Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
While the fairy tale of WMDs was a multiyear effort the US has undertaken, first and foremost as a response to 9/11, Saddam was painted as the leader harboring terrorists and aiding public enemy number one, Osama Bin Laden and his then suddenly sprung into public attention group called Al Qaeda.
It's only later on that Powell was sent on a mission by Bush/Chaney/Rumsfeld to tug on the world's and American's heart strings by producing laughable evidence of WMDs. Not dissimilar to how they sold the original Iraq War with babies in incubators being thrown.
During that first year and all the way to March 2003, endlessly bush has used 9/11, and anybody who is 'harboring terrorists' cough cough Saddam Hussain cough cough to justify anything and everything America wanted to do. And Americans stood behind him, blind and proud with our American flag.
I believe this was debunked before the war started, as was WMD's (remember Hanz Blix).
But that doesn't change the fact, this is who he and his regime was marketed as to Americans in the 2.5 years post 9/11 as the basis for war.
For Americans, and especially the military, this guy helped cause 9/11, therefore he should be hunted and die. All the others... collateral damage.
Perhaps you could share with the class what you believe is inauthentic about 9/11?
For example, that segment of the populace that championed waterboarding and defended it as a legitimate interrogation method involving a little discomfort, and believed it wasn’t torture, have come to show their true colors and believe they can’t breathe and are being tortured by wearing a mask.
When it comes to COVID, anti-masking is arguably a form of coping with a reminder of mortality, by "minimizing one's perception of the threat" [1]: that the virus is "not nearly as contagious or lethal as health experts claim it to be" or "originating in a politically motivated conspiracy".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00221678209594...
Clearly the US is exempt from the war crimes laws, and that needs to change. But it would require leaders of other major powers/countries to push for this.
But… this will never happen because almost no leader wants to be held accountable, and thus they will never vote against their peers.
The US is not exempt from laws relating to war crimes. While it is not a member of the ICC, it is bound to the laws of war as is any other state.
Yeah?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17#Br...
I think that would be near impossible when looking at US laws like the following:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
I don't see this happening any time soon, without a popular movement that drastically alters the American political landscape. Whichever party a president and legislators are from, they have war criminals among their ranks, so they couldn't accept their friends, colleagues, "bosses", etc. being sued and going to jail for war crimes. Not to mention the American fetishisation of the military, a politician could hardly campaign on sending "our heroes" on trial. Heck, Trump pardoned a notorious war criminal and it was celebrated by some.
So, baring a switch to proportional representation which would allow more parties and variety, or a popular movement that swipes away the current two parties, i absolutely can't imagine that happening.
Eddie Gallagher? I've yet to see conclusive evidence of that either way.
I agree that proportional representation and greater democracy can fix a lot of current problems, but we don't need to put off everything until that arrives and indeed that will need to be achieved within the current system and might need similar compromises to be achieved.
I really don't think that's a great idea for war crimes. They're already illegal, and absolutely despicable. Some really terrible things were done, they should be punished - saying from 2030 we'll really punish war criminals doesn't inspire confidence, and probably won't be an actual deterrent until the US starts enforcing it en masse.
But, forgiveness is hard, and it means evil people walk free.
There are a few additional facts folks forget since this is now 20 years later. Such as on Sept 10th, an assassination attack was launched against the Northern Alliance because they knew that the US would retaliate for the attacks coming the next day. There were also a number of Taliban leadership that directly aided in the planning and execution of 9/11.
IMO, "nation building" is always an impossible mission. The objective should have been to attack, destroy the enemy, and leave - immediately. Punishing the sponsors of the 9/11 attacks, not entrenching an ideological split.
US Congress signed into law the a priori consent of invading the capitol of one of its NATO allies ( NL ).
Disclaimer : I am Dutch.
If the US turn destroyed all the dikes, then it could use amphibious assault ships for troop transport.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nieuwe_Hollandse_Waterlinie
Of course, officially, "this plan is abandoned" nowadays. Nevertheless, I'd bring boots if I were invading...
I don't know what that means. Can you explain?
This, technically, gives the President the power to invade the Netherlands without getting (further) approval from Congress.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Insofar as it does that, it gives the President the authority to wage open ended war anywhere on the planet as long as a US citizen is held by the ICC, since the President has sole discretion to determine what means are necessary.
OTOH, that provision is also arguably an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power with no effect whatsoever, since if it delegates anything less than the ability to do anything Congress could allow it isn't specified.
On the gripping hand, the War Powers Act already allows the President to wage war to get a US citizen released from the ICC (and for almost any other reason) anywhere on the planet as long as they ask Congress before too long after starting the war.
Yes I'm intionally not naming names/groups/countries, but we probably know who I'm talking about.
It would not be the first time that a symbolic gesture was made that would appease the victims while not actually punishing those responsible. [ed-spelling]
Actually in this case you have even more interests at play from many sides (since US strength in the middle east - because of oil interests) has been a priority for decades.
Nation building seems to be a total ruse.
It's a human universal, unfortunately.
Most countries around Afghanistan have oil. If Afghanistan could have been managed (as in, exploited without difficulty or consequence), then the US would have probably been financially wise to attempt what they attempted. But it turns out, after observing two major powers attempt to dominate Afghanistan, that it is just too messy to manage.
Am I missing the sarcasm?
There's a big difference. Saudi Arabia has to answer for creating and sponsoring the ultra-conservative Wahhabi-cult of Islam, but that's getting further removed from the fundamental issue of protecting the 9/11 planners _after_ 9/11 (aka: what the Taliban did)
...but the largest OUTFLOW of money from Al-Quaeda, a full 2/3rds of their annual budget was to fund the Taliban government - $20 million per year.
They should never do anything that makes the lives of ordinary Afghans worse who suffered more from the Taliban than the US. You can’t just bomb a country, create a power vacuum, and nope out of there. Moral cowardice in the extreme.
As a counter example see Japan and Iraq.
The political will to commit to that level of destruction and rebuilding hasn't existed since then.
Iraq begat ISIS. Iraq was a clusterfuck since 1990.
If we use this logic, then the US should be stormed and occupied for the sins of its leaders and all innocents should be held culpable for not overthrowing their evil government.
Voter block A wants to bomb them back to the stone age and leave.
Voter block B won't tolerate wrecking the place without some pretext of "helping the people" or whatever that means.
So the compromise is to wreck the nation then spend 20yr pushing food around our plate as though we're actually going to rebuild it until voter block B is satisfied that we gave it the college try.
