Pashtun culture has a concept of collective decision making. Look up "Jirga", it isn't that different from other ancient decision bodies that predated democracy in European cultures [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jirga
On the other hand, Iraq has a long tradition of absolute rule by ruthless powerful figures, going well back to antiquity. It is much easier to concentrate resources and build a standing military to steamroll your opponents in a flat agricultural country.
Jews don't in fact control the united states of america or a subset of it's government.
Jews don't control the world either.
They have various views on issues, politics, and culture. They're found in places all around the world, and like any other group you'll find good and bad. To say they control the U.S.'s foreign policy seems ignorant to me and based on an anti-semetic trope.
EDIT: grammar
>but there is overwhelming evidence that the purpose of US intervention in the middle east is almost purely for reasons of power and resource
Sure, I'll collect my check at the pump, I guess.
>and this has been obvious to scholars and even casual laymen observers for nearly half a century
I think you're missing the meaning of my original post, which was a comment about people who experienced war in Afghanistan feel about it. You're welcome to contort that into whatever point about human rights, "America is bad", whatever point you feel like. Like I said originally. I don't care.
> Does anyone in America actually care about what style of government Afghanistan adopts? Apparently these people in DC think they do.
I had dinner with the ambassador to the Taliban once at Yale, back in 2000. He said they banned TVs because there wasn't any Pashtun programming, so they were effectively just banning porn. He was accompanied by this very nice lady, Lailia Helms, who was the granddaughter of the former king of Afghanistan and married to the son of the former CIA director, Richard Helms. Weird.
Outside of the excessive dev costs, and high price tags of these things, ongoing, year after year, institutional knowledge of "how to construct weaponry", and "how to test / build" the same is absolutely vital.
You absolutely cannot be in a position where no company and employees exist, which knows these things.
The cannot be overstated. Imagine a war breaks out, and now you try to build ... missiles. You have no tooling, no factory, no employees which have ever done so, and no supply chains either. Nor even engineered, first step designs!
Now, I agree things are not perfect, but something must be in place. Something ongoing.
This same logic holds with the military too. You want to lose a war? Have a no standing military, or one which is never deployed.
You need trained, experienced troops, which will train other troops if a massive war breaks out and your numbers swell. You need experienced persons to lead, which have not been trained in isolation.
Canada tries to solve this, as much as possible by peacekeeping. It's not perfect though, blue hats don't often engage in large scale actions.
Point in all this is, trying to pick just, humanitarian causes for troop deployment, and weaponry usage in the field, and to keep supply chains alive, is difficult, yet is literally essential if you want to have a real defense potential.
Or should the US, the West, just degrade their military, and hope for the best?
(Canada was in Afghanistan for more than a decade.)
The receiving end however might hold a different point of view.
If we demobilized, we'd probably never really need to remobilize. (What, are the Nazis going to rise again?) But if we did, we could.
This is a very 1990s/2000s point of view. We have a real global competitor now. China's military spending is rising faster than their fast-rising GDP. Some recent war games exercises suggest that the US could already be in losing position in a conventional war with China [1].
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/china-u...
Not even our generals are stupid enough to get in a war with China. (Our politicians probably are, but they're not in charge.) They'd probably take all of our Pacific Islands, and they would definitely sink all our carriers. It will take a few years for the Pentagon to forget the asskickings we've received recently. They're searching for nations smaller and weaker than Syria; China is off the list completely. Even though we spend far more on the military than they do.
However, we don't have to get in a war with China. We owe them trillions of dollars. We're probably not going to start out by straight-up defaulting, but there are all sorts of things we could fiddle with to put the hurt on them. What are they going to do in response? Stop exporting us lots of crap? That would be good for American workers. Maybe they'll hack American firms' insecure shit more? Ditto.
We would live happier, healthier, and more prosperous lives if we stopped viewing every challenge through a military lens. Especially since our military is incompetent to achieve any goal through military action.
