5 ms·

> For the life of me, I can't understand the strategic purpose of invading Afghanistan. They're not even the ones who attacked us on 9/11. The Afghan governmen

by zeveb 9y ago

> For the life of me, I can't understand the strategic purpose of invading Afghanistan. They're not even the ones who attacked us on 9/11. The Afghan government at the time offered sanctuary to Al Qaeda, refusing to hand over its members after they had declared war on the U.S., attacked USS Cole, hijacked four civilian aircraft and crashed them into the World Trade CEnter & the Pentagon, killing thousands; the strategic purpose of invading Afghanistan was to demonstrate to every country that shielding those who commit acts of war against the United States is itself an act of war against the United States — and that being in a state of war with the United States is an unhealthy condition. What's the strategic purpose of staying in Afghanistan? 'You broke it, you fix it': having invaded, having destroyed the previous government, it is our responsibility to build a functioning government. Additionally, we desire to prevent the resumption of conditions similar to those which enabled the rise to power of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the first place.

the-dude 9y ago
They did not refuse to hand over OBL, they wanted to see some proof. Which was of course a-OK for the US, they did not want OBL, they wanted to invade.
- notahacker 9y ago
  I don't doubt the US was happy to go to war (and do doubt Bin Laden would have gone quietly if the Taliban had said "you're welcome to come and arrest him") but it's something of a stretch to imagine Afghanistan only wanted to "see some proof" even if that was one of their stated positions. The Taliban had spent the last three years refusing multiple countries' requests to extradite Bin Laden for other bombings and was lead by a man married to one of Bin Laden's daughters who compared the notion of handing over Bin Laden as a betrayal akin to the "end of Islam"
  - the-dude 9y ago
    Fair enough, I knew my position was 1 dimensional. Although you might be correct on all your points, it glosses over the fact there might actually be no proof at all.
RUG3Y 9y ago
I asked the question ~2009. What never made sense to me is that with unsecured borders, what's the point of invaded a poor country of goat farmers? Ok yeah, so Al Qaeda supposedly attacked us and they were allegedly being harbored in Afghanistan. But the guys in the planes were Saudi. Why didn't we invade Saudi Arabia? (That's a rhetorical question). If someone wants to come here and hurt us, they can do it pretty easily. Invading Afghanistan doesn't solve that problem. The whole thing is a joke. Now I'm aware of a host of reasons for us to be there, none of them good. Of course we're in Afghanistan for some purpose.
- ashark 9y ago
  Yeah, by '09 there was clearly no reason. When they originally sold the war they played up Al Qaeda's size, power, and level of infrastructure (specifically in Afghanistan) so, assuming you believed that[1] the original invasion kind of made sense. [1] personally, my suspicions that the claims that this organization was so huge and capable and dangerous, yet had only just now managed anything so big and had totally failed to achieve any of the more obvious follow-on attacks, smelled a bit of BS (that is, its size and capabilities were being wildly exaggerated) were confirmed when IIRC Rumsfeld went on the news with a diagram of some GI Joe playset-style giant underground base thing that couldn't conceivably have been built in secret due to its scale and equipment, and claimed that Bin Laden had "not one, but several" of these obviously-fantasy supervillain lairs hidden in Afghanistan. That they were clearly lying about the popular war that was an easy sell definitely colored how I received their later pitch on Iraq. Not that it mattered.
  - jMyles 9y ago
    Here's that interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhGHxw0mSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhGHxw0mSo It's shocking now to watch. How did anyone ever buy this? I remember being 18 at the time and thinking it was completely ludicrous. I wonder if anyone seriously believed it or if it was just the story that the media needed to hear to feel less sheepish about acting like this war made any sense.
    - 9y ago
arprocter 9y ago
I interpreted what you quoted as a sly nod towards the Saudis, but maybe GP can clarify
- RUG3Y 9y ago
  Yeah that's what I was referring to. The whole Al Qaida thing is murky with CIA engineering and scapegoating. Maybe I sound like a conspiracy theorist, I don't know. They were a pretty convenient foil for us to invade a whole bunch of countries that we had no business invading.
  - the-dude 9y ago