Why was not invading unthinkable, at any point? More so, why was it necessary? What did anyone gain from sendnig an already piss-poor and backwards country even further back in time towards the Stone Age?
And, to clarify, are you saying that to not invade was unthinkable for US citizens, or for the US government? Or someone else?
Attacking al-quaeda after 9/11 didn't make sense?
Americans still haven't worked out that taking over nation by force isn't the correct answer and makes things worse. God forbid anyone attempt to occupy the US, you would all go ape shit mad.
And why would the US people want their country to invade a country on the other side of the world, that was no threat to them and was clearly not capable of defending itself against the might of the US army? Why would the US people want their country to invade anyone? And 80% of them? This I find very hard to believe. Maybe the "80% support" was for something else entirely, e.g. killing Bin Laden or destroying Al Qaeda, rather than invading Afghanistan?
https://web.archive.org/web/20140203074515/http://www.aei.or... (p.58: "Do you approve or disapprove of the current U.S. military action in Afghanistan?")
88% approval in the US in Oct 2001.
All very disappointing.
It might be hard to understand for folks that didn't live in the US during that time. A time when TV and print media were very much king. To paint the picture more clearly. Imagine a 24-hour news cycle on nearly every single TV channel. Even non-news channels discontinued normal programing to broadcast one of the big news stations. Every newspaper has massive headlines covering the content. For days and weeks there was no escaping the media barrage. It definitely warped folks perception.
Bonus: Anthrax scare directly after didn't help either. https://www.npr.org/2011/02/15/93170200/timeline-how-the-ant...
Thanks for explaining.
That's bollocks. I'm German, had the Allied Powers followed the Morgenthau plan Germany would be essentially an Afghanistan today - an agro state and nothing more. But you all followed through with Marshall, and that was perhaps the ideal example that nation building works.
It is just very complex, requires understanding of cultural differences, and patience. The Western countries didn't even have a proper post-immediate-hostility strategy (partially because Bush's cronies clearly hadn't invested a single second of thought beyond "how to fill the coffers of the MIC) in Afghanistan, much less a plan on how to give Afghanistan-the-country an economic perspective beyond farming opium.
Afghanistan has a lot of precious natural resources: minerals, metals, oil and gas. Had the Western countries invested in kickstarting mining these, providing locals with employment and the government with a steady stream of funds, the situation would have been very difficult today. Especially since a population that has security, stability and income doesn't go and look for the next fundamentalist terrorist for a perspective!
As a result: I refuse to put blame on any ANA soldier or civilian for deserting against the Taliban. Why fight for a country that has literally no way to survive on its own?
And fwiw, the lack of a modern "Marshall Plan" clone is also what led to the shitshows that are Libya, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. You can't just go into a place, depose a dictator and then hope that the situation will turn out all right on its own. If you want democracy, you have to make it appealing to people!
I don't know about this. I may call it "nation re-building" - Europe already had highly developed societies, infrastructure, and institutions. But coming into a less developed country and trying to insert those institutions by force - or even worse replace them - sounds unlikely to work.
I wonder if maybe the Americans started actually believing the nation building stuff after saying it over and over for 5 decades...
See: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-afghanistan-occupation...
Provide people with tangible benefits they gain from democracy and then it will come as naturally as they flock to the Taliban simply because they promise to get rid of the Western countries.
The West didn't do anything to actually promote democracy and provide a perspective for the people, and then we all wondered why the Taliban were able to take over the entire fucking country in a matter of two weeks.
Britain dropped some criminals in Australia and they created a prosperous democracy. Because the people had a millennium of cultural development under its belt to support democracy. Meanwhile democracy has failed in Iraq and Afghanistan despite massive US support.
In my home country of Bangladesh, we’ve had civilization for over a thousand years. The British spent 200 years in the country building institutions and culture. We have a lovely constitution. And even then we can’t maintain democracy. We’re basically back to a one party state now. The Afghans have never even had a real national government of their own. Their society is at a feudal stage of development. It’s like trying to bring democracy to England circa 600 AD.
That is a sorry description of colonialism.
Your theory of "cultural development" also doesn't explain how Germany chose through elections to turn itself in to a Nazi state.
As an aside, Zakaria is a talking head, part of the news as entertainment complex - sticking to the mainstream narrative as close as possible while trying to appear insightful at the same time. He is neither a historian, economist or sociologist and is a known plagiarist. Why would anyone want to read his books?
If the US pulled out of Germany in 1965, what would have become of the place? IMO, it's clear. The communists would have been conscripted into war, West Germany would have surrendered rather than fight their countrymen. This is exactly what happened in Vietnam and it's what is happening in Afghanistan now.
And they don't today.
Yes, we host a couple of US military bases (Soviets went out after GDR reunification, Brits and French have long left), but these have no occupation purposes and competences at all.
Here’s a report on what $500 million to develop mining achieved: https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/audits/SIGAR-16-11-AR.pdf
There are probably something like hundreds of these reports, all with similar conclusions - spent a ton of money, didn’t really achieve anything meaningful, made some crooks richer, and the taliban either a profits from what little was achieved (for “protection services” and such) or just blows it up.
We can dream that this could have been better, but I’m unconvinced that the US in the 21st century is capable of achieving any different outcome.
Source? I've never heard that. All we ever heard was "harboring AQ."
> Prior to 9/11 the largest single al Qaeda expense was support for the Taliban, estimated at about $20 million per year.
https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/staff_statements/911_Ter...
https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/16/911.commission/
> As final preparations were under way during the summer of 2001, dissent emerged among al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan over whether to proceed. The Taliban's chief, Mullah Omar, opposed attacking the United States. Although facing opposition from many of his senior lieutenants, Bin Ladin effectively overruled their objections, and the attacks went forward.
https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Exec.ht...
There was also a report outlining several Taliban officials that were identified specifically in their roles, which I can't find anymore on google...
...and they continue to nurture that alliance: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2015/08/20/the-taliban...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/26/afghanistan.fe...
Isn't that a bit of a one-sided, vindictive point of view? I don't know who are still being detained in Guantánamo, but if there are terrorists among them, shouldn't these key figures then also be rewarded?
I don't have the answer neither, but IMO the way the responsible people should be treated depends on their intentions, willingness to accept suffering of innocents, external limitations on their powers, and the net effect of their actions, not only on a seemingly simple case of wrongdoing.
Compare: Throw the whole population of your country in prison. Clearly, you've also imprisoned every terrorist of your country. Should you be rewarded for that?
The Guantanamo situation is comparable: The US picked random people from the street based on gossip at best, or because they looked funny at a soldier at worst, and threw them in jail and tortured them. No process, no nothing. Nobody should be rewarded for that.
