13 ms·

U.S. Signs Peace Deal with Taliban

196 points by beefman 7y ago

jdkee 7y ago
So the U.S. lost, like the Soviets, like the British, etc. Graveyard of empires.
- mc32 7y ago
  Cut your losses. We should never had been in there other than to get OBL but Bush chickened out with AF and didn’t make them give him up when we knew where he went to after Tora Bora.
- boznz 7y ago
  What was there ever to win?
  - pixxel 7y ago
    Presence.
  - polotics 7y ago
    The prize would have been a massive reduction in opium production. Nowadays with most US OD deaths being on Chinese synthetics and lobbyist-supported Sackler shit, the landscape's evolved a tad.
    - ccsnags 7y ago
      This was never a priority. In fact, they increased production and got a host of veterans hooked on the junk.
  - dx87 7y ago
    Have the country run by a secular government, not a theocratic one.
    - platz 7y ago
      regime change doesn't work
      - arcticbull 7y ago
        That's an overly broad statement, I think we have plenty of examples from history where it did work. I'd say it worked fine in WWII Germany.
        eropple 7y ago
        Total defeat tends to do that, yeah. A better description might be that resisted regime change usually doesn’t work. Which is certainly not unfair with regards to Afghanistan.
        platz 7y ago
        The next time we're in a world war I'll grant your point Can we talk about things that happened in the last 70 years please
        AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        If we had rebuilt Iraq like we did Germany and Japan, it probably would have worked. We could have created a secular, democratic state. We would have had to keep several hundred thousand troops there for a decade or more to make it happen, though, and there wasn't the political will to do so.
        apta 7y ago
        It's quite egregious how the US thinks it has the right to force a regime change in any state it chooses, and that "secular" and "democratic" is always the answer. This is an extremely Western biased, and sorry to say, extremely ignorant way of thinking.
        AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  - ccsnags 7y ago
    That was the issue the whole time. There were no defined conditions of victory. On the ground, victory or defeat weren’t on the table. When we were there, we just wanted to come home in one piece.
  - x0re4x 7y ago
    Huge profits for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_industrial_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_industrial_complex
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    Military-industrial dollars from the US taxpayers?
  - smackay 7y ago
    It's probably strategically important, particularly with regards to China's Belt and Road Initiative, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
  - unlinked_dll 7y ago
    Well that's the reason the War on Terror is such a stupid concept. There was no win condition, because we never defined one or stuck to it. As Kissinger pointed out in World Order (love or hate the man, it's a good read) - military force is a political tool to achieve political goals. And just like Kissinger's abject failure to achieve any meaningful political goals other than endless, meaningless war and death, it's because he could never define goals that could be achieved in the first place. And that's the story of American foreign policy in the middle east. Our leaders and political theorists can't even agree on what goals should be or even goals that can be reached - just meaningless diatribe about "presence" and "if we're not there someone else will step in."
    - throwaway22920 7y ago
      Not just the middle east, but the world over. We can't have normal relations with Cuba because they're repressive, yet we'll sell weapons to Vietnam? Politicians get maligned for simply meeting with Bashar al-Assad, but selling weapons to Saudi Arabia gets met with a shrug? The political establishment in the U.S., usually backed by the media, pushes a nonsensical foreign policy that's often against U.S. interests. Turning Iraq, Libya, and Syria into failed states runs contrary to just about any goal you can imagine for the U.S., but the political and media establishment decided to go at it full bore for whatever reason.
      - unlinked_dll 7y ago
        I think you missed my point, which was that the wars in the Middle East failed because we didn't have clear political objectives. That's not true in the other examples you listed, we have pretty clear goals as it relates to the Saudis and Cubans. With respect to Libya and Syria we're more sideline players but the goals are still fairly clear. If you try and apply a consistent morality onto geopolitics you're going to see everyone is hypocritical. But geopolitics is not a debate between philosophers on morality and political theory. It's applied game theory closer to what Sun Tzu wrote than Hobbes or Locke.