    Dude, I think it is great you have left the army. I offer you another anecdata : I have an American friend here in Groningen ( NL ) who has been living here for about 30 years now. In the eighties he was stationed in Germany. Due to the thawing relationship between the US and the USSR a meet and greet between Russian and American soldiers was organised. He discovered they were ordinary guys, not monsters. They talked intelligence : both groups had knowledge about weapon systems of their enemies. It opened his eyes, he left the army and stayed in our beautiful city. The cold war too, was just 'a story line'.
    - greedo 9y ago
      This is a false equivalence. Yes, the individual soldiers shared commonality. But your implication that the Cold War was just a story line doesn't align with the facts. Read Solzhenitsyn. Look into Hungary 1956, Prague in 1968. To dismiss the Cold War as just a "story line" is the shallowest of arguments that flies in the face of history.
  - 1001101 9y ago
    It's hard to develop a coherent picture when operations are shrouded in secrecy and, in some cases, covered by multiple outright deceptions. Sometimes all you're left with is speculation, and I don't begrudge anyone who tries to makes sense of it. The trend towards leaking in the information age is turning many conspiracy theories into facts.
ashark 9y ago
> the strategic purpose of invading Afghanistan was to demonstrate to every country that shielding those who commit acts of war against the United States is itself an act of war against the United States — and that being in a state of war with the United States is an unhealthy condition. It demonstrated that doing anything other than saying "how high?" when asked to jump by the US is unhealthy—if an only if you don't have nukes, anything resembling real air defenses, or a special economic relationship with the US. If any of those are true than you can just do whatever. I would submit this wasn't a lesson worth spending so many lives and so much money to teach, seeing as everyone already knew that (see: the 80s and 90s). If we wanted to send a novel message we'd have hit countries that matter, and/or pumped all those Afghanistan and Iraq war dollars into renewable energy. So, it was either a huge strategic blunder or was mostly for the purposes of directing anger away from said countries that matter while probably also hitting the Afghans for mostly-unrelated and unstated reasons. Or it was both.
- RUG3Y 9y ago
  I think that's a pretty good analysis. Nothing is certain but IMO the whole Al Qaida narrative is questionable. Now, it looks like we're there for heavy metals / opium / contracting $$$ and to possibly block China from exerting further influence in the region.
jMyles 9y ago
> the strategic purpose of invading Afghanistan was to demonstrate to every country that shielding those who commit acts of war against the United States is itself an act of war against the United States In hindsight (actually, even it seemed even at the time) it was probably better to offer a more mature presentation to the world community about what we knew about Al Qaeda, why we believed some of its associates to be in Afghanistan, etc. Rumsfeld and Bush didn't across as authors of some thought-out strategy; they seemed like buffoons. Underground fortresses? [0] Watch this drive? [1] As it is, most of the world now doesn't believe that the US had any idea what it was doing. We also now know that some well-connected Saudis were directly responsible for some of the planning of the attack. So I don't think that this "strategic value" panned out in the slightest. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhGHxw0mSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhGHxw0mSo 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCm9788Tb5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCm9788Tb5g
- euyyn 9y ago
  > what we knew about Al Qaeda, why we believed some of its associates to be in Afghanistan, etc. I was living in Spain and no one needed the US to explain why they "believed some of Al-Qaeda's associates were in Afghanistan". I'm not sure if you didn't watch the news through that time or what, but the Taliban were very upfront about having Bin Laden. E.g.: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taliban-wont-turn-over-bin-laden/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taliban-wont-turn-over-bin-lade...
  - jMyles 9y ago
    They were up-front about having Bin Laden, but not about harboring "Al Qaeda" - a phrase which Bin Laden didn't use in any public media appearance until a month later. They wanted evidence that Bin Laden had anything to do with the attacks (which of course he denied). Why not deliberatively and carefully provide this evidence to the world instead of rushing into a war? What's the strategic value there?
    - RUG3Y 9y ago
      Capturing one guy is a symbolic gesture anyway. "Well, we had thousands of civilian and US military casualties, but we got Bin Laden! It was totally worth it!"
dragonwriter 9y ago
> The Afghan government at the time There wasn't one. You probably mean the Taliban, but while they may have been the largest of several de facto or putative governments in Afghanistan at the time, they were never the government of Afghanistan.