Besides, the idea that starting wars is an effective method to prevent losing wars is completely illogical.
if this were the case, then the USA would have actually benefited from these wars. you ascribe far too much competence to our ruling class
The actual reason is more like an unholy mishmash of the sunk cost fallacy and the ever-present need to pad the pockets of Boeing and Raytheon
"if this were the case, then the USA would have actually benefited from these wars."
I don't see where that conclusions comes from unless you fall for the same mistake you mention - adress too much competence. Also the US ruling class can loose a gamble.
Strategic influence, military bases on the ground (vs. Iran) etc.
So if one would characterize complicated geo politics as gamble, I think it is fair to say the gamble was lost, considering the huge ressources spend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military...
It boxes Iran in, it taps on China's exposed western shoulder and borders the stans that buffer Russia's soft underbelly and it's close enough to other established air bases that can provide logistical support.
Better yet, if you do manage to capture it, it's has some of the most favorable geography for repelling invasions of any country. If America was fully established there, getting it out would be pretty much impossible.
It's not a huge shocker it was seen as a prize worthy of an expensive gamble at a time when America felt it was at the peak of its power. Anyone remember fukuyama's "the end of history"? America had a pretty severe case of hubris in the 90s/early 00s.
The war was lost a while ago, of course. It's really hard to admit defeat however, and there's always a tinge of hope it might be turned around, a disbelief that the American military could suffer defeat, so, of course it dragged on.
Anybody who has worked on a huge, vastly expensive high profile project knows that inertia can drag it on for years after it's clear to everyone that it's dead in the water.
Afghanistan would be good to have in a war with Iran, but I honestly think that the opportunity for that is gone. AFAIK Iraq has gone from being a US client state to nominally independent, and Russia’s plan to prop up the Assad regime worked out very well for them.
Well, sure, if you believe that the powers that be were acting for the benefit of their country rather than for themselves.
Making an investment is not the same as assuring returns on investment.
True, but the power and resources for a few corporations and individuals for sure! But not American people. Nah, not the common man.
You might want to ponder what propaganda you have been falling for.
No doubt Afghanistan has resources but I'd like to see supporting evidence that it was the reason for invasion.
As just an ordinary American citizen, I think that question is nearly 20 years too late (or 32 if we consider Charlie Wilson’s War). And that particular question is downstream of other more important questions.
My primary calculation is: what is the likelihood that a central Afghan government could actually influence the governing of regions far from the major cities, what is the likelihood that American soldiers could support the central government in establishing order/governance there, how much progress have we made in 20 years, how much longer would it take to make such a project self-sustaining without further US support, would the central government be considered authentic by those whom it governs or just a Vichy, and how do American citizens know the progress we are making is real or just optimistic spin by professional generals whose reputation is tied to this engagement.
Honestly I’ve been pretty pessimistic about Afghanistan since Bush 2 took his eye off the ball in 2003 and moved his efforts to Iraq, which was at least a stable governing organization (although I freely admit I would never want to live there). We elected Obama and Trump since, both of whom tried to pull the US out of these Middle East wars and mostly did (until things changed).
If America had any real chance to help Afghanistan, it was in 1989 right after the Soviets left and we left the weak remaining government to deal with the well trained mujaheddin with no significant American support.
If you could create something to drawn them in, it would work better, but I'm not sure how the game works. Like attacking certain locations in Go to make them 'hard' to draw solders to an 'easy' IED'ed location.
The Taliban are just us, they like creativity, they'd think hacking Western Pokemon Go would be cool, it would help them recruit.
But, the logistics of getting for instance a McDonalds on a base also has risk. It's all risk management.
This isn't the Soviet-Afghan war, where the US was happily and openly supporting the same mujahedeen that eventually became the Taliban. Russia and China both have significant 'problematic' Muslim minorities, and have little taste for seriously sponsoring Islamic extremism.
(The US and Saudi Wahhabism, on the other hand, continue to be odd bedfellows, because, you know, we still can't get over Iran.)
Not the Taliban, but ISIS was very quick in adopting Google Earth/Google Maps early in their war in Syria, you could see some map screens in the videos where they used to prepare a targeted suicide bombing and such (not sure if those videos are on YT or Twitter anymore).