      - pjc50 7y ago
        The US can't have normal relations with Cuba because the families of those who fled are swing voters in Florida. Whereas nobody cares about Vietnam and they're now a fairly normal far east state (effectively one-party, but so is Singapore) and communist in name only like China. > Turning Iraq, Libya, and Syria into failed states runs contrary to just about any goal you can imagine for the U.S All of them had publicly defied the US at some point. It's the insult that matters to the establishment.
  - alfiedotwtf 7y ago
    Military contracts
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Revenge for 9/11? Of course, since OBL was being sheltered in Pakistan by the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, and much of the support for extreme Islamism was coming from Saudi Arabia (as were some of the hijackers), and those countries were untouchable, the reprisals had to be carried out against the two Arab Muslim countries that were least popular with the US instead. (Much of the supplies for Afghanistan had to be driven across a thousand miles of lawless Pakistani frontier and were occasionally attacked there; the Afghan occupation was also hampered by being unable to pursue or fire across the Pakistani border.)
  - sytelus 7y ago
    -
    - boomboomsubban 7y ago
      >back on to achieve the same objectives they were in 2000. Sovereignty and economic stability for their communities? Or do you imagine their goal involves hurting the West rather than improving their lives?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - arminiusreturns 7y ago
    If I gave you an honest answer you probably wouldnt believe it, nor would others, and I'd be called many names (as has happened before). Truth is treason in an empire of lies.
    - selimthegrim 7y ago
      You might as well.
      - arminiusreturns 7y ago
        I initially wrote a response about why it isn't worth it. Many downsides and not as many upsides, but on second thought I realized I was prejudging the HN community and I don't like that I was doing that. Considering this is a day old and probably only people particularly interested in the topic are still reading, I'll give a go. I'm not fully sure how to structure this, so I'm just going to dive into a list of potential answers to the original question: What was/is there to win? While I am aiming at the question about Afghanistan, general region topics and Iraq factor in very much as well. 1. Destabilization: Much of the problem in the GWOT was and is due to the confusion of purpose. Some saw it as to defeat Al Qaeda. Some as revenge for 9/11 (despite the fact that most of the hijackers were Saudi Wahhabists, even if they had been in the Afghan training camps. That eventually evolved over time to issues with the Taliban, and it's various networks like the Haqqani and the Quetta councils in Pakistan. The problem is that while certain groups like the military leadership (such as Petraeus) bought into this, they didn't understand or weren't empowered to counter the underlying desire for instability at the political and above level. When I say above I mean what I call the political "shadow players", the ones that exist through multiple presidencies and have a huge influence over top-down decision trees in government. I like to use Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger as prime examples. They in turn influenced the top level political entities to make moves often counter to the surface purpose of the war(s). A great example of this would be when Ian Bremmer and Rumsfeld, despite protestation from the military, decided to tell the Iraqi commander with 40k troops asking what to do with them to go fuck off. In the end, much of actions of that type were very much geared towards keeping things unstable, for reasons I will go into further, and it's worth noting that's pretty much exactly what has happened. 2. Containment: Let's be frank. Iran is sandwiched in between Iraq and Afghanistan and it has been in the crosshairs for quite some time now. Also worth remembering in context is that much of Saddams power was increased when we quietly backed him in the Iran-Iraq war. The joke on the ground used to be "How do we know Saddam has WMDs? Because we still have the receipts!" Not much actually changed from the 90's and destabilization of the region plays into keeping Iran busy there instead of elsewhere such as in Lebanon and Syria, at least to a degree. It's more than that, but Iran is the main target of containment. It also was used as a draw to get fighters to show up there instead of in western countries, another form of containment. Lots of foreign fighters started showing up the body count. 