High ranking officers (I am thinking of Sir David Omand) reported a switch in the past two decades in the practiced decision making parameters, which accept more false positives to avoid false negatives in alarms.
As if one calibrated a spam filter to discard messages from the Embassy and stationery supplier to be sure as little Viagra and inheriting princes come through. "More security, too bad for the few innocents."
That's not a comparison to the situation in Guantanamo. 780 people were detained there, out of a potential 400 million (depending on where you draw the borders).
> Nobody should be rewarded for that.
One strike, you're out? Is that the rule you judge by?
> One strike, you're out? Is that the rule you judge by?
That's how law works isn't it? Just because you've done a lot of good things doesn't mean that you shouldn't be tried for stabbing a person.
The first suspect who died in custody was a cab driver named Dilawar. He died in handcuffs that were attached to a chain link cage. One of his interrogators said he knew the guy was innocent —- he had some experience interrogating terrorists —- but his superiors wouldn’t listen and he continued the torture.
The ICC primarily prosecutes the war crimes of war losers. They’ve convicted some Nazis, some Serbs, and a few African war lords here and there. But it’s silly to presume they have authority over any nation that exists with even a modicum of national security.
You won’t see George Bush, or any other US official before The Hague for the same reason you won’t see Xi Jinping, or Putin, or Netanyahu, or Tony Blair, or Ali Khamenei, or Rodrigo Duterte… there.
It is supported (i.e. signed and ratified) by all industrialized countries except the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_parties_to_the_Rome_Sta...
Also, of the fully ratified signatories, it’s only supported when politically convenient. No member of NATO is going to allow for their citizens to be prosecuted by some extraterritorial court that thinks it has jurisdiction over half the world. Every NATO country has been accused of war crimes, and they’ve probably all committed them. None of them have been prosecuted, allies won’t call on other allies to be prosecuted, even Angela Merkel defends Israel’s on this topic, and Israel barely even pretends that they don’t commit war crimes.
It’s also why there’s so much popular anti-ICC sentiment in Africa, because a lot of people there think it only exists to prosecute Africans (which isn’t a very easy accusation to rebut).
[1] Except Israel, which essentially never differs from the US in UN voting behaviour.
According to the IMF, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao are all “advanced economies”. All of them are certainly industrialized, and certainly not signatories. All “Newly Industrialized Countries” would also meet the criteria of being “industrialized” as well, and they include (among others) China, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Phillipines and Turkey. All industrialized, and all non-signatories.
Really the only countries in the world that could be considered non-industrialized are the ones classified as Least Developed.
It is, there have been plenty of Serbs that have been convicted.
4-7 is plenty now? Especially considering the size and situation of the others?
Clearly they have no major infrastructure left to build and their industrialization is done. Nothing to develop left at all.
That's because most nations do have an established practice of putting their own war criminals on trial. It's good for building trust, which is quite beneficial in the longer run. The U.S. have slipped somewhat, but then they make up for that by literally paying for much of the civilized world's security, so they're still quite good on net.
That’s a terrible way to justify immoral or illegal actions.
You cant be too shocked about stuff that has an actual wikipedia article ...
He was sentenced to life without parole.
>The Maywand District murders were the murders of at least three Afghan civilians perpetrated by a group of U.S. Army soldiers from June 2009 to June 2010
Five of the Army soldiers faced murder charges while seven others were charged with participating in a coverup.
War is waged by people. War crimes are inevitable but it seems to me the US has done a fairly decent job of holding themselves accountable. How should the "US" be held accountable?
That's easy to claim when you're the one doing the investigation. By refusing to co-operate with the International Criminal Court, the US has signalled it will not be held responsible for war crimes unless it's convenient for it. That decision is not great for the US's optics.
I say that as someone whose ancestors were invaded by both US and Soviet forces, and I happen to think US forces really are less likely to commit war crimes - but that seems more a result of rugged individuals holding themselves to a higher standard, "The US" seems to have acted as badly as any other large, unaccountable institution would.
'Well that guy over there did worse' 'It was only 100 civilians' 'There could have been a bad guy amongst them' 'Oops I did it again'
That list was wikipedia, so pretty limited in scope and skewed to cases that have been charged and prosecuted.
lol at 'war crimes are inevitable'
This thread seems to want senior US leadership held to account for war crimes when they never ordered anything illegal.
War crimes are inevitable- war is waged by humans and humans make mistakes or do bad things to one another. Humans are not perfect. It's about what you do about them when you discover them. We have soldiers serving life sentences without parole for war crimes.
I would suggest that <1% of war crimes (number pulled directly out of thin air) are held to account. There are approximately 200,000 civilians dead as a result of these wars. Some 'legitimate' collateral damage, some because soldiers like to shoot people, some because they were journalists in their office, some because they went to the wrong wedding.
While the investigator, judge, and jury of these potential crimes are the people perpetrating them themselves we have absolutely no idea of what proportion are or are not investigated let alone punished. Certainly, the evidence of cases that have received public attention (see the collateral murder video and 'investigation' as just one such example) shows a pattern of lies and coverups to justify gross incompetence or outright psychopathic behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Violence_against_civil...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos
You can't have it both ways. You are either responsible for the management and oversight of your organization (corporation, country, etc.), and thus accountable, or you are negligent.
So criminal intent, or criminal negligence.
Even if it were the case ( it isn't), look up the Command responsibility principle. There's established precedent for it.
Illegal kidnapping, detention, and torture, of mostly innocent people at that, is another easy one.
They knew the target was innocent civilians?
Looks like they were pretty keen to wipe out that guys entire family; 16 year old son two weeks later and eventually nailed the 8 year old daughter. You dont often see bipartisan action like that.
'Accidentally' killing kids is A-OK, so long as the kid is standing next to a 'legitimate' target when you drop a bomb on them.
Article 51(5)(b) forbids any attack ‘which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated’. Such attacks will be classified as a war crime.
https://legalanswers.sl.nsw.gov.au/hot-topics-80-internation...
Given the fact USA drone strikes have bombed at least a handful weddings, under that definition those actions go very close to being a war crimes.
According to the United Nations, the Taliban and its allies were responsible for 76% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009, 75% in 2010 and 80% in 2011.
Gitmo also needs to be emptied, at least of everyone detained from this conflict.
Actionable data isn’t worth very much if you don’t act on it. What we need is accountability. I don’t know how you hold the decision makers behind the war accountable though.
