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Comment by conradfr | Hacker News Reader

Not a huge win for women in Afghanistan though.

The US was in Afghanistan for twenty years. Everything the US did there collapsed in a few months after twenty years. It seems like after the second Osama was killed everything done there was a waste of time and money for the US. It's a terrible situation, but it's a terrible situation whenever there is a country using religion to justify oppression and war. The people have to be willing to get rid of the oppressors.

There were just 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan before they pulled out, and below 10,000 for years before that. There are more U.S. troops in countries like Germany, Italy, or Spain.

In the end it was a very small commitment for the US, with huge gains not just for Afghan people but also for the US.

I'd argue that zero troops and zero dollars in Afghanistan should be the goal. Afghanistan knows that if they try to raise up another Osama what will happen, so I would argue that what happens there, even if it's terrible, doesn't actually affect things in the US anymore.

We can invade a bunch of countries in South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe and possibly "improve" lives there, impose our will, while sucking money out of America ostensibly forever.

Or we can sanction human rights abusers, offer proper asylum, and if there are any real on the ground changes from within the country then possibly support in a similar way to support in Ukraine.

Once you invade a country you're committing to a certain responsibility to do right by it and the people living there. Either follow the Prime Directive or don't, but you can't just choose whimsically based on whatever is convenient in the moment. Blame the Bush admin if you really want to blame someone.

How does the prime directive apply when you are attacked directly.

I do agree that Bush deserves the blame for turning what should should have been a hunt down and destroy Al Qaeda mission into a sprawling invasion of various countries in the middle east

Afghanistan or the Taliban didn't attack the US – bin Laden did, who had no position in the Afghan government. Taliban refused to extradite Bin Laden to the US, and the US refused any compromise such as extradition to another country. All of that is a rather different thing than "they attacked us".

Regardless, Obama, Trump, and Biden had to deal with the situation as they found it, whether they agreed with the lead-up or not.

This is a very disingenuous argument. American troops aren't fighting an insurgency in Germany, Italy or Spain!

US had to learn the age old lesson too it seems - you just can't conquer Afghanistan (well maybe apart form wiping almost its entire population but even russians didn't do that). And its not a place for democracy, its tribal to its core and nobody likes giving up power held over many generations. It doesn't matter much how superior you think your cause is or advanced equipment deployed.

You should read up on Afghanistan before the communists took over.

Counterpoint: after World War II we still have troops in both Germany and Japan who are now our allies. Any kind of occupation, and our occupational forces were small, was always going to be a long term commitment. Instead we just straight up abandoned our allies.

This was not a win, and the Biden Administration lying about it at every single stage of the process until the final troop was out was downright cowardly when all we had to do was continue to commit to sit on our asses while Afghani society rebuilt itself.

They reverted months after we left, which means the only way to hold it off would have been to stay forever and make them the 51st state.

Anyone who didn’t want to live under authoritarian Islamist rule should have left during that 20 year period. I find it hard to believe the whole place reverting was a surprise.

We were not in Afghanistan to fight for Afghan women.

Obviously, still big side effect.

The US invasion and attempted puppet government in Afghanistan made life much worse for women in Afghanistan because it drove regular people to support the extremist Taliban, who themselves became more extreme as the war went on.

Just because the US could take control and pretend to make progress doesn't mean it actually changed people's minds. In fact it actively poisoned the concept of women's rights in that region for decades

This is what happens when you start to believe in the pretense

Enough ordnance lying around for them and their army and menfolk to have fought if they wanted to. At some point we have to say enough is enough. Thousands of American lives, trillions of American dollars, and 20 years ought to have been enough. If not, then it's just not a job that is reasonably accomplishable by a foreign state. I wish them all the best in building a free society for themselves over the next decades, but they'll have to do it without American boots on the ground.

Maybe its China's turn to try to conquer the graveyard of empires.

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