3. Presence: By establishing and expanding the middle east and western asian connections, infrastructure, bases, etc, we have closer inroads for conflicts in the future, and that's not even necessarily geared towards ME countries. It could be China, Russia, Africa, etc. Africa in particular happened to play this out with Libya, Sudan, etc, and it continues to this day. 4. Combat hardiness: at a more Machiavellian level, the relatively tame conflict(s) on blue-side were seen as a good proving ground to refine modern combat techniques, tools, tactics and strategies. Lots of think-tank analysis after the fact to help gear up towards conflicts in a future that might be more tri-polar conflict likely. It's a dirty business to be a general and have to think like that, but it is what it is. 5. Black markets: Just as in Vietnam, the destabilization and control offered a great opportunity for certain organizations to participate in black markets. See, for example, congress is supposed to have purse string control of the CIA... but if they can pull some Iran-Contra esque gun-drug running on a suddenly booming opium producing country that has almost no rule of law and is swarming with military who don't ask too many questions, they can essentially remove themselves from congressional oversight. Just look at the growth of the opioid epidemic in America in time with Afghanistan. Ignoring the pharma part, a huge percentage of tested heroin in America traces it's origins too... yep, Afghanistan. It's an age old playbook the 3-letters have been using for a while. (Cocaine cowboys like Barry Seal into Arkansas... who was the governor there again?) 6. Kickbacks: You also have to realize that a lot of the policy influencers tend to be old white guys who own or on the boards of defense companies in Virginia (or oil companies like Halliburton), and those good ol boys have lots of power. Lots of what happened was just plain old money laundering from taxpayers/the treasury into their pockets. There is a reason a few counties in Virginia have had the highest growth of millions in the country since the GWOT started. 7. Resource control: along with presence and control of these places, comes the ability to influence resource flow routes (and who gets those contracts, see above). This is one of the most important and oft overlooked aspects of the whole thing. See cries that the wars were about us taking the oil weren't quite true. It was more about controlling who the oil did go to. Even in the modern context a lot of the action in say Syria has a lot of hidden resource control route justifications the public never hears about. On the Afghanistan side one thing it does is help prevent natural gas and oil from reaching China to the east and Russia to the north. I saw the current Russia-gate hysteria coming many years ago because the shadow players like ZB telegraphed it so much... always talking about the return to a tri-polar world. 8. Banking: Banks and economies tend to boom in times of war (until the war is over and things contract, or if you are in the country the war actually happens in). This is also highly under-analyzed. 9. The elephant(s) in the room: Israel and Suadi Arabia. Much of the actions in ME have been due to a large level of influence they both have over policy makers in the US. Many of the above reasons seem to benefit them more than the US, especially when the repeat blowback comes home to roost in another 20 years. 10. Destruction of rights at home: when the people cried out for a response, the military congressional academic think-tank complex immediately used the opportunity to further undermine individual rights at home. They have constantly moved the overton window further and further towards acceptance of a dystopian semi-totalitarian state. Just look at any topic in HN, a forum full of hackers, to see the excuses and servile placations for these things. There are multiple reasons, some of which are a bit over the top to get into, but the more reasonable justification is that technology has changed the threat model away from nation states and more and more towards single actors being able to pull off big things (bio-engineering, infrastructure hacking, etc). Many of the MICC/good ol boys in DC/VA buy into this reasoning on the surface, despite really understanding they are undermining the foundational principles of America (and lining their pockets at the same time). A prime example of this would be William Binney's report that he had designed a surveillance program called ThinThread that would have protected American's privacy and still enabled the gov to track threats, and implimentation would costed in the 10s of millions. The program was scrapped in favor of a multi-billion dollar program that didn't protect Americans privacy and lost threats in the haystack of information. Just a few off the top of my head. Hanlon's razor just can't account for all these things. Yes incompetence runs rampant, but incompetence in these cases is often just as bad as malice, or is easily manipulable by those with malice.
- sintaxi 7y ago
  Israel lost. U.S. had no business being there in the first place.
- basementcat 7y ago
  Alternatively it is an inspiring story of a bunch of ragtag rebels who never gave up and never lost faith for decades and ultimately defeated the World’s most powerful military.
  - sytelus 7y ago
    This has been a recurring theme in history. If you want to overthrow the world's largest best equipped most powerful armies, build a small guerilla force of ragtag rebels. This also applies to startups, research, engineering and other facets of life.
