It was written by a retired veteran: Mike Jason retired in 2019 as a U.S. Army colonel, after 24 years on active duty. He commanded combat units in Germany, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
It pulls no punches and, in my opinion, is worth reading.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/how-americ...
I read a book a while ago that was well researched and gave the impression that Afganistan would always belong to the Taliban. It was called "No Good Men Among the Living".
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17454723-no-good-men-amo...
Gopal’s book is essential reading for anyone concerned about how America got Afghanistan so wrong. It is a devastating, well-honed prosecution detailing how our government bungled the initial salvo in the so-called war on terror, ignored attempts by top Taliban leaders to surrender, trusted the wrong people and backed a feckless and corrupt Afghan regime. The book has its flaws, minimizing the role of neighboring Pakistan in the Taliban’s resurgence and letting the Taliban off too easy. But it is ultimately the most compelling account I’ve read of how Afghans themselves see the war.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/books/review/no-good-men-...
At least US tried to make a difference. EU is very passive in that sense (I'm from EU).
the mainy problem in afghanistan is the fact that not many people feel a common sense of being an afghani. The country is extremely decentralised and rural. Most people only look at their villages and community, not at the bigger picture.
Only thing is that when they left, we made sure the Nazi's didn't come back.
Right now they were training Afghans to have their own military, but it's all so corrupt that it is just an impossible task. Those who can will flee the country instead of fighting for it.
Initially, Taliban offered surrender. US denied their terms. So they kept on fighting and rebuilding.
They took over the country in less than a month. They never left. They were always there.
Chinese approach to radical islam will work. But West will never admit that.
Chinese see islam as totalitarian ideology that is incompatible with Chinese values and competing communist totalitarianism.
The public just believes otherwise because of 70 years of US propaganda [1]. The only thing US soldiers left us europeans with are a massive influx of refugees of which we have to take care of and for which we are ridiculed by US politicians and their citizens alike.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year...
Don't forget the military bases and the half-secret spy networks linked to terrorist attacks.
The role of the US and Russia are inextricably linked at the end of WWII and to pretend either was irrelevant, or either "really did all the work", is to simply ignore history.
You're responding to another human, such that its a locality sensitive sentiment. To a French, Belgian or Dutch national the US is the savior of that war - the Soviets being uninvolved in their liberation.
As an aside, I wonder if there exist an Slavic-language HN where Eastern Europeans argue that American steel was the true winner in the war and the Soviets don't deserve glory...
At least it is sure that many of them wished the Americans had liberated them, not Soviet.
The USSR for all its achievements was a harsh place to be for everyone except the luckiest ones.
"In America there is huge differences between rich and poor - in USSR everyone is equally poor".
While the Soviet Union obviously never fought in Western Europe, the article that the person you are replying to quotes numbers from right after the war, where the majority of French people said that the soviets were the ones who were the most responsible for the outcome of the war. And that does make sense, considering for how long they bore the brunt of Nazi aggression, and the number of casualties speak for themselves.
There is a comparison with now, where of course most people would give most of the credit to the Americans. I think a lot of people in Western Europe aren't aware what the costs of the War in Russia were.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_o...
To be fair, the major reasons for this were that the Russian military leadership was utterly incompetent during the earlier stages of the war [1], and that they suffered from a serious lack of equipment and material. "Number of casualties" and "years spent fighting" aren't good indicators of military effectiveness.
[1] That's what happens when you liquidate your military elite or put them into gulags because they are on the wrong side of your class war.
WW2 was started by Germany and USSR hand in hand.
'Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September'
And an honest question: why do American people think that it's so damn important to spread American democracy at the cost of waging wars? Pew Research said 94%+ of Afghanistan adults support Sharia laws. So why do we risk our own people's lives, kill thousands of people in a foreign nation, and throw trillions of dollars just to force other countries to buy our own ideology? Isn't it text-book definition of pure evil? Another case in point: According to the book Skin in the Game, the western countries removed Assad in the name of bringing democracy, yet triggered one of the most brutal civil war in a country, left dozens of cities in ruins, and ironically fostered the largest slave market in the world. Yeah, slave market. Isn't it ironic?
This is the only way to keep the faux heaven looking as it does. Utopian.
It’s also the one topic you can have both sides of the aisle always agree on. No matter the political climate. When the military is working, it’s always at work in keeping us free.
Woodrow Wilson would have been proud at how we monetized his emotional button of American exceptionalism
Remember that the companies you talk about are not the only ones that profited here. It's not that different from when Hillary Clinton was laughing at the camera and saying the greatest thing about Lybia's liberation would be that they would pay for the reconstruction.
This is a management issue. For all of the failings of the current US president, getting the hell out of an endless, unnecessary war is a good thing.