by zeveb 9y ago

the-dude 9y ago

They did not refuse to hand over OBL, they wanted to see some proof. Which was of course a-OK for the US, they did not want OBL, they wanted to invade.

notahacker 9y ago
I don't doubt the US was happy to go to war (and do doubt Bin Laden would have gone quietly if the Taliban had said "you're welcome to come and arrest him") but it's something of a stretch to imagine Afghanistan only wanted to "see some proof" even if that was one of their stated positions. The Taliban had spent the last three years refusing multiple countries' requests to extradite Bin Laden for other bombings and was lead by a man married to one of Bin Laden's daughters who compared the notion of handing over Bin Laden as a betrayal akin to the "end of Islam"
- the-dude 9y ago
  Fair enough, I knew my position was 1 dimensional. Although you might be correct on all your points, it glosses over the fact there might actually be no proof at all.

RUG3Y 9y ago

I asked the question ~2009. What never made sense to me is that with unsecured borders, what's the point of invaded a poor country of goat farmers? Ok yeah, so Al Qaeda supposedly attacked us and they were allegedly being harbored in Afghanistan. But the guys in the planes were Saudi. Why didn't we invade Saudi Arabia? (That's a rhetorical question). If someone wants to come here and hurt us, they can do it pretty easily. Invading Afghanistan doesn't solve that problem. The whole thing is a joke. Now I'm aware of a host of reasons for us to be there, none of them good. Of course we're in Afghanistan for some purpose.

ashark 9y ago
Yeah, by '09 there was clearly no reason. When they originally sold the war they played up Al Qaeda's size, power, and level of infrastructure (specifically in Afghanistan) so, assuming you believed that[1] the original invasion kind of made sense. [1] personally, my suspicions that the claims that this organization was so huge and capable and dangerous, yet had only just now managed anything so big and had totally failed to achieve any of the more obvious follow-on attacks, smelled a bit of BS (that is, its size and capabilities were being wildly exaggerated) were confirmed when IIRC Rumsfeld went on the news with a diagram of some GI Joe playset-style giant underground base thing that couldn't conceivably have been built in secret due to its scale and equipment, and claimed that Bin Laden had "not one, but several" of these obviously-fantasy supervillain lairs hidden in Afghanistan. That they were clearly lying about the popular war that was an easy sell definitely colored how I received their later pitch on Iraq. Not that it mattered.
- jMyles 9y ago
  Here's that interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhGHxw0mSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhGHxw0mSo It's shocking now to watch. How did anyone ever buy this? I remember being 18 at the time and thinking it was completely ludicrous. I wonder if anyone seriously believed it or if it was just the story that the media needed to hear to feel less sheepish about acting like this war made any sense.
  - 9y ago

arprocter 9y ago

I interpreted what you quoted as a sly nod towards the Saudis, but maybe GP can clarify