- chewz 7y ago
  Actually there were many more successful conquerors of Afganistan (Greco-Baktrian Kingdon, Mauryan Empire, Kushan Empire, Sassanian Empire, Ghaznavids, Mongol Empire, Timurid Empire, Mughal Empire and Safavid Empire to name just a few) then failed ones. Alexander of Macedon[2], British, Soviets and now USA have failed because they all have had unrealistic objectives. But Afghanistan had been ruled by "foreign" rulers for most of it's history. They all had one thing in common - they have kept multiple forces in balance and limited their rule to the capital. > He shows how governing these peoples was relatively easy when power was concentrated in a small dynastic elite, but how this delicate political order broke down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Afghanistan's rulers mobilized rural militias to expel first the British and later the Soviets. Armed insurgency proved remarkably successful against the foreign occupiers, but it also undermined the Afghan government's authority and rendered the country ever more difficult to govern as time passed. > Afghanistan is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how a land conquered and ruled by foreign dynasties for more than a thousand years became the "graveyard of empires" for the British and Soviets, and what the United States must do to avoid a similar fate. Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History by Thomas Barfield [1] [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7718203-afghanistan https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7718203-afghanistan > Recounting the plight of the most powerful leader of the time as he led the most sophisticated army of its day into the treacherous world of tribal warlords, Holt describes those grueling campaigns and the impact they had on Alexander, his generals, their troops, and the world. Into the Land of Bones also examines the conflict from the point of view of the local warlords who pushed the invading Greeks to the limits of their endurance—and sometimes beyond, into mania and mutiny. [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1584212.Into_the_Land_of_Bones https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1584212.Into_the_Land_of...
mercora 7y ago
whats up with the "text only" version? is it somehow required to deliver any service at all if i decline the consent dialog and this is what they came up with?
- pixxel 7y ago
  I don’t know, but if declining tracking consent serves a plain text view I’d love all websites to adopt it. Saves clicking reader mode which doesn’t always work. I’m on mobile though which wraps text nicely. What happens on desktop? Browser full width?
  - oneplane 7y ago
    Works fine on desktop. I think most people that have a problem with it didn't use the internet in the 90's.
- Semaphor 7y ago
  I absolutely love it. I click decline, go into reader mode, and have by far the most readable and best designed news site on the internet.
  - mercora 7y ago
    ACK. i am still curious if this got implemented because of the consent dialog and legal requirements to deliver a service in case consent is declined... maybe it is the first time i see it properly implemented somehow?
option 7y ago
what was achieved there? will anyone be held responsible for dragging us into that mess?
- option 7y ago
  remember that some people who voted in support of that war are on the ballots now.
- pirate_dev 7y ago
  Nothing and no. It served as a jobs program of sorts to a lot of places that have nothing else, so that's about all it has boiled down to in the past 20 years. The people who started it all will die peacefully, though I hope I am wrong.
RestAndVest 7y ago
Big, huge embarrassment for USA. They should've kept it going at all cost.
- donatj 7y ago
  And in order news the Vietnam War continues to rage.
  - RestAndVest 7y ago
    North Vietnam was going to break in 1989, US just had to hold the fort with yearly Linebacker bombings for 30 more years.
- mythrwy 7y ago
  They still might. After 20 years I'm guessing the US doesn't just "last helicopter out" with the Vietcong closing in. I'll be there will still be US presence/monitoring in Afghanistan for some time to come.
donatj 7y ago
A well-armed militia took on the most powerful military in the world and won?
- alpha_squared 7y ago
  Isn't that how America was founded?
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    I like how the US Department of Defense became the US Department of War right about the time it changed its name from the Department of War to the Department of Defense.
    - codr7 7y ago
      Newspeak, attack is defense, war is peace.
      - Udik 7y ago
        And arbitrary armed violence is "world police". And militias we decide to back are "rebels", the ones we don't are "terrorists". And governments we don't like are "regimes". And acts of terrorism from our side are "targeted killings". And killed civilians are "collateral damage". The list is endless.