What do you do if something is not a crime though? Vote them out? We already do that.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/14/us-sanctions-internation...
*Correction ICC not ICJ
In that specific incident, such a degree of accountability was desired to be held that the Commandant of the Marine Corps is said to have attempted an influencing campaign around their trial: https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2017...
I'm sure there are things the military does that go untracked, however, deploying troops are heavily trained on the Law of Land and Warfare, the Geneva Convention (which only applies to how they treat citizens of a nation and the terrorists they're fighting, not to how they will be treated.), and various others.
So, what war crimes are you wanting them to investigate that their own governing bodies have not chased?
1. Bush Administration (and subsequent cowards)
2. Project for the New American Century and related organizations
3. cheerleaders and thoughtleaders in the media
4. executors of the orders and plans
5. and finally the American people for being so hungry for bloodlust (remember those "Liberate Iraq - Support our Troops" yard signs and bumper stickers?)
… and folks wonder why there is a crisis in trust and epistemology. Awfully enough, a lot of these people are being rehabilitated (politically) because the subsequent ones are so bad that the old are cast in a more positive light. But let's not forget the flagrant impunity and lies, and the stench of recrimination and smear campaign against those who called out against the jingoism rationally (e.g., Valerie Plame Affair with Iraq)!
I'll never forgive nor forget these folks' bad decisions. Bankrupted our country and my generation's future (and that of the subsequent ones). The opportunity cost of these bad decisions is incalculable.
On the one hand, I can understand the hesitancy to set a precedent of prosecuting the political opposition; while I think the evidence is clear that Iraq was a war crime, and not a well-intentioned "mistake", it's not hard to imagine counter-factuals in which genuine policy mistakes are spun the other direction.
Nonetheless, it should give us pause that our Constitutional mechanisms for holding power accountable for flagrant abuse don't seem to have any teeth in practice; not from a lack of legal mechanisms, but from the factionalism of the two-party system, and that leaders are incentivized not to spend scarce "political will" that would distract from their own agendas, if not come to bite them as well when power changes hands.
This article also conflicts with the birth year on his wikipedia page, according to which he would have been 22/23 in early 2002. This birth year estimate comes from the Guantanamo authorities however, so not sure whether that is very credible either.
> He can’t get a job. He can’t leave the country, or drive. He has no healthcare. His relationship with a woman he loved ended after he was denied a travel document to visit her.
Does anyone know how or why Mansoor Adayfi ended up living in Serbia? I would have (naïvely) thought that Guantanamo prisoners would be repatriated to their homes or home countries. Does he have family living in Serbia? I also haven’t paid attention to the political situation in Serbia in recent years but it used to be within the Russian sphere of influence so I’d be surprised that the US would choose Serbia as the site of his new “prison”.
Edit: this report¹ from 2016 explains that
> Transfers have been slowed because many inmates were from war-torn Yemen, and so had to be returned to a third country that can provide rehabilitation and monitoring.
The report also seems to indicate that Serbia volunteered to “assist” the US and that that the Guantanamo detainees were being “transferred” (rather than being released). So, it seems that, despite not having ever been convicted of a crime, the torture survivors are still incarcerated under a form of “house arrest” by a third country – rather than directly by the US military.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20160805071557/https://www.abc.n...
this is the only information information in the whole arricle about why he was sent there, and it is pretty sparse information.
If i were to put on my critical thinking media hat, this gives the impression that its not the whole story, or at least an idealized version of it.
Also its not explained his connection between Yemen and afganistan.
(this isnt to validate the practices at guantanamo, however)
There probably are bad people among those imprisoned and there just isn't enough evidence to convict them. The damage they can cause isn't on the level to committing treason towards your own alleged values.
The US also has spawned a lot of defense contractors the last 20 years that now will look inward to find business opportunities if no other external threat can be summoned. That will probably not be pretty.
The article also links to this report of an ex-Bush era official saying most detainees were innocent [1] and the ALCU has some more info and numbers [2].
1. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/most-guantanamo-detainees-are-... 2. https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/detention/guan...
[1] https://twitter.com/_secondthought/status/133274615894763520...
Nope. Go away, Google.
I remember 2001, Bush and Co throwing silly justifications to engage. At that time most people felt that we should fight terrorism where it spawns. Years later Ben laden is supposedly caught, killed, and dropped deep in the ocean far off the coast, god knows where. No trial, no question asked really. Just the releaf that the most terrorising terrorist was done for. "We got him" as Obama said.
The surrender was rejected, and the Taliban became an insurrection force we know today. We won the war in 2001, then lost it when we refused the surrender terms. We wanted to nation-build instead.
-----------
EDIT: Never turn the government of a country into an insurrection force. The Taliban, for all of their flaws, was the government of Afghanistan (or the closest thing to a government that they had in the decades before 9/11). They knew how to run their country. We didn't kill the Japanese Emperor when we won WW2, we let the Emperor live a life of dignity and remain a culturally significant icon while negotiating surrender terms.
Irony upon ironies: "Mitchell, who is retired and lives in Land o' Lakes, Florida, spends his free time kayaking, rafting and climbing.[14] He describes himself as an atheist and a supporter of Amnesty International.[10]"
That's a funny one. Someone should interview him and see how he sees himself and his role, and does he consider himself to be a war criminal.
This also contains this amusing aside: "He also criticized Obama’s healthcare policy – a 'shit sandwich' – and his administration’s approach to global warming. Mitchell believes it’s a myth."
Sacha Baron Cohen. Seriously, Sacha's interview with Dick Cheney where he asked him to sign his waterboarding kit was pure gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmUnUoeLSIM
It also wouldn't have happened unless there was solid political support at the highest levels. That includes not only politicians but the parts of a democratic society that isn't necessarily directly elected, within the justice system, military and media.
The system also has been held up under multiple administrations, including one that probed public opinion enough to debate closing it only to turn around and expand it instead, which didn't make a measurable difference with voters. The last part is the key point here.
All this may sound a bit hopeless, but we know how to fix these types of inherent issues in a society, by proper application of division of power.
You can say that the rise of the Nazis was due to flaws in the Weimar political system and weaknesses in social institutions at that time, but you can also make sure people know the names of Eichmann and Heydrich and similar.
What makes this a delicate problem for the democratic institutions is that 50+% of the voters voted in Bush for a second term even in the light of the paying for prisoners and tales of torture and worse, from survivors like the three British citizens just months before the election who went on to make a movie about it.
If we still want to make sure something similar doesn't happen again, it is necessary to have a juridical institution specifically to protect human rights with the power to veto these decisions, if neither the military institutions or the democratic populace will. Otherwise history has a tendency to repeat itself.
