Special Report: Afghan pilots assassinated by Taliban as U.S. withdraws
reuters.com
reuters.com
And it's not like we didn't have plenty of warning. Our experience in Afghanistan is exactly the same as the Soviets before us, and the British, like, five times before them.
We Americans are such idiots in some ways.
In Syria outplayed by Russia
In Iraq outplayed by Iran
In Afghanistan outplayed by a league of local tribes.
Russian will use Pakistan as a proxy, and will fill the void. The way the pull off was decided and implemented will prove to be a decision as bad as the decision to go into Afghanistan.
They better have a good plan for a pull off in a hurry of the current US Embassy. As soon as the wind changes it is pretty clear to what allegiance the current Afghan Army will go with.
"After troops exit, safety of US Embassy in Kabul top concern"
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-kabul-445f33e7bba08c382...
Lets open this haste will not make for Taliban flying F-16's...
I’m not sure he gets exactly lumped in with Bush and Obama here. Too early to tell what Biden admin will do.
The left mostly focused on his “take the oil” comments, not his “get out” statements. Pretty much everyone in Obama’s cabinet and staff is on record saying he screwed up not doing more (boots on the ground) to take out Assad.
For all of Trump’s ranting on NATO, I really question the EU’s wanting us to do something about Putin, Ukraine, Syria, etc while shutting their nukes and building gas pipelines to Russia.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-to...
What would you do if it was your son, or brother, or nephew? And, what would you do to those who bankrolled them?
We really gotta stop doing this.
* years later *
"What do you mean 'technical debt'?"
The point: there's substantial risk to waiting for an indirect, non-imminent threat to become a direct, imminent one. Addressing it is frequently easier and cheaper in the early stages.
Isolationism was easier when adversaries took weeks/months/years to get to you.
Getting out of Afghanistan will make the big powers .. China, Russia et al. to pay attention now that Americans are no longer bogged down.
20 years is enough - I do not even know how many trillions are wasted. Do you know the GDP of Afghanistan, it is less than USD50 Billion.
Pay-off the warlords put some mercenaries in Kabul, ask Indians and Russians to fund opposition to Taliban because it is their strategic headache.
Give Turkey some security role because they seem to have good terms with Pakistan, so that Kabul is out of Taliban control or some kind of compromise.
Not putting troops is not isolationism.. you apply other levers of your power.
Part of the problem in geopolitics is that there's genuinely no way to ever know this sort of thing, without read/write access to a multiverse.
Is the Middle East more or less stable than three decades ago is hard to assess on its own, let alone "what would it have been with/without adding x".
The other problem is that while people talk about caring about this, none of the actors who pretend to actually have this as their primary goal, its just an excuse used when advantage, not stability, is being sought.
Do you generally oppose any kind of alliance, like NATO?
Afghanistan wasn't the only country in the region (nor weas that the only region in the world) in which the US conducted campaigns against al-Qaeda and factions allied with them.
> Bin Laden hid in Pakistan after all, and the Taliban often crossed the border to Pakistan to seek refuge.
And the US conducted attacks against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan from very early in the war, and also against bin Laden himself there.
One might make a similar argument about Europe during WW2 (I am not, but that's why I'm asking the question).
The escalating embargo and blockade of Japan meant their industrial output was facing collapse within months. The attack was a desperate attempt to protect their invasion of the resource-rich East Indies. They literally had no choice, and this is exactly the argument that won Tojo permission to go forward with the attack.
Plus, the spirit of the Japanese nation was very much in favor of total conquest. Hakko Ichiu was sort of the Japanese version of America's Manifest Destiny, except they explicitly applied it to everything from Russia to Australia and Burma to Alaska.
"Asking for it" is an acceptable excuse for a war internationally.
Did we finally find some?
> Afghanistan didn't ask for it with harboring Taliban?
The idea that responding to 9/11 is similar to some supposed "we thought you'd be cool with us taking Hawaii" in 1941 is a bit baffling.
Since WWII the world sees unprecedented peace and prosperity, all thanks to the USA being the world police. Just the freedom of navigation of merchant ships, afforded by the oversight of the US navy, is a huge enabler for world trade.
I hope US continues on its course for the next century instead of creating a power vacuum which the Chinese would be happy to fill.