        igravious 7y ago
        Watched Vice[0] recently starring Christian Bale as a corpulent power-grabbing[1] vengeful, power-behind-the-throne, Dick Cheney; Amy Adams as his steely missus; Sam Rockwell as a likable "W"; and Steve Carell (of all people) playing Donald "Don" Rumsfeld. They get to the part post 9/11 where the gloves come off and they sit down with corrupt legal advisers (Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo), many who are advocates of the Unitary Executive Theory[2], to concoct a legal firewall around their actions. The twisted logic is: The US does not torture therefore the varieties of "enhanced interrogation" being used cannot, ipso facto, be torture. Alongside "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture) we have those other Newspeak euphemisms[3] "extraordinary rendition" (state-sponsored kidnapping) and "enemy combatants" (any fighting-age male present in a combat zone). Then there's the legal limbo that is Guantanamo Bay, the suspension of habeas corpus[4] (a foundational legal right in modern democracies), and the frankly draconian USA PATRIOT Act. Ah, good times. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6266538/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6266538/ [1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/etc/network.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/etc/networ... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory [3] https://vizettes.com/kt/american_empire/pages/euphemisms-glossary.htm https://vizettes.com/kt/american_empire/pages/euphemisms-glo... [4] https://www.thoughtco.com/bush-lincoln-both-suspended-habeas-corpus-3321847 https://www.thoughtco.com/bush-lincoln-both-suspended-habeas...
causality0 7y ago
You can't save a people from themselves. I don't know how many times the US is going to have to learn this lesson.
- dntbnmpls 7y ago
  Do you really believe we invaded afghanistan to save these people? You think we invaded iraq to bring freedom and democracy to the iraqis? Was turning libya and syria into rubble part of our campaign to bring happiness to these people? I guess propaganda does work. "Mission Accomplished".
  - pjc50 7y ago
    I assumed he meant you can't save America from the Americans.
- heartbeats 7y ago
  You can. As they said in Vietnam, we had to destroy the village in order to save it. If the alternative is an Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban, I really do not see what there is to lose.
erentz 7y ago
Over 20,000 US servicemen and women killed and wounded. Countless Afghans killed and wounded. And $2 trillion in lost opportunities for the USA.
- gibolt 7y ago
  Imagine if much of that had instead been invested in renewable energy. The same people trumpeting energy independence could have had it and made the U.S. the dominant renewable exporter. Yet we still do everything possible to equate only oil to energy
- hrdwdmrbl 7y ago
  Not to mention the reputational damage around the world and the lasting legacy of hatred that will be felt for generations of Afghan people towards the US. That kind of thing can take more than century to forget. The Chinese still hate the Japanese for the Rape of Nanjing in 1938 (there are probably better examples but I'm not a historian).
  - wbl 7y ago
    Reputational damage? Are you forgetting that the Taliban were utter bastards who banned female education, were unrecognized by most countries and murdered 3,000 US civilians one fine fall day? The reputational damage is done because we didn't kill them all when we had the chance. This deal is capitulation. Only this time there won't be refugees grasping at the skies of helicopters. We'll just lock them out and watch the Taliban kill every educated woman in the country.
    - strken 7y ago
      The Northern Alliance, which the US sided with, also contained its fair share of bastards: they've been accused of summarily executing thousands of Taliban POWs, murdering civilians in raids on villages, and profiting from the opium trade, among other things. Despite fighting alongside Al-Qaeda and despite harbouring bin Laden, the Taliban aren't Al-Qaeda.
    - 7y ago
dx87 7y ago
It's probably for the best now, but it shouldn't have needed to come to this. In "Call Sign Chaos" by Jim Mattis, he talks about how the Bush and Obama administrations both repeatedly ignored the recommendations of military and intelligence officials. The Bush administration was too cavalier and thought they knew best, the Obama administration was too weak and wanted to score political points by not providing the force that was required. When I was in the Marines, they told us that we shouldn't need to be there, but politicians from the 80s/90s left things such a mess after trying to stop the Soviets, that now we had to go try and clean up the mess created 20 years prior.
- anm89 7y ago
  >When I was in the Marines, they told us that we shouldn't need to be there, but politicians from the 80s/90s left things such a mess after trying to stop the Soviets, that now we had to go try and clean up the mess created 20 years prior. This is of course true but you can play this fallacy out forever. The right thing to do in the 80s was not to meddle. Then after that we should have cut our losses and stopped meddling. And now 40 years later we are cleaning up failed clean up attempts on failed clean up attempts. At every point in this chain, the correct move is to admit you can't be world police and stop meddling.