You could probably just make raw API calls. I'm pretty sure that's how all those pokemon-mapping websites worked for the first several months of the game's release before they removed those features from the game.
Something like Pokemon Go could permit dropping something rare to attract people to a sighted-in spot you'd then drop mortars on.
In any case, Pokemon Go's been out since, what, 2016? No one on any side has taken the American war in Afghanistan seriously since well before then. When you're just waiting around for Americans to acknowledge the inevitable and leave, there's not all that much point in finding clever ways to blow up Americans - all that's liable to do is make Americans maybe decide to stick around longer. That doesn't necessarily make Americans playing Pokemon Go in Bagram a good idea, but it also doesn't make it a bad one, and I can think of a lot worse.
It may be backwards. Niantic - the developer of the game, was founded by a guy who worked in "foreign affairs" for the US Govt [1]. One of his early companies was funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital branch [0].
Why put boots on the ground to get street level imagery, when you can just have kids all over the world do it for you?
[0] - https://www.networkworld.com/article/3099092/the-cia-nsa-and...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
The "fitness tracking app Starva" did not reveal the secret army base, soldiers inappropriately using their phones and broadcasting their routines by using a civilian application designed to share their location revealed the secret army base.
I know it sounds pedantic, but I think we should be very careful about verbiage when it comes to who is to blame here: it's not the apps. This kind of thing gets exacerbated hugely by media headlines too - always putting the app front-and-center and downplaying the policy/training/OpSec failures. This leads to erroneous and scary conclusions like "apps should be flagged for national security" like the GP mentioned - but the actual takeaway should be that we need to train the dang soldiers operational security.
Wording matter.
It does.
"a person getting hit by a car" is quite neutral.
"a driver ramming their car into a person"."
This sounds intentional and shifts blame to the driver.
A good image breaking down a news article in this way: https://www.camcycle.org.uk/magazine/newsletter110/article8/
It says "the victim was struck" as if it was their fault being where they were, not "the driver struck the victim".
As for the content, it doesn't seem newsworthy to me. PokeGo players know that your Pokemon will stay in a gym for a long time (indefinitely) if there's no rival team to knock it out.
Googling gave me this answer for how they stay in gyms: "Forever. Someone has to defeat it in battle to knock its motivation down to 0. Otherwise, it will never hit 0 through normal decay."
https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongo/comments/fjl4xz/how_long_...
I guess they call it "motivation decay". It's a mechanic where you have to feed your pokemon food to keep it motivated. You can feed it remotely, though. They can be fed up to 10 times with normal food, or an unlimited number of times with golden raspberries.
EDIT: I was wrong about getting kicked when the boss came. So if you kept feeding your pokemon, you could keep it there indefinitely. My bad.
I stopped about a year ago fwiw.
I realize nobody actually watches that movie anymore but I have and everything still fits.
This is why i dont like Stars and Stripes. Little disingenuous comments like this show thier priorities. Does anyone actually believe that soldiers didnt play during work? And, for a soldier, exercising is work. We know that a bunch of young men away from home with cellphones will play mobile games. We dont need to be told that they are all boys scouts who would never do so during office hours.
Im more woried about the security implications. A camera app that involves soldiers wandering around a base chasing gps-tagged sprites is ripe for intelligence gathering. How secure was pokemon go at this time?
As the US withdraws it’s troops after an incredible amount of time, the next few months will likely see many such stories about “life in Afghanistan” and what is being left behind.
Apparently there were Pokemon Go gyms and Pokestops on overseas military bases.
The last US military Pokemon Go players put their Pokemon in gyms before they left.
Those Pokemon are still in those gyms when they would have normally been kicked out by other players.
This means those Pokemon will stay in those gyms until another Pokemon Go player comes along which might be a very long time.
What about this?
> Like other veterans, he said he is pessimistic about the future of Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal. But he hopes the situation improves one day, to the point he can once again play Pokemon Go there.
Pessimistic / realistic view: once the military coalition forces withdraw there will almost certainly be armed conflict, perhaps a full civil war.