You missed money, who make up the majority of the overclass.
The person responsible(²), Frank-Walter Steinmeier, is now Germany's president.
There is a repeating pattern here: Governments, officials and people in power are not held accountable.
--
(²) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank-Walter_Steinmeier#Murat_...
Society is built on systems and everyone submits to them. If it works for the majority, it's good enough.
The sad part is that it is possible to change the various ancient systems into something better, more dynamic, more responsive, that would work for more edge cases.
We just... don't. Few dare question the status quo and even fewer try to change it.
Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger did step back when she did not agree with a legislative proposal.
I never heard of this. Do you have any sources for this?
Great book, it directionally aligns Progress to accountability (really accounting). After reading the book, when I am in a big city I look up at the skyscrapers and think about how despite the web of vendors and people trying to defraud each other, some small amount of value manages to get diverted into a successful skyscraper, and this is made possible by accounting. Progress is an iterative prisoner's dilemma
So your country goes against the US, the US retaliates by stopping trade. People in your country lose jobs, people demand the govt to fix things, what is your govt going to do then?
It easy to say our politicians should be accountable, real life is more complicated though.
Denmark was obviously just an example, but there are a lot of U.S. allies, trading partners and so on, that all have assisted or participated in the war on terror.
Besides, the Democrats could probably just blame it on Bush anyway.
Once Russia starts making some noise, all European countries will need US protection.
I guess I find this shocking, because it feels to me like the "just cause" reasons for scenario the US got itself into Iraq have been repudiated entirely at this point and the fallout has been pretty much entirely negative and led to some long term rather terrifying dysfunctions. I feel like the arguments made by those of us who protested the onset of the war made have been proven historically correct. I struggle to understand the opposing opinion?
Afghanistan we can make somewhat separate arguments about, for sure. But Iraq... Someone on the conservative side of the spectrum, please enlighten me what the reasonable argument for justifying the past military action there is at this point...
I'd say that it's possible (quite possible) to be conservative and to be against foreign adventures. It's probably better to view a country as being occupied by multiple cohorts of political thought, one of which is a ruling class that likes to play Risk.
That ruling class has shifted party allegiance and probably will do so in the future.
In any case, from my uninformed armchair, it seems pretty obvious that it's easier to run foreign policy by attempting to influence the existing dictator (whether it's in Iraq or Libya or Syria) rather than install a new one with the attendant cost in blood and treasure.
Western countries aren't ruthless enough to really win wars in the Third World. They should think less like Rome and more like Byzantium. But those opening scenes look amazing.
I can't answer your question though, so I'll leave it at that. Maybe it's the wrong question. Probably best to ask simply for 'people' who supported regime change as opposed to a straightforward trackdown and punishment of guilty parties.
For instance, at this point I'd probably place George Bush at the progressive end of the political spectrum, or at least as an ally. A lot of people have changed their seating position in the last five years.
As usual, James Howard Kunstler has an opinion regarding Afghanistan, a person could argue that the shadow of the CCCP looms over the US. History doesn't repeat, it rhymes:
please look up the 'neocons' and how they got started. Around the time of 911, neocons got a lot of (emotional) support from regular conservatives, but in general, this is not a conservative ideology.
The second Iraq war may or may not have been WMD based, but Saddam slaughtered hundreds of thousands of mostly Shi'a and Kurdish civilians. Saddam's badness to ease of defeat ratio was probably the highest in the world, making him an easy target. You never know what will replace a bad dictator, but I can see how it would be hard to stand by knowing the guy has killed so many and do nothing.
(Not a conservative, per se, but I try to understand all sides.)
Richard Perle, chair The Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board July 11, 2002
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/who-said-war-would...
"Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets. This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a pan-Arab leader... and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments. The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/m...
I often see it claimed that the US for some reason wanted Iraqi oil. I just haven't seen evidence for this.
In any case, further quote from the second one:
> To this end, as Whitehall documents obtained by the Independent show, the US and British sought to privatise Iraqi oil production with a view to allow foreign companies to takeover. Minutes of a meeting held on 12 May 2003 said:
"The future shape of the Iraqi industry will affect oil markets, and the functioning of Opec, in both of which we have a vital interest."
"... an oil sector open and attractive to foreign investment, with appropriate arrangements for the exploitation of new fields."
I can buy that. This also needs some context though. Meeting minutes can be seen as brainstorming ideas. Having oil is huge though- having a good natural resource cash cow helps you pay/feed your military and fund an economy- something we see Afghanistan lacked. Good point though, noted. Thanks.
Under Saddam, Iraq's oil was nationalized, and most of the profits went to Iraq's government, with Chinese and Russian companies taking less than 10%. After the invasion, the US pushed for a law that would allow no-bid contracts to western oil companies[1]. It never passed because that would have been the end of Maliki's government.
So, to be fair, we wanted to steal the profits from Iraqi oil production, and secure access to the 3rd largest reserves on earth.
The reasons for going to war were a lie, and claiming that the removal of Saddam was the true victory is an excuse.
The Second Iraq War was not based on any altruistic motive. If it was, the US would say so, instead of manufacturing evidence for WMDs. We can safely conclude that the actual reasons for the invasions are something that the US government wanted to hide.
Beyond that, the war in Iraq killed more people than Saddam Hussein's genocide, so that justification simply doesn't fly. It's complete bogus, through and through.
They envisioned Iraq being a little more like Gulf States i.e. more stable, allies, and a buffer between Israel/Iran/Saudi Arabia.
And some nice construction contracts for Bechtel.
And a geostrategic signal of power.
The WMD thing was a populist narrative justification, the real motivation is literally published for all to see, it's just not what the media war was fought over.
Nobody ever fought a war for purely altruistic motives, it's unlikely the Americans were to have joined WW2 unless they were at risk themselves, but that doesn't mean there can't be motives and actions that are better than others.
Weirdly, the justification for Iraq I think would have been entirely function of historical revisionism given the success or failure. If Iraq was more stable and prosperous then 'it was the right thing to do', if the invasion was a failure, then it 'was a mistake' and that's it. Iraq has $5K/USD per capita GDP now, it has a government, elections, there's progress. Iran has a lot of control and of course Kurds are doing their own thing, but there is baseline order. 'Was It Worth It?' is another question, maybe in 50 years we can understand definitively what the real cost of finally getting rid of a Saddam-like institution was.
[1] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Project_for_the_New_Am...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
I'm not saying either was a good idea at the time, and they were both obviously bad ideas with hindsight, but it seems there was possibly a greater strategy at play.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/missile-gap...