  - Udik 7y ago
    > you can't be world police Off topic, but the whole concept of "world police" is just spin. A police force is one that enforces equally laws established by others. You cannot be at the same time the one who establishes the rules and who decides when and where to use force against those who break them. This is just arbitary use of violence.
  - ggm 7y ago
    left things such a mess after trying to stop the Soviets So much contained in this one sentence. People need to go look at what backing an insurgency against a repressive but modernising government does and ask questions.
    - 7y ago
buboard 7y ago
So there will no longer be a war in afghanistan? So those thousands of people fleeing to Europe are no longer refugees?
- pjc50 7y ago
  You can seek asylum if it is unsafe to return regardless. And most of the people are now from Syria.
- superflit 7y ago
  WHOooaaHH! Wrong THINK detected!
- jonathankoren 7y ago
  Well, perhaps the Americans and the rest of NATO can go back to ignoring it. Afghanistan is a country that has been in a civil war for over 40 years. It’s a tragedy for sure, especially when you compare photos of Kabul in 1979[0] to today, but ultimately no one is going to impose a peace there. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans could. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview/18bumiller.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview/18bumiller.h...
- postingawayonhn 7y ago
  I expect there will be many more refugees. Once the Taliban regains control of the country I'm sure there will be many reprisals against those who supported the elected government.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Of course there won't be. I just watched Trump in a press conference say that (literal quote) "If bad things happen there after we leave we will be back with a huge force". You really can't make this stuff up.
realhermit 7y ago
It took the Trump Administration to finally wake up and end this war. Kudos
- krapp 7y ago
  If a Democrat had done the same, they would be called a coward and a traitor.
didericis 7y ago
While poking around for information about other places I ran across a great little documentary on Afghanistan by a guy named David Adams, who was one of the last people to see the Buddhas before they were destroyed. It’s a firsthand look into the history and culture of the country from a relatively apolitical, exploration based perspective, although it’s now somewhat old. Some people might find the whole Indiana Jones thing and the “quest” hook to the series a bit camp, but I quite enjoyed it. Encourage people give it a watch if they want to learn a bit more about the history of the place. https://youtu.be/VXXmcGirPMA https://youtu.be/VXXmcGirPMA
grizzles 7y ago
Something that came up in lots of Congressional hearings on the war, no one in the U.S. military knew what the goal was in Afghanistan. For 19 years.
- yhoiseth 7y ago
  Care to share a source?
  - grizzles 7y ago
    Some recent hearings were a consequence of this reporting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
    - yhoiseth 7y ago
      Thanks! That’s a great read. And very disappointing.
cheese4242 7y ago
What an absolute mess this whole situation has been. Sadly no one will be held accountable.
yumraj 7y ago
Peace deal with Taliban sounds like an oxymoron
foxx-boxx 7y ago
Drug lords of Eurasia are unbeatable even by the US. Because government officials get involved in growing opioids. Corruption everywhere. Help Afghanistan to take their market niche of supplying neighbors with tons of drugs!
thinkingemote 7y ago
I like thinking about how today would look like from the perspective of someone 100 years in the future. For example Bill Gates might be more well known for his philanthropy (like Carnegie now) or, on some kind of level Trump might be listed as the most peaceful president. Sounds bizarre - I guess theres a paradox of intervention and non intervention at work.
3pt14159 7y ago
Counterfactuals are hard. If Nato had stepped in after Syria used chemical weapons we may not have had a global refugee crisis. America has kept the peace pretty much everywhere but the middle east, and even there, I'd wager that Saudi Arabia would have nukes by now were it not for the American presence in the region.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Russia made it quite clear that they would defend the Assad regime, and ending that was the only way to realistically end the refugee crisis. Turkey has stepped in to fight Russia in Syria instead. I'm not sure how many Russian aircraft NATO intervention would have been able to shoot down before Putin explicitly brought up the nuke threat? The US is currently quietly supporting Saudi Arabi in their war against the Houthis.
  - 3pt14159 7y ago
    Again, hard to say with counterfactuals. Obama made the red line quite clear and he backed down anyway. In my view, Russia isn't going to start a nuclear war because they lost a few servicepersons in a unimportant regional ally.
  - yyyk 7y ago
    That's post-Oct. 2015 at best. Before that, there was no direct Russian involvement and plenty of time for NATO to intervene.