We should have at least kept a smaller force around as a presence to maintain continuity. See this “rescue plan for Afghanistan” from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board for more suggestions that aren’t blindly exiting Afghanistan in a few short months: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-rescue-plan-for-afghanistan-t...
But not pulling out seems to be just delaying the inevitable, and a continued presence is expensive and arguably incendiary/destabilizing to the whole region, so I can understand doing it.
This isn't a commentary on the specifics of how it was done, merely on whether a withdrawal should have been done.
Terrorism in Afghanistan has zero to do with the US constituency.
A "foothold" is useless and unnecessary.
I feel badly for the Afghan people, but ultimately it isn't the US' problem, and never has been. If they'd like to have a civil war and get those assholes out, let them.
But when the Saudis presumably financed some of the same/similar bad guys it wasn't even worth much of an investigation? I find such "they're bad guys!"-arguments to be applied very inconsistently
those are the terrorists the US created by mercilessly bombing their civilian relatives.
What terrorist acts have the Taliban committed? I've mostly only seen them fight back against foreign invaders.
> and harbor terrorists once again in the future (remember the same Taliban sheltered 9/11 terrorists and is still allied with al Qaeda!).
First they offered to look at evidence and consider extradition, then they offered extradition, both of which the U.S. refused.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1539468.stm
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...
> It means we lose a foothold in the region, militarily and economically.
Why does the U.S. need a foothold in a region on the other side of the world?
Giving aid to a terrorist group that commits those acts doesn't make the Taliban less complicit. See this UN report from June about how the Taliban is still closely tied to al Qaeda (https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/02/middleeast/un-report-tali...). As for what atrocities they've committed, there's a long list on Wikipedia, many of which meet the definition of terrorism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Condemned_practices).
> Why does the U.S. need a foothold in a region on the other side of the world?
So many reasons. First, to contain China, which is the principal threat to America's prosperity and control in the future. Second, to support other democratic nations like India, who will suffer from the Taliban's resurgence. Third, to expand our economic interests. Fourth, to continue our mission to sustain human rights which the Taliban is already eroding. There are others, and I am certainly not a foreign policy expert, but my point is - there's something there.
Not that the US DoD is in any way a model of efficiency, but I suspect you are vastly underestimating the difficulty of the problem set.
Over the past 200 years, the British, Soviet, and American empires have all failed to pacify Afghanistan. Probably the Mongols and Alexander the Great struggled too, I need to dig into the history of those campaigns for more specifics.
Can you articular which particular aspects of our nation-building and counter-insurgency techniques are distinct from our equally-failed predecessors? Have you considered that the objective may not have been to erect a fully-functional Afghan government and military, but instead to conduct a multi-decade delaying action to stymie Chinese expansion for as long as possible?
(I mean this as an honest question, i don't know that much of the geopolitics of the region)
"Afghanistan may be sitting on one of the richest troves of minerals in the world, valued at nearly $1 trillion, scientists say."
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/rare-earth-afgh...
The Chinese will ask no questions, will do the work, and wont bother the Taliban with annoying issues like freedom and democracy. A perfect match.
Are you aware that one of the most cliché jokes told outside of the U.S. is some variation of "when an American says democracy, everyone ducks for cover"?
Having said that, it didn't work at all. China patiently used those 20 years to develop its economy and infrastructure, locked down Xinjiang against subversion, set up Belt and Road, and gained strategic tempo in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait while the US got much too carried away in Central Asia.
To humiliate America
Other than the Khybar Pass, Afghanistan is a piece of land of very little value, and only 38 million of very proud, and militant people.
I recommend checking out this thread, as the whole Afghanistan = Graveyard of empires meme only applies to quite recent history.
https://twitter.com/Alex_Khaleeli/status/1425608335726940166...
That wasn't in the original brief, and I've never heard it before in the 20 years?
Frankly if it's an expensive unpacifiable area, let China have it. They can sink effort into an unwinnable war instead.
Also, having consulted a map, how do you expect China to physically get there?
On the other hand, it seems a lot of Afghan soldiers deserted to the other side. They see no upside to the new Afghan regime.
"China, at least, is not limited by public perception, and will have no qualms about doing war crimes, and they will call it conquering."
But, really, China is pretty peaceful compared to US thuggery. I prefer China. At least they are rational.
Yeah it's one of those unspoken "national interests" that underlies how the US plays The Great Game, but rarely states explicitly.
>>>Frankly if it's an expensive unpacifiable area, let China have it. They can sink effort into an unwinnable war instead.