Regular citizens generally are not going to buy into complicated arguments or vague, geostrategic issues, they often need clear, more unambiguous line of reasoning. Especially those that align with their supposed values.
The proles need to hear stories about 'Freedom' and 'Democracy' and 'Evil Tyrants' and scary things about 'Masses of Chemical Weapons'.
US leadership wanted to enter WW2 long before the American public could be convinced. It took an attack on American soil, and dead Americans to tilt public opinion.
The US used a 'False Flag' (Gulf of Tonkin) operation in Vietnam to help build public support and credibility for intervention in Vietnam.
George Bush proposed a 'False Flag' UN airplane incident apparently, an idea that was quashed.
This is the case in every war, without getting too controversial, even the US revolutionary war.
It all seems kind of Machiavellian and duplicitous, and it is, but it's also the reality of leadership in ugly scenarios. Imagine that you're the leader of a nation that really, really needs to do something that the plebes don't want to do? It's a weird kind of moral dilemma.
FYI I'm not justifying any of these decisions, just illustrating the incongruity between actual planning, and the marketing / communicating of it.
COVID is an example of that, it's a massive exercise in 'Public Communications' where the stakes are existential. What we are being told publicly i.e. the 'Narrative' isn't a lie by any means, but it's definitely designed to create outcomes.
So:
" The reasons we went to war were very clear, 'Saddam was stockpiling WMDs and was a threat to world.'. "
No, that's just what they said publicly. That's how war was 'marketed'.
Also - they used the term 'Terrorism' a lot with respect to Saddam, i.e. 'War On Terror'. Of course, Saddam was definitely not a radical religious terrorist, he was basically the opposite of that.
Everyone pushing for the war knew that the material evidence for WMD's was pretty weak.
PNAC made several publications before Bush came to power, and the public members of PNAC literally filled the White House.
Those who were against (or more Dovish) on the war i.e. Colin Powell and Condi Rice - were the not part of PNAC.
So imagine if there was this 'Think Tank X' that wanted to push for some thing, 'X' and then when Biden comes to power, more than 1/2 of his Cabinet is literally from this special 'Think Tank X' and then after 1 year, the all push hard for this 'X thing' but communicate it to the public as 'Y'?
You can hardly say it's about 'Y'.
It's about 'X', it's fairly clear.
There were 17 members of PNAC in the White House. And the President's own Brother.
[1] https://gyaanipedia.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_PNAC_Members_ass...
Richard Clarke claims that the Bush administration began seeking pretexts for Iraq invasion from the morning of September 12th: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/us/president-asked-aide-t...
General Wesley Clark is on record with the claim that the administration had plans to invade "seven countries in five years": https://www.salon.com/2007/10/12/wesley_clark/
Is this another "Manifest Destiny" in disguise?
But it's complicated though ... the US is a huge part in keeping up that set of dominos that is the international order. But it doesn't mix well with hyper nationalism either, and definitely not military adventurism either.
Its an attempted justification of a pointless war, an excuse. 'We got rid of the bad guy', If someone bombed your cities, destroyed your power and water supply while going on to occupy your country for years leading to the deaths of 100,000s, would you hail them as liberators?
As for Iraq, its completely destroyed. Saddam was peanuts compared to the unholy inferno the US brought down on Iraq. Good guys don't instigate wars and decimate cities. The US spent 100s of billions to 'fight terror'. How do you fight terror? With terror apparently.
I'm not saying that this isn't very bad, and worth stopping, but how is it different from what happens all the time on a lot of places on that region? (Is the US planning an invasion of Israel right now? I don't think so.)
Countries normally don't interfere on such things because doing it has a tendency of backfiring and making things worse than they were at the beginning. From my impression many thousands of km away, the US people mostly did held that opinion at the time, and would refuse to allow an invasion if the government didn't lie to them. Also, the WMD focus was such a blatant lie that it's impossible that anybody with any power believed it.
As far as instability, the very boundaries of Iraq were purposefully drawn so that the Kurds, Shias, and Sunnis would be locked into the same nation state and easier to control. Saddam was just one of the pawns in the great oil game the US and the western world has been playing there. The fight over access to oil - the singularly important resource that enables modern armies and economies to function - is the underlying cause of the instability in that region, and has been for the last century.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
It's hard to make the claim that every Iraqi is better off. That claim is obviously baloney.
But we can say that some are better off. It's clearly debatable by reasonable people whether or not a war was needed to make that group of people better off? Trying to be objective myself, I'm willing to concede it may not have been. But others might disagree.
There are pretty big numbers in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War and then you should start counting the millions that were displaced, which situation may not be the best.
I don't see any wins. None.
Saddam Hussein was a pariah and was no longer a convenient leader to have around in such a volatile region. It would have been political untenable to support him and potentially dangerous to leave him around. If he started to get desperate or his weakened status allowed another actor to gain significant sway with in the region then there could be wider regional issues.
Now with hindsight we know the region became massively more volatile and is even more a collection of fractured and nearly failed states.
Could a strategy have been developed to remove Saddam and encourage a less dangerous Iraq, seems doubtful as it really sounds like it would always be a gamble. And could it have been done while being lead by government that's in a 4 year election cycle, very doubtful, need quick action to get that sweet re-election after all.
For the record I was not a supporter of the war. Nor am I from the USA :)
At this point? None. At that point? Well...
Saddam was playing a very subtle game. He was, on the one hand, telling the US inspectors (truthfully) that he didn't have any weapons of mass destruction. And, on the other hand, he was telling his neighbors (and even units of his own military) that he did.
In retrospect, you can say that all the intel was there to say that he didn't have them. At the time, though, when he was trying to tell his neighbors that he did? That was less cut and dried. And, after 9/11, the bias was toward "over our dead bodies are we letting someone like him have WMDs". So the ambiguity (with whatever probability mix) got resolved to "yes he does".
I mean, after 9/11, would you have accepted a 20% probability that he had WMDs? Even if you would, would the country? Would you expect the president to accept that?
Interesting that the guardian is reporting on this as if their very own government consists of angels and saints on these matters.
It's The Guardian US reporting about the United States. The Guardian UK is also generally very critical of the UK government, so I don't get your point. You don't need your government to be made of saints to criticize war crimes.
The same goes for our business leaders, by the way. Personal results should align with the business and social results. There shouldn't be wealthy Purdue pharam execs or McKinsey consultants after oxycontin wrecked the health of Americans.
I know I shouldn't expect more from the grauniad but this is pretty hard to parse.
