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Comment by Ericson2314 | Hacker News Reader

This is silly.

The USD's prominence in world trade goes beyond what the US is doing, let alone with that US federal government is doing. And moribund governments have been demonstrated to old on for centuries. Unwinding a system where small states have worked hard to hoard US reserves for stability will take a while to happen.

In other matters, the incompetence of the US is absolutely priced in already, like budgets for public transit :/.

Also Afghanistan is a simmering 20 year old failure. The fact that the kleptocracy we propped up was completely unstable to stand on its own two feet is more reason to exit, not less. Yes, recognizing that fact rather than partaking in more fantasy land is stupid, but expected for our incompetent money-guzzling military who didn't want to leave, but couldn't face its own shame in arguing we had to leave more slowly because we had failed so miserably.

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afghanistan is unexpectedly bad optics, but imho the truth is nobody cares about afghanistan beyond appearances, sadly.

But the COVID failure was much more important, visible and pretty stark. The US had ample time and warning from european countries to show some real leadership. They should have gone with what Australia did, and the rest of the developed world would follow their example. Instead it was a string of bad advice that makes one wonder what will happen in the next pandemic.

Agreed. Afghanistan is one of the few things at this point that pretty much everyone in the US agrees about: the need to get out. The bad optics will be forgotten in a month or so if not less.

COVID, on the other hand is apocalyptic in the original greek sense of the word (revealing something that was hidden under the surface): It's revealed huge problems in the US not the least of which is an epistemic gap that seems unbridgeable.

Agreed re Afganistan

But re COVID people were already forgetting how stupid we were simply because we bought more vaccines. Now the Delta paranoia is putting other things back in the spotlight, but I suspect that won't last either.

Mostly agree. Failure is also not binary. We could fail a lot harder and it would hurt a lot more!

> Also Afghanistan is a simmering 20 year old failure.

Nice strawman. Leaving Afghanistan (to fail) has been a long time coming. Obama wanted to do it, Trump wanted to do it, Biden decided to pull/had to pull/tripped over the cord.

The massive failure here isn't the fall of Afghanistan, it's the botched evacuation attempt. Even Balaji says: "Afganistan exit".. Leaving weapons and people to fall into enemy hands? I mean, come on...

Read the last century of history of Afghanistan and it becomes clear that the war was lost before it ever began. It was not just the Soviets before America that failed to reform the ways of rural Afghanis. The Soviets came into Afghanistan in large part because the Afghani PDPA was also failing to do the same. Before the PDPA took power from Daoud in the Saur Revolution, Daoud was himself trying and failing to impose progressive reform on the same people. And preceding Daoud was Mohammed Zahir Shah, also a progressive reformer, who failed to make much of any lasting impact despite forty years of good effort. Zahir came to power after his father, Nadir Shah was assassinated; Nadir Shah had himself acquired power in the first place by putting down a rebellion of Afghani tribesmen, but obviously that had no lasting impact either. And that rebellion was itself precipitated by Amanullah Khan's failed efforts to reform Afghanistan.

The arrogance of Americans to think their invasion would succeed where previous invasions and native reformers had failed is staggering. Even if America were to fight for reform for forty years, as Zahir Shah did, why should anybody believe it would make a lasting difference? 20 years made no lasting difference, and another 20 wouldn't either. You can suppress afghani tribesmen, you can send their children to universities and crush those who openly oppose you, but as soon as you leave (and you will eventually leave) they will go right back to the way they prefer to live. This has been demonstrated again and again.

This is an informative comment, but did you reply to the wrong parent comment?

I guess my response was prompted mostly by this:

> Leaving Afghanistan (to fail) has been a long time coming. Obama wanted to do it, Trump wanted to do it, Biden decided to pull/had to pull/tripped over the cord.

I don't think blaming the failure on Obama, Trump, or Biden is fair. Even blaming the failure on the way Bush handled the invasion after it began is unfair, since I think it was doomed to fail from the very moment of conception. I don't think it ever stood a chance of working in the first place.

Anyway, if you'd like to know more, there are interesting parallels between the Taliban's resurgence in the past few days, and the rise of the Saqqawists during the Afghan Civil War in the 1920s. Amanullah Khan's government and armed forces were struggling against a rebellion of tribal forces (the Shinwari) who opposed Amanullah's attempts at reform, particularly wrt the status of women. When Amanullah's forces were preoccupied with fighting the Shinwari, the Saqqawists used that opportunity to attack Kabul, which Amanullah's forces surrendered to the Saqqawists with almost no fight (sound familiar?)

My point is that I / other people / mainstream media are not blaming the failure of the invasion on anyone. That's a massive strawman. We all agree that the idea was doomed from the start, a war fought under false pretenses, which would have failed in its nominal goal even if it succeeded (terrorists would have just moved from Afghanistan to e.g. Syria, which they did anyways).

The retreat itself was a massive failure, and that's to (at least partially) blame on the current leadership.

> My point is that I / other people / mainstream media are not blaming the failure of the invasion on anyone

Yes, that's the problem.

> The retreat itself was a massive failure

The retreat was a massive failure as a direct consequence of the occupation being so massive of a failure that the previous administration freed a Taliban leader for the express purpose of signing a surrender to the Taliban, and that the Afghan government and Army, unlike their South Vietnamese equivalents that stood and fought for years after the general US withdrawal and even as the PAVN fought into Saigon, collapsed swiftly, with the President fleeing the country and the army offering no resistance to the Taliban.

The idea that you can separate them is nonsense propagated by people still in denial about the totality of the failure of the occupation.

Again, I'm not condoning the War, I was against it from the start (IIRC... I was still a kid!) but I'm definitely not going to blame Obama/Trump/Biden on a war they did not start.

I do blame them for being too afraid of the flak Biden is getting now to call a spade a spade and end the charade.

Ah fair enough, I think we agree in these regards. America's departure from Afghanistan was ungraceful to say the least. I think it was doomed to end up that way from the very beginning, but even so, America might have done more to evacuate western sympathizers before letting control of the country fall back under the Taliban.

My original point is similar to your response, in that the very myopia that led us to invade is also preventing us from planning the exit better.

The Military wanted us to believe that "just a few more years" would prop up the regime, so they cannot come clean saying we cannot pull out without a proper evacuation because that would undermine the "just a few more years" argument.

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