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Comment by justinclift | Hacker News Reader

Seems to be missing something quite important:

    The Western media missed this story. Part of the reason was that the war-torn
    countryside had been difficult—though not impossible—for foreign reporters to
    access, so the scale of the crimes committed by U.S. forces and their allies
    went undocumented.

Sure, that's "part" of the story. The rest of the story is that if you make the crimes of the US forces public, then the US government will fuck you and your family over, and by extension the people around you.

Even if you're a non-US national living in a completely separate, supposedly "allied" country.

The most prominent example of course is Julian Assange.

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It's mostly whataboutism though. Similar to how closet nazis attack Israel. There is an enormous moral difference between the US behaves and the Taliban behaves.

The US for example cares and are ashamed of the war crimes you speak of.

The Taliban CELEBRATE their war crimes, beheadings, lynchings of women.

> The US for example cares and are ashamed of the war crimes you speak of.

Maybe in words, but not really in deeds/actions.

The US quite literally goes out of it's way to suppress any info about war misdeeds. Which of course directly enables those misdeeds and similar to continue.

Along those lines, the Guantanamo Bay facility is still operating to this day. All that seemed to do was enable torture and related activities (crimes?) in some weird finger pointing / blame shifting exercise.

> The US quite literally goes out of it's way to suppress any info about war misdeeds.

Again. The Taliban and similar islamists celebrate their crimes. They post them on youtube.

The US also actively prosecutes war crimes committed by it's own. See Abu Ghraib.

Do you think the Taliban comes close to anything like this?

It's not really relevant, as I was talking about why the US media misses specific types of stuff.

Abu Ghraib was covered extensively by the media.

That Frankie Boyle quote seems relevant here.

“Not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but what's worse is that they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”

On the other hand, look at Korea. In hindsight it seems pretty clear that it was a huge loss to humanity that the US didn't push further north.

And of course, look at Afghanistan today.

Uh, we did push further north?

That's why China intervened?

I am not sure what exactly you are suggesting here, but its hard to believe that a nuclear war against china (and likely the USSR) in 1951 as MacArthur seemed to believe was necessary to recover North Korea would have been a net positive.

Sure. I'm not saying it was possible. Just that history has clearly shown it was just.

Should the US have stayed involved or gotten involved with Afghanistan? Why? What good has come from it?

As a naive guess, if the US had somehow managed to avoid corruption at pretty much all levels in their Afganistan er... adventure, then either approach may have worked.

But the corruption just made a joke of everything, and of course it all ended badly. :(

In the cities millions of people had the best years of their lives due to US intervention. So in isolation that was a moral thing. But of course, they didn't manage to shift the balance away from islamism to secularism in the country. Probably because they didn't even try much. There was a cultural battle that the US largely tried to stay out of, even though that was the real battle all along.

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