> “We were all following orders, we were all victims of the same machine,” he says.
Echoes of Nelson Mandela.
The TV series Always Sunny In Philadelphia did a skit on this, its called the DENNIS system.
Guantanamo detainees were tortured with stress positions, sexual abuse (including simulated rape), simulated executions (including being taken out to sea and told they would be thrown overboard), held in cold rooms, and told their family members would be arrested and put in prison.
This includes detainees who were later exonerated.
In comparison, Assange has been...in British custody pending the results of an extradition hearing? While contesting credible (be they right or wrong) charges of rape?
There's something deeply unjust in making this a discussion about Assange.
That's one way of putting it. It would be more accurate to say for the vast majority of the detainees, there was never any tangible proof of crimes and they were fully innocent.
ie. Not the doing of the things, but the public revelation of the doing of the things.
I think it's entirely pertinent to the discussion.
"The US" is not a monolith. Guantanamo--both the rapid expansion and ingestion of likely-innocent bystanders and the torture program--was an effort of the Bush-era Defense Department, specifically with high-level support from Donald Rumsfeld and legal cover from the Office of Legal Counsel (John Yoo).
The Assange extradition was a project of the Obama-era Justice Department. It's hard to see any commonalities (in terms of goals or decision-making) at the implementation level, and whatever else you think of Assange, the US's extradition requests have, essentially, followed both international norms and American and international law.
You can try to see some sort of historical through-line here about American imperialism (and you might be right), but, as with my above analogy, that's like saying "the Star of David analogy is pertinent because it relates to the abuse of government power." At a sufficient abstraction that's true, but it still doesn't shed a lot of light.
The biggest change I've seen in the last 20 years is the recent (sudden?) withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
To be clear, I don't think you're wrong, I think we're just coming in at different angles of subjectivity, and the above is just how I see it from where I am.
it's called "rape"
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...
That's a Bad Thing, for sure. But I suspect most of Assange's fans aren't upset about the treatment of Assange because they oppose the carceral state; it's because they're fans of Assange.
In other words, if you say "I'm opposed to the conditions of Assange's detention", I suspect you're not saying you oppose the normal conditions of legal detention--which perhaps you should--but, rather, that you are opposed to the fact that those norms we happily apply to millions are being applied to Assange.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/10/dutch-court-bl...
From what I've found, the UK in particular is not in a huge position to throw stones given the standards of their prisons result in this being yet another area where they're a sort of mini-USA. But e.g. the Swedish system would be better.
Just saying this because you think it's necessary.
The idea is, every 4 years the highest position of governance is put on a trial and the population votes if they approve or disprove the way things are done and reconsider alternatives.
Besides the 4 year period for the evaluation of the highest ranking officers, there is an ample opportunity for direct intervention through other elections and NGOs.
The burden is on the US citizens but other nations holding the US nation accountable is unrealistic. The Germans were held responsible for Hitler but they lost an open war to a greater power. The US is not facing such a power.
Whatever happens is up to the US internal politics and the culture of the US nation. The best the external powers could do is to push for events that change the US populations feelings, thus affecting the judgement of the periodic reviews.
If only the US would live by that when looking at other countries. Sanctions, embargos, trade-restrictions, threats are used against other countries by the US, why should they be treated any different themselves?
Such "proposal" is completely irrational. Proposals must be defensible, irrational ideas are not universally defensible.
One is not responsible for other people's choices, and cannot be held responsible for other people's (or coinhabiting peoples') choices, nor for the barbaric systemic faults that hinder the ideal implementation of a political system.
For some reason, people with option to choose and change their representative claim that they cannot be held responsible for the actions of their representatives.
What's irrational on holding a population responsible for the choices they make? I see statements but no reasoning that would explain the irrationality of holding the electorate responsible for the actions of the elected. Care to explain?
> holding a population responsible for the choices they make
> holding the electorate responsible
That option does not exist for individuals, mrtksn. The "people" on an abstract level do, but the "people" does not exist. John exists. The population does not make any choice; it does not exist: Jane exists. The electorate is not a person.
The irrational way you used is to work on abstractions without having vetted your idea against real reality. To which purpose one may make non existent entities "responsible"? The thought cannot stop there. You kept the idea floating, since having brought it to immediate consequences would have debunked it - it must not have been kept afloat by reason.
If a sensible idea to make this virtual "people / population / electorate" fairly and justly face these mysterious responsibilities, keeping firm that Jack is completely innocent of the choice of his neighbours (nor of the perversions in the established choice itself, nor of the system in which all takes place), exists, I am very curious. To blame it on "all" without blaming it on Jill, still keeping out of the meaningless thin air of ideas - this would be an impressive feat.
It's true that individuals in specific populations don't face the consequences that a population faces but they do face the immediate outcomes. Sometimes those outcomes are good for them, sometimes bad. For example, Europeans are facing the consequences of the chice they made with their support for the interventionism in Africa and Middle east. For example, Richard from GB faced the consequences of his votes by loosing access to EU's market as a result of influx of refugees due to interventionist politics creating these refugees.
That doesn't mean that somebody held them responsible, they will be held responsible in the history. History is written quickly these days. This time, it might have actual consequences for being held responsible just like it had consequences for the Germans.
It was not the European population to put presence in the MONA, not Richard's brother, who even voted against, to cause brexit: they are not responsible.
Surely history will act with stochastic determinism, creating maybe an aura that one may romantically depict "as if responsibility" - but in a future wave of damages involving the real Tom and Dick, they will most probably be innocent. What they could have done to prevent facts is minimal. Let us just be careful in spreading slogans that weaker minds may take literally - it would be an damage against a very real mental collectivity, more and more people seeing the false instead of the truth, using bad intellectual keys with collective consequences.
In fact, the chief thing one is responsible for in these matters, is the ongoing effort towards cultivation and refined intellectual discrimination and judgement. Little, or much less, can be done for the neighbour - surely let us not pollute his mind.
Again on the specific point:
responsibility means that somebody should respond with consequence to some event, in fairness and justice.
-- Officer Greene is a policeman. He may kill an innocent in action. He is responsible. In case of incident, he will be investigated, there may be consequences on his career, reputation, freedom etc. That "Officer Greene is responsible" is true and meaningful, makes sense, to an easy interpretation of the statement.
-- The team of Mr. Browne organizes business continuity in an office. They are responsible. In case of incident, they will act and be judged for it, as their good or bad work prevents or causes losses etc. That "Mr. Browne's team is responsible" is true and meaningful to an easy interpretation of the statement.
