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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

So you were willing to stay there forever? Or at least with some sort with some sort of open-ended commitment. How would we ever know when it was time to leave? Lots of other places in the world where bad things are happening - should we send troops to those places as well? Where does it end?

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Perhaps we just start with the places we invaded? The idea that we were in Afghanistan too long seems odd given our bases in Germany, Japan, Korea, the Philippines or Cuba.

17 US troops died there in 2019. If that's what it takes to maintain a democracy, it may be worth that cost indefinitely.

What makes you believe Afghanistan was a democracy under US control?

Afghanistan's democracy was weak but improving over time.

https://freedomhouse.org/country/afghanistan/freedom-world/2...

IMO this assessment is overly optimistic, focusing too much on the outer trappings, and too little on the reality on the ground. They did have competitive politics, yes - but competition was really between various clans, and not for individual votes.

I mean people launch BLM over 15 or so unarmed black men killed in police encounters in a nation of 350million or so. They definitely don’t think it’s just the cost of a police force.

Yeah, "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make"

Ideally there should be a solution that's neither "stay there forever" nor "pull out and let the Taliban take complete control".

No. The US is so broke it's buying its own debt by the trillions of dollars via debasing its currency to keep the federal lights on (to keep social security and medicare solvent).

We can't pay our bills properly. When as a nation your central bank has to buy your own debt because nobody else can afford to buy so much garbage paper, you clearly can't afford such irresponsible foreign adventurism.

Enough is enough. Time to go home. Time to reduce military spending immediately. Time to stop playing at nation building. Time to stop pretending we can afford to be a globally deployed military superpower, as though WW3 is going on and we have to be at max defense spending.

The US couldn't afford Afghanistan 15 years ago. It most certainly can't afford it now.

There really isn't. The only practical alternative was to hand it over to some other great power to occupy, but no-one is stupid enough to willingly take that hot potato.

And yes, it was occupation. One thing that the rapid collapse made clear, is that Taliban genuinely has plenty of popular support, and the US-backed government had very little. Keep in mind that ANA had three times as much manpower as the Taliban, and military equipment supplied by US - and yet it all just dissipated in less than two weeks, because, apparently, no-one was actually willing to fight.

If my tax dollars paying American troops to maintain order prevented a single little girl from being violently raped at the hands of the Taliban—yeah, I'd say let's stay there forever.

I mean seriously, this argument holds no weight whatsoever. No one ever intended to stay there forever. But maybe "stay there long enough to help the government be resistant to religious zealots willing to die to subdue non-believers"? That seems like a pretty damn low-bar.

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