I did not say all US intervention was good, but that as a whole, Pax Americana has been great to us. The Chinese or Russian alternatives are not very enticing.
And the “just let countries live their life peacefully” alternative is actually much more enticing than “force capitalism and democracy on countries that don’t care, by killing hundreds of thousands and ruining lives so they end up hating it for generations” reality that we live in.
Vietnam, Irak, Afghanistan, maybe learn from your mistakes at some point and acknowledge this strategy is not the best?
Tell that to Taiwan and Ukraine. Or go back and tell it to the entire eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Tibet etc.
I also guess most Cubans today would have wished Sovjet didn't interfere back in the day.
America and the west generally is prone to mindless self-flaggelation.
Imagine China having occupied (and largely destroyed) 2 separate European countries for the past 15years. Or Russia having occupied two separate Latin American countries for the past 15years. Clearly the level of interventionism of the US is unmatched.
Taiwan can forget about their freedom forever if China occupies it. Eastern Europe only got out because USSR collapsed.
Can't imagine we're going to get very many more people agreeing to work with us...
Disclaimer : Dutch.
https://www.businessinsider.com/1993-independent-article-abo...
This would imply that anyone who worked with the US government, or are perceived as doing so, should leave immediately. You can't fight the tide.
The argument you may be looking for is that Afghanistan should be ruled by Afghans, without outside interference.
Most would agree, but there is no way from here to there without fighting it out, and whoever wins will rule very far from any western ideals.
Perhaps the more realistic scenario is that as the US leaves, Iran, Pakistan, and maybe Russia, China and India will keep fighting proxy wars there. As an American, I'm OK with that as long as we stay out.
It was created by Pakistan due to the fear of the soviet invasion spilling into their country, it was ideologically and financially supported by the Saudis with some logistical support early on form the US.
The Saudis gave the funds for the ISI to train 100,000 fighters and introduced what essentially was a new religion into the area. Afghanistan wasn’t historically particularly conservative from a religious point of view Deobandi/Salafi fundamentalism is quite foreign, mosques were rare to non existent in the tribal areas and organized religion doesn’t overall works that well with a predominantly tribal and illiterate population.
Some more information here
Myanmar is a good example of this. Typically the people with the guns can seize power. This does not mean it is the will of the people.
I heard an NPR story that there is a large backlog of asylum requests from Afghani that worked with the US government. They see the writing on the wall.
And yes, as I see that situation, Afghani local people do support Taliban, like it or not. They are Muslim people and they want Muslim country with Sharia law. Forcing democracy on such people does not do any good. You can't quickly change culture. USSR tried to eradicate religion for 80 years and former USSR countries are very religious atm.
Hard to argue the people enjoy their ruling party.
If you accept the above statement, then very little of what has been done by US in Afghanistan makes sense either.
> should leave immediately
Would be a good idea, yes. Slight problem with that is that the western militaries seem to have forgotten all promises about that now...
Aka collaborating with the invaders. I know Afghan tribal factionalism doesn't reflect Westphalia state mores, but purging traitors post war is the norm. US should have done more to extract these folks.
--s
>A White House National Security Council spokesperson strongly condemned “all targeted assassinations in Afghanistan”
Just as a fun fact because you didn't specify which bin Laden: Osama's son, Hamza bin Laden, was actually assassinated in Afghanistan by the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Qasem_Solei...
It would've been a bad idea to not go in and maintain Afghanistan as the El Dorado for international terrorists. The Taliban got the message rather quickly though, the occupation was unnecessary.
However, only in hindsight is it obvious that Afghanistan could not be turned around, to reverse the decades-long descent into tribal mob rule. It was a mistake worth making.
I don't think this is true at all. I think we knew from Japan, Korea and other "projects" that it works but it takes generations.
We knew that before going in.
We know it now even though it suits people to pretend it's impossible and that people in Afghanistan are somehow different to people literally everywhere else...
Its exactly this sort of ignoring of known facts that gives the US a bad name. The US is great at shock and awe and giving up.
The US has had one foot out of the door of Afghanistan since day one. In Japan the US wanted an ally against the communists. Rebuilding was important. In Afghanistan, the US had no such need. So we didn't bother.