-- If one stated that "the people are responsible for the action of the elected", an interpretation should be provided that makes the statement true and meaningful. Good luck with it, if anyone wanted to tackle it - I do not see it easy, nor possible.
The Taliban used that as a recruitment call. We're months late on the original timeline, and they knew we were leaving last year. Of course the Taliban would surge in this timeframe.
The question now is: is it worth to counter-surge to hold back the tide? It seems like the overwhelming opinion is that we should leave, so we're leaving.
Sadly, it looks like this was never the plan. At least, some people profited from weapon sales.
Russia put out bounties on US soldiers, Iran armed the Taliban, Pakistan sheltered them and I'm sure China had their fingers in there just as well.
The Taliban have never been the legitimate, much less the benevolent government of the Afghan people. If you've seen "The Handmaid's Tale" you have a general idea of what happened in the 90's and is going to happen there again.
It were Britishers who started this mess 140 years ago, and they must be the ones to fix this.
And since then, the country effectively had 180 years of slowly going civil war without much interruption sans for the few decades under king
And I'm particularly not saying that there is or must ever have been some particular "legitimate government" for every piece of land. I'm just saying that when the US went in and kicked out the Taliban, they definitely weren't making things worse from a lot of perspectives. They ultimately weren't able to solve all the problems, but that is a different question. The 20 years have largely been better than the years under Taliban rule.
It's not that the borders don't make sense, it's that the area as a whole is hard to rule and it's hard to pay for that ruling. Currently one could argue that the medieval kind of "political technology" used by the Taliban is superior to the democratic political technology, for this very reason.
The Taliban's win condition was basically to inflict just enough damage the former condition would be impossible. Their troops are not far removed from criminals themselves: they loot, rape and torture.
> Several Afghan and US officials have long accused several regional governments including Pakistan, Iran and Russia of giving financial aid to the Afghan Taliban, a practice they frequently deny. > Private citizens from Pakistan and several Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are considered the largest individual contributors. > Although impossible to measure, these sources of funding clearly provide a significant proportion of the Taliban's revenue, and according to experts and officials could be as much as $500m a year. > These links are long-standing. A classified CIA report estimated in 2008 that the Taliban had received $106m, from foreign sources, in particular from the Gulf states.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/amp/news/2021/...
The much bigger problem was that Trump said outright this story is fake, instead of holding Putin's feet to the fire or getting behind the issue at all.
Stop pretending to care.
The story wasn’t that “Russia had a bounty on US soldiers” instead it was “Trump knew that Putin put out a bounty on US soldiers” neither story is true but you only really care about the second one because OMB.
The point is your crocodile tears are a sad excuse for caring.
That was BS. It's amazing what you find out when people are actually under oath. It was likely an intelligence "leak" to keep us in Afghanistan. These are the same organizations that tried successfully to convince us of "WMDs." I'm not sure why people continue take what they say at face value anymore, especially the news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_bounty_program
The Department of Defense (DOD), in testimony in July 2020 to the House Armed Services Committee by General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, said that U.S. defense intelligence agencies had no information to corroborate reports of a Russian bounty program in Afghanistan[37] and lacked evidence of "cause and effect linkages to a Russian bounty program causing U.S. Military casualties."[5][38]
Citing credible unnamed sources, on June 26, 2020, The New York Times reported on a Russian military program to pay bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing American soldiers in Afghanistan.[17] Two days later, The Washington Post reported that the bounty program had resulted in the death of at least one U.S. soldier.[16]
Wang Yi (the Chinese Foreign Minister) last July met in Tianjin a delegation of nine members of the Taliban.
He promised support in the reconstruction of Afghanistan and asked them to interrupt links with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, accused to have perpetrated attacks in the Xinjiang. For Beijing, some Jihadist Uiguri would be affiliated with the organization.
Wang promised to make the country part of the new Silk Road, contributing with infrastructure investments (motorways, hydroelectric energy, ...). This would prevent social, political and terrorist instability, while saving an unpleasant military action.
And China has not only a border with Afghanistan, it also has a history of shady dealings with neighbor countries in trouble.
That is because the USA armed and bankrolled the jihadists who overthrew the secular, left-leaning PDPA in the 1980s. Here is Ronald Reagan with the jihadists in the White House
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c9RWtx8myQc
It's inane for Americans to arm a jihadist insurgency against a left-leaning secular government, and then tear their vestments in some feigned moral superiority that the jihadists would take over the country thirty years later.
> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c9RWtx8myQc
> It's inane for Americans to arm a jihadist insurgency against a left-leaning secular government, and then tear their vestments in some feigned moral superiority that the jihadists would take over the country thirty years later.
It's weird that you wouldn't mention this important context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War
> The foundations of the conflict were laid by the Saur Revolution, a 1978 coup wherein Afghanistan's communist party took power, initiating a series of radical modernization and land reforms throughout the country. These reforms were deeply unpopular among the more traditional rural population and established power structures.[56] The repressive nature of the "Democratic Republic",[57] which vigorously suppressed opposition and executed thousands of political prisoners, led to the rise of anti-government armed groups; by April 1979, large parts of the country were in open rebellion.[58]
> The communist party itself experienced deep internal rivalries between the Khalqists and Parchamites; in September 1979, People's Democratic Party General Secretary Nur Mohammad Taraki was assassinated under orders of the second-in-command, Hafizullah Amin, which soured relations with the Soviet Union. With fears rising that Amin was planning to switch sides to the United States,[59] the Soviet government, under leader Leonid Brezhnev, decided to deploy the 40th Army across the border on 24 December 1979.[60] Arriving in the capital Kabul, they staged a coup (Operation Storm-333),[61] killing General Secretary Amin and installing Soviet loyalist Babrak Karmal from the rival faction Parcham.[58] The Soviet invasion[nb 1] was based on the Brezhnev Doctrine.
Also, the Taliban started in 1994, and it's hard not to feel morally superior to people who do stuff like this: https://twitter.com/NasrinNawaBBC/status/1425139216443482112.
I mean Trump was an idiot and all but at least a part of the wall he promissed was build
He was kept from closing Guantanamo Bay by factors beyond his control.
How exactly did he do that? By arming ISIS and destabilizing a few extra countries around the region in the name of "Democracy"?
The real question is, what one is advocating for, and whether one does so honestly. And while there are certainly circumstances for justified violence, "antiwar" seems like a pretty good thing to advocate for, all else being equal. And I fail see any blatant dishonesty or bad faith in this piece, whatever the shortcomings might be of The Guardian or the mainstream press in general.