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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

This argument makes no sense from a logical viewpoint.

NATO is a defensive union. The only reason to fear it is if you’re planning to invade other nations. Putin ostensibly should have no reason to fear NATO expansion unless he has ill intent.

And if the argument is: yes, it is defensive now, but it might turn offensive against Russia at some point. Well, for that you just need an alliance of countries, it does not need to be NATO. A group of countries comprised of NATO and non-NATO members can gang up against Russia any time they want, without any NATO involvement.

I believe Putin only says this because he wants to keep invading other countries on the table as an option, and that is precisely the reason to keep expanding NATO.

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> NATO is a defensive union.

Sorry, but this is incorrect. NATO is a security union, of which a co-defense pact is a part.

Your whole argument seems to build on that and it is a faulty one.

There is a good rebuttal, but this isn't the one.

No my argument is based on NATO members being perfectly able to join up with non-NATO members to invade another country without needing to do it through NATO. Ukraine did not need to join NATO to join with them to wage war against Russia, if that is what they wanted. They only wanted to join for defensive reasons, and with very good reason as it turns out.

There is no reason to join NATO except for defense. Zero. None. Yes, NATO members do sometimes gang up to invade other countries, but they would also do so if they weren’t NATO members.

Putin as been in power since 1999. In that time NATO countries have invaded (direcly or through proxy forces):

- Iraq

- Syria

- Yemen

- Libya

- Afghanistan

Just two days ago NATO countries conducted drone strikes in Somalia. NATO aligned forces have been conducting air-strikes and other forms of aggression against the Palestinians in their native lands. The destruction wreaked, the number of death and maimed, of those ongoing acts of war by NATO and NATO-aligned forces is very substantially higher thank those coming from Putin.

An interesting question is: is it irrational, in the light of this undeniable fact of NATO aggressions, to want to be safe from NATO?

NATO states spend more on weaponry than the rest of the world combined. How is that defensive?

How is that not defensive?

If we were concerned with defending against credible threats to our security, our spending on weaponry would be proportional to that of such threats. Can we credibly expect attacks from off-planet?

Defense spending is preventative. If you lower your spending, the threats become more credible. We're literally watching what happens when NATO defensive capabilities don't exist.

The US spends more than is defensively necessary, but NATO as a whole is absolutely spending proportional to the threat level. Perhaps the US should spend less, and the rest of NATO should spend more.

It NATO went away, they still would.

Perhaps more relevantly, a single member, the US, spends more than the rest of the world combined. Remove the US, and NATO is spending less than China. This doesn't seem like an honest argument.

If NATO is a defensive union please name one defensive war it was involved in. You’re right, none, s as opposed to 20+ aggressions NATO states have been involved in.

Afganistan was the only time Article 5 was used and you can disagree, but yes that was a defensive war. One with an occupation that lasted way too long, but that's a different story.

When and how Afghanistan Attacke any NATO member?

Someone claiming it was defensive doesn’t make it so.

If Afghanistan can be called a defensive war, Russian „demilitarisation“ of the Ukraine is purely humanitarian operation.

...way too long...

Taliban weren't friendly with Al-Qaeda, and attempted to surrender in the first week of the war. In the first month of the war, its alleged target ObL decamped to Pakistan. After a decade, someone somewhat resembling ObL who had been living under close Pakistani military supervision a mile from PMA Kakul was allegedly murdered as a campaign event for BHO's reelection, although no corpse was ever examined. After another decade, NATO forces left Afghanistan with tails between legs, while experts assured us that the "government" they had installed would last several years. Realists assumed that meant it would last several months, but even we were surprised when that actually meant several hours.

It seems "way too long" somewhat understates this. There is no sense in which this was a defensive war, and if this were as you say the only thing NATO ever did (perhaps something might have happened in Kosovo?) then that is a complete indictment of NATO.

Jess you can disagree, but at the time of this writing this is what one of the introductory paragraphs of the war's Wikipedia states:

> Following the September 11 attacks in 2001, then-US President George W. Bush demanded that the Taliban, then-de facto ruling Afghanistan, extradite Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the attacks and who was, until then, freely operating within the country. The Taliban's refusal to do so led to the invasion of the country; the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies were mostly defeated and expelled from major population centers by US-led forces and the Northern Alliance.