You can build nations (eg Japan). It takes longer when you're working from a rougher starting place. I don't think these are unreasonable points of view. Nor were they novel before Sept 11th 2001.
I should say the coalition or nato rather than the US for a lot of the above. Plenty of other countries followed along on an obvious bad idea.
Dubious, but at leaat arguably true. But, unfortunately, the mistake you suggest is worth making is not the mistake we actually made, the serious effort in Afghanistan being shortchanged early on for the distraction of the war of choice in Iraq. Both Iraq and Afghanistan were (among other issues, particularly with Iraq) afflicted with “counterinsurgency on the cheap” disease in the Bush Administration, with fairly predictable consequences even if one thinks that nation-building with counterinsurgency warfare by the US as a key pillar was viable.
It's exactly this kind of stupid, arrogant, historically illiterate rhetoric that gets us into trouble.
Between the Brits and the Soviets, Afghanistan has been occupied half a dozen times in the modern era. Each time the occupiers have sought to reshape Afghan society from the bottom up into something resembling a modern western character. Every one has ultimately failed in a similar way. So now Americans act surprised that the seventh attempt failed? Are you fucking joking?
You underestimate the degree to which countries like Afghanistan or Iran were already "westernized". Cities like Kabul or Teheran weren't that different from Istanbul. The Islamists that you seem to conflate with "Afghan society" are a modern phenomenon.
It's true that many have tried (and failed) to deal with this problem. The only ones who have succeeded unfortunately tend to be cold-blooded strongmen like Hafez/Basher al-Assad, Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi. Broader civil society is not equipped to deal with it. The mission objective was to change this. Despite the failure, it was a noble objective.
You speak from your position within a privileged society wherein religious extremism is a thing of the distant past. Imagine for a moment that your military didn't exist and that armed evangelicals chose to ride into every major city to defend some of their "values". How exactly would you defend yourself and your (lack of) values? I suspect you would react by keeping your head down and hoping for better times.
Pick any aspect you like-- industrial, legal, political, civil, architectural, anything-- and tell me how "westernized" Afghanistan was in 1929, or 1919, or 1878, or 1838? Do you even know what those dates are? I'll give you a hint: moments in history, when Afghanistan was much the same as it was when we invaded in 2001, that could have enlightened us regarding our fate if we were willing to be educated.
> The Islamists that you seem to conflate with "Afghan society" are a modern phenomenon.
Modern radical islamism is completely irrelevant to my point. I neither mentioned nor even thought about it when writing my comment.
If history is any guide, not many decades will pass before some other wealthy nation again decides to civilize Afghanistan, and the inevitable tragic and bloody failure will again be justified post-hoc by historically illiterate folks who say things like "Gee whiz, who could have seen that coming? Oh well, at least it was a noble cause."
You didn't think of it? If I understand correctly, your point is that Afghanistan has been "mostly the same" for 200 years straight and that by invading this country, the same mistake has been repeated over and over, for the same reason. That's a remarkable feat of reductionism. Big, if true!
Nowhere did say or imply that Afghanistan has been "mostly the same" for 200 years straight. I'll leave it to you to somehow divine what I did say.
In the future, you might, just might, want to consider even a cursory study of Afghan/English/Russian history before weighing in on this topic.
Detour into minutae? Let's be clear: I'd like to stop talking to you, your style of debate is quite unpleasant. I get it, you have opinions. You can keep them.
> Nowhere did say or imply that Afghanistan has been "mostly the same" for 200 years straight.
How else am I to interpret this paragraph?
"Pick any aspect you like-- industrial, legal, political, civil, architectural, anything-- and tell me how "westernized" Afghanistan was in 1929, or 1919, or 1878, or 1838? Do you even know what those dates are? I'll give you a hint: moments in history, when Afghanistan was much the same as it was when we invaded in 2001, that could have enlightened us regarding our fate if we were willing to be educated."
The mistake is the same only if the objective is mostly the same and the country is mostly the same. If not, then your "could've seen that one coming!" assertion just falls apart. In particular, to disregard the rise of Islamism and the power-grab of the Taliban that preceded the US invasion strikes as willfully ignorant.
This is what makes your argument so weak - these premises are indefensible and you don't seem eager to even try. Instead, you resort to a gatekeeping maneuver. Nice try!