If we are lucky, that will be the outcome. If the Chinese find a way to balance transit routes and natural resource extraction without somehow pissing a conservative Muslim population (while they are simultaneously oppressing Muslims in their home territory)....that could turn into a problem. If they build out links to Iran, it will not only throw a lifeline to that economically-struggling adversary, it will help China pivot away from reliance on maritime lines of communication. That maritime reliance is key to the US's strategy of threatening economic strangulation of Chinese coastal industry in the event of a conflict.
>>>Also, having consulted a map, how do you expect China to physically get there?
Via their shared border? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan%E2%80%93China_bord...
Via China's ally Pakistan, the same routes most of US military logistics took into Afghanistan for the first decade?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257931864_The_Afgha...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_(1989%E2%80%9...
Probably not. There's definitely something we are doing wrong. Personally I look at the Russian intervention in Syria as a model for "hybrid warfare done -r-i-g-h-t- well enough". I think they manage to prop up client states, accomplish strategic objectives, and do it all without completely breaking the bank.
In my view there's always arrogance in thinking that GIs can literally fall from the sky and "save" the locals...
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210814-weapon-seizur...
Why wasn't all this equipment repatriated or destroyed? Why were the bases just abandoned without proper transition to Afghan Control, so that in some cases they were even looted by civilians?
Possible explanations:
1. Extreme incompetence or total apathy by US Commanders/Politicians
2. There was no land/sea transport route through Pakistan to retrieve all the equipment
3. The US Military-Industrial Complex was happy for all this stuff to be lost, so it could be reordered
4. The US wanted the Taliban to reconquer the country quickly, so that any power vaccuum could not be filled by China or Russia
5. Managed decline of the US Empire, requiring deliberate humiliation and demoralization of the US forces, enabled by corrupt senior US commanders and politicians who have made deals with China.
"The fall of the last major city [Jalalabad] outside the capital secured for the insurgents the roads connecting Afghanistan to Pakistan, a Western official said."
If Afgans do not want to fight Taliban themselves what US can do?
Which of course has been the post-WW2 standard operating procedure for the U.S. in more countries than I care to count. And it always comes back to haunt us, god knows what the long-term ramifications of this latest fiasco will be.
But it seems like all Western-minded urban Afgans want to get evacuated to US, Europe, Canada rather then put up a good fight. So why the West shall fight for their freedoms?
> Q Mr. President, some Vietnamese veterans see echoes of their experience in this withdrawal in Afghanistan. Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam, with some people feeling —
> THE PRESIDENT: None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is — you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy — six, if I’m not mistaken.
> The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...
That did not age very well. https://www.npr.org/2021/08/15/1027806863/the-taliban-seize-...
https://observers.france24.com/en/20200218-afghanistan-corru...
E.g. an excerpt:
> [A]s Chayes studied the graft of the Karzai government, she concluded that it was anything but benign. Many in the political élite were not merely stealing reconstruction money but expropriating farmland from other Afghans. Warlords could hoodwink U.S. special forces into dispatching their adversaries by feeding the Americans intelligence tips about supposed Taliban ties. Many of those who made money from the largesse of the international community enjoyed a sideline in the drug trade. Afghanistan is often described as a “failed state,” but, in light of the outright thievery on display, Chayes began to reassess the problem. This wasn’t a situation in which the Afghan government was earnestly trying, but failing, to serve its people. The government was actually succeeding, albeit at “another objective altogether”—the enrichment of its own members. Washington supported Hamid Karzai and his ministers and adjutants in the hope that they could establish a stable government, help pursue Al Qaeda, and keep the Taliban at bay. But the Karzai government wasn’t a government at all, Chayes concluded. It was “a vertically integrated criminal organization.”
The ammo, weapons and military vehicles I believe quite lot of it technically belongs (or belonged) to the Afghan national army or at least was donated to them, although from what others on here have said, they were barely functioning as a force with rampant corruption at all levels.
None of this is new, pretty much exactly the same thing happen after South Vietnam fell, with the North Vietnamese getting an even more massive stockpile of basically US military equipment that makes what the Taliban have captured pale in comparison. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/03/29/archives/arms-left-by-us-... https://militarymatters.online/weapons/vietnam-loves-america...
Not to mention all the helicopters they just pushed into the sea during the Saigon evacuation to make more space on the decks of ships.
Even back to end of world war 2 they dumped huge amounts of equipment into the sea or buried them or just left them in place to avoid the costs of taking them back. I suppose it does make some sense from an overall cost and logistical point of view, but on a personal level it does seem incredibly wasteful. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/wwii-ended...
... and if some group (Talibans?) fetches it then become a foe, he will be a serious one, and therefore the Complex will sell more stuff.
4. Profit!
“God has promised us victory, and Bush has promised us defeat. We’ll see which promise is more truthful”.