Taliban and aQ were "allies" in the sense that they both fought against Northern Alliance. aQ were (are?) foreigners to Afghanistan, only welcomed by locals they regularly paid, which included some Taliban. Taliban, who themselves were not a monolith, were happy to receive weapons and training from aQ, but it wasn't out of love. It made political sense for American war media to blur the lines between them, but by now we know never to trust what we're told in the first few weeks of a new war.

Did someone in Bush's administration ask some Taliban poobah for ObL, at some time before the invasion? Probably! That would have been like asking for a unicorn pony. They didn't have him in custody, and they weren't going to be arsed to engage in whatever deadly combat would have been required to get him in custody. Unlike today, at that time Taliban weren't really a national ruling entity. They ran the courts and the tollways in some of the populated parts of Afghanistan. ObL was holed up in the hills somewhere. USA military didn't have a great deal of luck digging him out either, once they gave it a try.

The proportional action would have been to occupy only those parts of Afghanistan in which one could reasonably imagine ObL had hidden, and hire both Taliban and Northern Alliance to provide security on the condition they not fight each other while USA troops were around. It's not as though Taliban had created aQ, our supposed ally Saudi Arabia did that. Taliban, just like everyone else in Afghanistan, would have been perfectly happy for aQ not to have escaped Sudan.

Somehow the goof troop that got us fighting a war in Iraq also screwed up the operation in Afghanistan. At this point that can't be a surprise to anyone. But you're talking about mistakes made leading up to and in the first several weeks of the occupation. The point of this thread is the following two decades of pointless brutality.

Al-Qaeda are foreigners, yes, but that was because of their very founding as a force of volunteers to help the Afghans during their war with the Soviets. They were trained by the Americans as part of the cold war, but their real friends were the Taliban and everybody knew it. You can say "they weren't going to be arsed to[...]" but the reality is that they were close friends. If they weren't, the Taliban could have easily retained power by inviting the Americans in to aid their capture.

As for why Nato stayed so long in Afghanistan, it is difficult to imagine now, but 20 years ago we had just won a giant string of wars and in most of them democracy was installed and life got better for everyone. We tried to make it work in Afghanistan too, but it didn't work for a multitude of reasons.

Anyway, with respect, I was talking about Article 5 and the defensive alliance that is Nato. Countries within Nato can choose to go to war outside of A5, but they are only compelled to help under it.

Sure, USA created these groups in order to undermine Afghanistan's existing government that was sympathetic to Moscow. Astute observers note the similarity to USA creation of e.g. "Right Sector" in Ukraine.

Taliban did offer to turn over ObL, and this was known by the public at the time. [0] This may not have been such a realistic offer, given the hiding-in-caves-with-lots-of-guns aspect mentioned above, but they tried to do exactly what you advise and it didn't work. Maybe they learned a lesson about how USA policy is entirely controlled by the military-industrial complex through the sockpuppet war media?

Let's ignore mistakes made over twenty years ago. We could have withdrawn at any time over that twenty years, so I'm more complaining about the mistake made every minute since then.

The point of the thread is that NATO is not "defensive". You offered as a counterexample, NATO's war in Afghanistan. If that's all you've got, we can conclude that NATO is indeed not defensive in nature.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...

Last comment because, well, I've learned to limit how much I go back and forth on these types of things.

First, even the article you liked didn't offer to turn over Bin Laden. It offered a discussion, asked for proof, etc. This isn't how international relations with a super power that's just had it's financial sector gutted in a once-in-a-decade event go. There is this retreat to minutiae that often happens in political debates. Sometimes it helps, but it usually does.

1. USA was attacked (for the second time) by a religious extremist.

2. They invoked Article 5, the only time in the history of the alliance that countries involved had a pre-commitment to jointly aid in defence. This isn't to say that individual Nato countries can't join together in other military exercises, like, say the invasion of Iraq. But that isn't Nato. That's UK + USA, it doesn't include Canada.

3. Every major ally of the USA responded by deploying troops to Afganistan. Even France.

You can talk about the "industrial complex through the sockpuppet war media" and yes we have to be careful about how much we trust reporters because black propaganda is sadly a real thing, but the constant denial of ground realities and suspicion of Nato is clearly false on the merits. People are not lining up to immigrate to Russia or China or Afghanistan.

Everyday people know that you have to try pretty hard to piss off Canada and if Canada is part of Nato maybe it isn't because of a giant world sized conspiracy theory. Maybe, just maybe it's because (mostly) peaceful democracies naturally want collective defence.

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