> I'll leave it to you to somehow divine what I did say.
Refusing to clarify when required immediately disqualifies you from debate.
I think you're having trouble interpreting it simply because you don't know what you're talking about. You don't know the significance of those dates, for example, so you probably can't imagine why I left 1979 off that list. You don't know how the country evolved throughout the British occupation, so you have no idea how absurd it is to talk about how "westernized" it was. This stuff is obvious to anyone who knows anything about the country's history.
The real problem is that your question doesn't even make sense. It makes no sense to posit whether Afghanistan has changed, because Afghanistan isn't a single entity. It's barely even a country. So the answer is yes and no. Vast rural areas are indeed almost unchanged since the pre-British era; life in eastern mountain valleys, for example, looks pretty much the same as it did a hundred years ago, with the notable and somewhat jarring exception of cell phones. Kabul and Khandahar on the other hand went through drastic changes mid-century. These are essentially different countries.
> The mistake is the same only if the objective is mostly the same and the country is mostly the same. If not, then your bold "could've seen that one coming!"-claim just falls apart.
That's some interesting logic. I and others who predicted failure in Afghanistan over twenty years ago were unaware of these rules, and yet we somehow managed to predict the course of the conflict. That could just be a total coincidence. Or it could be that a deep knowledge of the country and its history allows one to analyze the long sequence of conflicts there, differences and commonalities between the various actors and conditions of the country across those times, and then draw informed predictions. Do you think maybe a few books were written about this exact topic?
> In particular, to disregard the rise of Islamism and the power-grab of the Taliban that preceded the US invasion appears willfully ignorant.
You might be surprised to learn (and I'm guessing you'll actually be surprised) that the rise of militant Islamism did not make us more likely to win. Regardless, both the Brits and the Ruskies, who had very difference experiences in Afghanistan in many ways, including the absence and presence of militant Islamism respectively, were nevertheless able to confidently tell us that our own little project was almost certainly doomed. And hey, they were right, imagine that.
There aren't any "premises" here that have to be defended. This is just information about our countries and their common history that is easily accessible to you if you cared to find it. You could start with Edward Ingram's paper that I cited in a different comment.
Look, this is all pretty simple. Your claim was, "only in hindsight is it obvious that Afghanistan could not be turned around". This claim is idiotic. Not only idiotic; it's eye-rollingly, mind-numbingly stupid. Lots and lots of people knew exactly what was going to happen, and they've been proven right at every turn. And nobody on the other side of the debate, not even the most die-hard neocons, made the argument that our victory was assured. The neocon argument involved a lot of technical hand waiving about America's strength in intel and covert ops, but none of them was stupid enough to claim that failure was unforseeable, like you're claiming. Go read Doug Feith's book. Or Wolfowitz and Perle. Or anything.
Even worse was your second claim, that after trillions dollars and tens of thousands of lives lost, the "mistake was worth making". This is some arrogant, ignorant, first-world tech-bro idiocy that I don't even deem worthy of spending time on, so I didn't.
I have to say, as fun as it is for me to point and make fun, I probably won't come back to this thread.
You're the one that claimed Afghanistan didn't change, or rather that it was "much the same", so blame yourself for "not making sense".
Of course it's worth making the distinction between the rural population and the urban population. Indeed, rural living conditions didn't change much. Nevertheless, the influence of militant Islamism, a novelty of the twentieth century, has brought drastic changes.
> I and others who predicted failure in Afghanistan over twenty years ago were unaware of these rules, and yet we somehow managed to predict the course of the conflict.
Did you really? What precisely did you (or they) predict? Have these predictions been published at the time? Surely they must be available?
> You might be surprised to learn (and I'm guessing you'll actually be surprised) that the rise of militant Islamism did not make us more likely to win.
That's not at all the way I think about it. Islamists stand little chance in battle against the US military. The question is: Can you build a civil government and train it to stand on its own feet against the threat? This is a worthwhile endeavor, even if the odds are against you.
To that end, your 200 years of history aren't all that relevant. By looking at history, I could've predicted that the end of Apartheid would lead to the current state South Africa is in. That still wouldn't be an argument in favor of maintaining Apartheid.