Optimistic / hopeful view: somehow Afghanistan will stabilize enough that people will be able to travel there as tourists.
What happens if a country invaded another one and both has users on this game? Could future invasions be for digital assets rather than physical ones?
Already been done, in 1967.
What? they need a different version of the game to do this? On Android anyone can can set their gps location to whatever they want. I do this to test stuff all the time.
Leaving now is an incredible waste and lack of leadership.
Is this a joke? Satire? Why? I suppose trillions of dollars later this is what we deserve. Mission Accomplished.
There was zero right answer in this war. We don't have some corrupt cabal of leaders in our government and military. I can't recall a single American that didn't want to go into there after 911. Our soldiers have been stuck there putting their lives on the line to keep the house of cards from falling down. This power vacuum will disappear with another incredibly violent war after we leave. There will be zero way for the current government to maintain control. I don't see how it could possibly avoid becoming an isis like state that will lash out with more terrorism and I'm afraid this won't be the last time American boots will be in country.
You must not have been paying attention. There were a hell of a lot of us, and we weren't quiet. Or wrong.
> I'm afraid this won't be the last time American boots will be in country.
Oh, of course not. We'll have left behind whole shipping containers full of the things.
The Taliban were widely recognized as the absolute worst, and sheltering Bin Laden was just icing on the cake. This was a close to national unity as anything will ever be.
The public, here in central Europe, was and still is mainly against the US invading countries for their own means.
(This is actually part of the reason so many of my generation learned to hate America for their actions in a early age)
And I feel like holding massive anti-US protests in the weeks after 9/11 would have been a huge talking point in the last twenty years.
On a side note I would be surprised if Wikipedia had a line for a few hundred young lefties demonstrating in a basically forgotten country like austria. When I say huge, I mean relatively, Austria ain't big. But there should be Media and pics somewhere I guess.
That's like a decade after the war started.
Even in the US, by the time of the Iraq War a significant chunk of the population had turned anti-Afghanistan war, but resistance was very limited in the month between September 11th and the start of the war.
Even today, I personally have no idea what the US went to do in Afghanistan. Iraq, at least, had oil. But, Afghanistan? What was the point?
(And in case you genuinely don't know: the Taliban were openly harboring Al Qaeda including Bin Laden. The US ordered them to either hand him over or allow the US to pursue him. They refused. So, the US eliminated the Taliban.)
Removed the Taliban from power, they still very much exist.
As the other poster said, Afghanistan's connection to 9/11 was clear, not even Afghanistan denied it.
But I'm curious why you say "yet another country." Between September eleventh and October seventh which other countries do you think the US attacked?
What? How old are you? Where did you live when it happened? What community or group was against striking back after 911? How can you even say you were "right" when the rest of the country didn't agree with you?
> Oh, of course not. We'll have left behind whole shipping containers full of the things.
Do you really think Afghanistan won't be the new isis state? The government is weak and one of the mightiest militaries in the world couldn't help defeat the taliban. The taliban is battle hardened and it seems incredibly doubtful they won't retake the country. If you disagree, please explain how you envision a happy war free Afghanistan that won't breed enemies of the United States after we leave.
You could better answer the question yourself with a study of recent history in the region.
Largest anti war protests in history.
> We don't have some corrupt cabal of leaders in our government and military
You have patriots, who are far more dangerous because they believe they're doing the right thing. And a certain amount of cabal willing to lie about how much of a threat Iraq was.
The only winning move is not to play.
-- Wargames, 1983
For the Iraq war. The Afghanistan war had very little resistance as things like the Congressional approval happened on September 14th giving the military a blank check to "capture the criminals."
What would you do when you fought alongside people that became your brothers? Would you betray them and abandon them to this horrible fate?
It's easy to call them useful idiots sitting thousands of miles away and safe. They are not dumb, they see the reality on the ground that we are not privy to.
At the same time, our soldiers are dieing. It's ugly whatever route we take and I don't know the least horrible decision that should be made.
Pokemon Go is based on OpenStreetMap since Dec 2017: https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/4/16725748/pokemon-go-map-ch...