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Comment by remarkEon | Hacker News Reader

There was an instagram post I saw (one of the boys sent it to me, I'm not a social media guy) that showed the Taliban walking through our old FOB in Afghanistan. What was odd to me about seeing that is I really had no emotional response to it. I thought I would, but I just ... didn't care anymore. Over the last few weeks I've also been sent article after article about the withdrawal from other friends (not veterans) who are deep in policy circles, about how this or that thing will mean this or that thing for Afghanistan. Does anyone in America actually care about what style of government Afghanistan adopts? Apparently these people in DC think they do.

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".

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> Does anyone in America actually care about what style of government Afghanistan adopts?

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 The USA created a democratic government in the hopes that the troops could be withdrawn and the local Afghan government would maintain its own affairs and keep terrorists from operating in its country.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.

OBL was, in the end, operating out of Pakistan, a "democratic" "US ally".

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.

True but at least the US doesn't have the draft anymore so American society doesn't care much and life goes on unchanged. When I read about an aircraft carrier being diverted to cover the withdrawal I couldn't help mutter "Saigon".

> True but at least the US doesn't have the draft anymore

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.

https://www.sss.gov/

> Unfortunately it does.

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.

> 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

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.

>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

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.

"but if they want to run it that way, with an Islamist political party running the entire government then that's their right.

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.

> The USA created a democratic government in the hopes...

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.

Bin Laden was in Pakistan. The 9/11 attacks were carried out by Saudis, partially trained in the US.

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.

> 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.

To be a bit contrarianish:

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.

You might want to look up Mirwais Hotak and Abdur Rehman Khan

If this was any other place on the internet, I probably wouldn't bother because it's usually useless (but this is hackernews, so ill try)

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

Afghanistan borders to many Regional-Super-Power-spheres to be ever left alone. Its between India/Pakistan, Russia/US and Belt & RoadStates/ Traditional Western Cooperate Colonies.

And its geography is too complicated for any modern power to control it. Just the logistics itself is a nightmare.

It earned the title “destroyer of empires” for many good reasons.

Love this. And it's how I feel about most things which aren't directly relevant to the items on my todo list in a given day. I care if my house was flooding, I care about tickets being posted to some queue that I'm being paid to watch and I care about anything which is generally conspiring to get me to make a reaction or even just move a finger to show I'm still alive. Outside of these things, my life is about keeping the list of things I care about as small as possible. Nothing about politics makes that list.

For the past 20 years we have been focused on what it costs us to remain. Leaving has shown the cost to others for us to go. No matter what you think we should do, that cost is a bitter pill to swallow.

Not when I step over homeless/needy Americans.

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.)

> Does anyone in America actually care about what style of government Afghanistan adopts?

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.

I apologize if this comes off as blunt, but there is overwhelming evidence that the purpose of US intervention in the middle east is almost purely for reasons of power and resources, and this has been obvious to scholars and even casual laymen observers for nearly half a century. Human rights and self defense have very little to do with it, and to believe so is to fall to propaganda.

You can be as blunt and stupid as you choose.

>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.

I was replying to this:

> Does anyone in America actually care about what style of government Afghanistan adopts? Apparently these people in DC think they do.

Are you asking what I think the DC establishment thinks is the right government structure for Afghanistan?

No. Buy you seem to think your policy buddies care about finding the right government structure. If they are true establishment and not just cogs they don't care about anything other than game theory and maximum extraction of value.

Ah yes, the power and resources that flow from the rich nation of Afghanistan.

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.

The value that is extracted is not from the "rich" Afghanis, but from American taxpayers, in the trillions to the military industrial complex.

Ah, then we are on the same page.

Two things.

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.)

It really sounds like you've managed to reason into "we have a military, so it's best to use it for its own sake." If so, that's pretty frightening logic, particularly for anyone in the rest of the world.

All the fluff aside you just said that the US (or any other country for that matter) needs to mess with other countries in order to keep their military in proper shape. Sure it does make sense from that standpoint. Or maybe not and conducting military exercise is more than enough given your already very advanced state.

The receiving end however might hold a different point of view.

So it’s all about having to choose between murdering one million people and finding some cheaper ways to test new toys?

"Standing army" used to be an epithet, a sign that a society had lost its way. The best military we've ever had was the one we built from scratch for WWII. They curbstomped two actual "evil empires". Everything we've had since has been a pale imitation, not fit to wear the same uniform. That's because in WWII we were trying to win, and ever since then we've been trying to spend money.

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.

> If we demobilized, we'd probably never really need to remobilize

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...

That's a very 1950s point of view.

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.

So basically, you think that destroying lives of millions people as a training exercise is a good idea and makes America somehow noble?

It other countries did the same humanity would be in an endless state of global war until extinction.

Besides, the idea that starting wars is an effective method to prevent losing wars is completely illogical.

How does maintaining military readiness and being at war in Afghanistan relate? Isn't it reducing our military readiness and preparatory investment? Couldn't we have bought hundreds of aircraft carriers for the cost?

How does China solve this?

>the purpose of US intervention in the middle east is almost purely for reasons of power and resources

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

">the purpose of US intervention in the middle east is almost purely for reasons of power and resources"

"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.

I don't think you can correctly conceptualize the US presence in Afghanistan as a gamble for resources that was lost. It's been 20 years. If there was ever a gamble, it was a while ago

It was "ressources and power".

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.

The "geopolitics" is just marketing. The point is to spend money that will disappear unaccountably into the Pentagon. Thousands of rich people get even richer. None of them care who is more secure or who dies, here or abroad. All of the fables that USA (war) news media excretes are for the purpose of making those rich people even richer.

It was likely less about resources and more strategic influence. "Owning" Afghanistan would give America the ability to project power in a critically important region surrounded by American rivals where it lacked a military presence.

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.

There’s a whole lot of (literally) nothing between Afghanistan and anything worth bombing in Russia or China, and the US has military presence much, much closer to the important parts of those countries.

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.

> if this were the case, then the USA would have actually benefited from these wars

Well, sure, if you believe that the powers that be were acting for the benefit of their country rather than for themselves.

> 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

Making an investment is not the same as assuring returns on investment.

Some benefited handsomely. Most others, not so much.

> the purpose of US intervention in the middle east is almost purely for reasons of power and resources

True, but the power and resources for a few corporations and individuals for sure! But not American people. Nah, not the common man.

Correct, the common person in the US suffers immensely due to the resources being poured into the military, leading to wealth, health care, and education outcomes far below many other countries with smaller GDP per Capita.

Ah yes all those resources and power the US got from invading Afghanistan. Lol.

You might want to ponder what propaganda you have been falling for.

Afghanistan is extremely rich in mineral resources. The fact that we failed to secure them isn’t really proof of anything. We have a long history of trying to install foreign leaders who are friendly to US business interests with mixed results.

Citation needed.

No doubt Afghanistan has resources but I'd like to see supporting evidence that it was the reason for invasion.

I said middle east, not Afghanistan. As mentioned elsewhere, the main resource extracted from Afghanistan is money from taxpayers.

You’ll have to define power and resources. I mean, Afghanistan offers very little of either and any control you want to exert comes at a high cost and fades pretty quickly.

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