It's true, history doesn't always side with the "goods guys" and if you predict ahead of time that the "bad guys" will win, maybe you'll be able to say "I told you so, idiots!". Congratulations for that, may you revel in your glee until the end of your days.
> Regardless, both the Brits and the Ruskies, who had very difference experiences in Afghanistan in many ways, including the absence and presence of militant Islamism respectively, were nevertheless able to confidently tell us that our own little project was almost certainly doomed.
The Brits tried to install an already ousted monarch in order to turn Afghanistan into client state. The Russians tried to bring fledgling communists into power.
I don't think either are comparable to trying to prop up an already existing civil government whose weak defenses just didn't stand a chance against hordes of extremists with rifles and a death wish.
What precisely is it that lets you draw the conclusion that, because the former two scenarios were "doomed", surely the latter one must be doomed as well? Please don't answer in the form of book references or papers. I've read through your Ingraham reference and it doesn't actually contain any insight about why that British plan didn't work out.
> I have to say, as fun as it is for me to point and make fun, I probably won't come back to this thread.
Just when I'm about to call your bluff? How convenient.
Both the British and the Russians considered Afghanistan to be backward and ungovernable, and both made it their mission to civilize it to more modern standards, with particular focus on economic standards. See for example Britain's forcible re-installation of Shah Shuja in 1839, who was amply patronized by the East India Company.
Here's a good summary of Britain's societal goals in Afghanistan by Edward Ingram from his paper Great Britain's Great Game: An Introduction [1]:
"The first industrialized state and the first free society [Britain], in its own eyes naturally, was to take advantage of its superior technology, its steam power, its iron and its cotton goods to take over and develop the economy of Central Asia. And after British goods would follow British values, in particular, respect for private property. Given security for the just rewards of labour, nomads would settle and oasis cities surrounded by tribes of herdsmen would be turned into territorial states with agreed frontiers on the European model"
There is an approach to politics that basically says people create excess value (more than they need to survive), and all politics is just deciding what to spend that on. Each "side" will sometimes squander resources just to stop the other "side" getting them: someone on the left will gold plate social security so that someone on the right can't use the money for tax cuts.
I never really subscribed to the theory, but I have to admit the "war on terror" seemed designed from day one to bankrupt the US treasury. Either the people in charge were all really stupid or it was intended, and I don't think they were all stupid.
Not all of that is Afghanistan of course. There was Iraq 2 too. And a bunch of other conflicts. And 2 rounds of tax cuts. I'd include 2008 bailouts but I think they ran at a profit in the medium term?
In 2003 I was 16, but we already knew how this was going to end up, and tried to warn our American friends, yet we were bullied with the whole « freedom fries » bullshit.
Since then, we saw events unroll exactly as we expected for basically 20years with no significant deviation from the idea we had of how things would go. Really frustrating and tragic situation.
Do you mean the government or the public?
The people in power have power over the government through lobbying and over the public through press and media.
So both were fooled indeed
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/19/1004991965/afghan-interpreter...
That is, slaughter or enslave all males from any tribes who oppose you [1], take their women for your own [2], and enforce your own culture, language and religion [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banu_Qurayza
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susa_weddings
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuristan_Province
All of that is rather politically incorrect these days, so Afghanistan and nations like it will remain unconquerable except for nations like China who are still willing to carry out that level of annexation and assimilation.
Where is the outrage over Afghanistan? So much of our money was spent on this catastrophic failure while so many people in own country struggle with basic needs. I'm furious. Why is this colossal waste of money tolerated by the upper middle classes?
The general populace, those that supply their children as cannon/IED fodder, has no control of the "game". I propose that all of Congress and those that work for the federal gov't must send their children into these wars as general infantry. Let's see what happens to our forever wars then.
One does not send their adult children anywhere.
You might argue that only legislators with children in the military are allowed to vote on certain bills. But that would be unconstitutional.
Can't fight privileged exploitation with outraged incoherence.
Two trillion dollars. You can probably use your imagination to think of some better ways that money could have been spent instead of another lost war.
Fundamentally, the issue is competency. I guess I wouldn't be as furious if at least we had "won" and Afghanistan became a safe and prosperous democracy with some enshrined rights for people, but we didn't get that. We got absolutely nothing.
We flushed all that money down the toilet then walked away, and there will be no consequences of any kind for the people who are responsible.