RUG3Y 9y ago
Yeah that's what I was referring to. The whole Al Qaida thing is murky with CIA engineering and scapegoating. Maybe I sound like a conspiracy theorist, I don't know. They were a pretty convenient foil for us to invade a whole bunch of countries that we had no business invading.
- the-dude 9y ago
  Dude, I think it is great you have left the army. I offer you another anecdata : I have an American friend here in Groningen ( NL ) who has been living here for about 30 years now. In the eighties he was stationed in Germany. Due to the thawing relationship between the US and the USSR a meet and greet between Russian and American soldiers was organised. He discovered they were ordinary guys, not monsters. They talked intelligence : both groups had knowledge about weapon systems of their enemies. It opened his eyes, he left the army and stayed in our beautiful city. The cold war too, was just 'a story line'.
  - greedo 9y ago
    This is a false equivalence. Yes, the individual soldiers shared commonality. But your implication that the Cold War was just a story line doesn't align with the facts. Read Solzhenitsyn. Look into Hungary 1956, Prague in 1968. To dismiss the Cold War as just a "story line" is the shallowest of arguments that flies in the face of history.
- 1001101 9y ago
  It's hard to develop a coherent picture when operations are shrouded in secrecy and, in some cases, covered by multiple outright deceptions. Sometimes all you're left with is speculation, and I don't begrudge anyone who tries to makes sense of it. The trend towards leaking in the information age is turning many conspiracy theories into facts.

ashark 9y ago

> the strategic purpose of invading Afghanistan was to demonstrate to every country that shielding those who commit acts of war against the United States is itself an act of war against the United States — and that being in a state of war with the United States is an unhealthy condition. It demonstrated that doing anything other than saying "how high?" when asked to jump by the US is unhealthy—if an only if you don't have nukes, anything resembling real air defenses, or a special economic relationship with the US. If any of those are true than you can just do whatever. I would submit this wasn't a lesson worth spending so many lives and so much money to teach, seeing as everyone already knew that (see: the 80s and 90s). If we wanted to send a novel message we'd have hit countries that matter, and/or pumped all those Afghanistan and Iraq war dollars into renewable energy. So, it was either a huge strategic blunder or was mostly for the purposes of directing anger away from said countries that matter while probably also hitting the Afghans for mostly-unrelated and unstated reasons. Or it was both.

RUG3Y 9y ago
I think that's a pretty good analysis. Nothing is certain but IMO the whole Al Qaida narrative is questionable. Now, it looks like we're there for heavy metals / opium / contracting $$$ and to possibly block China from exerting further influence in the region.

jMyles 9y ago

> the strategic purpose of invading Afghanistan was to demonstrate to every country that shielding those who commit acts of war against the United States is itself an act of war against the United States In hindsight (actually, even it seemed even at the time) it was probably better to offer a more mature presentation to the world community about what we knew about Al Qaeda, why we believed some of its associates to be in Afghanistan, etc. Rumsfeld and Bush didn't across as authors of some thought-out strategy; they seemed like buffoons. Underground fortresses? [0] Watch this drive? [1] As it is, most of the world now doesn't believe that the US had any idea what it was doing. We also now know that some well-connected Saudis were directly responsible for some of the planning of the attack. So I don't think that this "strategic value" panned out in the slightest. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhGHxw0mSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhGHxw0mSo 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCm9788Tb5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCm9788Tb5g

euyyn 9y ago
> what we knew about Al Qaeda, why we believed some of its associates to be in Afghanistan, etc. I was living in Spain and no one needed the US to explain why they "believed some of Al-Qaeda's associates were in Afghanistan". I'm not sure if you didn't watch the news through that time or what, but the Taliban were very upfront about having Bin Laden. E.g.: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taliban-wont-turn-over-bin-laden/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taliban-wont-turn-over-bin-lade...
- jMyles 9y ago
  They were up-front about having Bin Laden, but not about harboring "Al Qaeda" - a phrase which Bin Laden didn't use in any public media appearance until a month later. They wanted evidence that Bin Laden had anything to do with the attacks (which of course he denied). Why not deliberatively and carefully provide this evidence to the world instead of rushing into a war? What's the strategic value there?
  - RUG3Y 9y ago
    Capturing one guy is a symbolic gesture anyway. "Well, we had thousands of civilian and US military casualties, but we got Bin Laden! It was totally worth it!"

dragonwriter 9y ago

> The Afghan government at the time There wasn't one. You probably mean the Taliban, but while they may have been the largest of several de facto or putative governments in Afghanistan at the time, they were never the government of Afghanistan.