- fit2rule 7y ago
  NATO didn't step in, because Syria didn't use chemical weapons.
  - 3pt14159 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_chemical_weapons_in_the_Syrian_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_chemical_weapons_in_the...
0xfeeddeadbeef 7y ago
Homeland season 8 predicted this.
squarefoot 7y ago
...while still hunting for Snowden and Assange.
dmode 7y ago
So after 20 years of waging war with the Taliban and spending trillions of dollars, we sign a peace deal ? At the same time, we always seem to be eager to cut food stamps, refugee support, healthcare.
- pjc50 7y ago
  The peace deal is the best opportunity to stop pouring money into graves.
  - drdeadringer 7y ago
    Honest Question: What if we started pouring that money into food stamps and similar instead of "not and graves"? Or am I missing a something like "these are apples and oranges"?
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      Putting money into buying weapons puts money in the elite arms company owners pockets, and the politician lapdogs pockets by extension. If you can work out how supporting food stamps can make those same people filthy rich, and maintain their hegemony, then I'm sure they'll go for it.
iambateman 7y ago
Other comments have taken shots at the foreign policy for Bush and Obama. We should remember how messy and complicated the region is, not to mention the home front. “Add 100,000 troops and blast them all”, “get our boys home now”, “get revenge for 9/11”, “don’t repeat Soviet mistakes”. There’s a lot of clamoring at home, and a lot of long-standing tensions abroad. We can assume for both the Bush and Obama administrations that most people were basically trying to do the best they could to solve intractable problems. Foreign policy is really hard. And despite my concern about the political motivations surrounding this deal, hints of peace are welcome.
LatteLazy 7y ago
It was a bad idea to go in. Having done so, killed so many people, made promises to so many more, pulling out is frankly disgraceful. America and the other countries involved have set that country back at least 100 years socially and ruined millions of lives.
baobabKoodaa 7y ago
So what happened to "we don't negotiate with terrorists"?
animalnewbie 7y ago
Here's something that political (either way) Americans will understand but not accept. If your neighborhood has termites, sooner or later they will destroy your property too. It wouldn't matter if they started from the house of your friend or your enemy. If you have a neighbor who is deliberately raising termites, you forget about termites and neutralize that neighbor first. America, both parties really, deliberately side with the bad guys and later give excuses when things work out against them. I wouldn't name names but it's not hard to guess who in this particular context is the neighbor raising termites.
chriselles 7y ago
Having been there for 3 short tours, it’s time to get out. If only, the US had destroyed Pakistan’s air bridge out of Kunduz in 2001 allowing thousands to escape by air to Pakistani safe areas. If only, the US had kept the mission to light footprint special operations only, a la the very successful Central America model in the 80’s/90’s. If only, Pakistan couldn’t guarantee the perpetual failure of Afghanistan. There was a need to intervene 19.5 years ago like there was a need for Iran to intervene 20.5 years ago(Taliban liquidated Iranian Shi’a diplomats). Few know US and Iranian forces actually worked together briefly capturing Herat in 2001. I once had the chance to grill a former US ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009-2011, unfortunately I handled it poorly. Time to decisively end the sunk cost fallacy bias.

196 points by beefman 7y ago

jdkee 7y ago

So the U.S. lost, like the Soviets, like the British, etc. Graveyard of empires.

mc32 7y ago
Cut your losses. We should never had been in there other than to get OBL but Bush chickened out with AF and didn’t make them give him up when we knew where he went to after Tora Bora.
boznz 7y ago
What was there ever to win?
- pixxel 7y ago
  Presence.
- polotics 7y ago
  The prize would have been a massive reduction in opium production. Nowadays with most US OD deaths being on Chinese synthetics and lobbyist-supported Sackler shit, the landscape's evolved a tad.
  - ccsnags 7y ago
    This was never a priority. In fact, they increased production and got a host of veterans hooked on the junk.
- dx87 7y ago
  Have the country run by a secular government, not a theocratic one.
  - platz 7y ago
    regime change doesn't work
    - arcticbull 7y ago
      That's an overly broad statement, I think we have plenty of examples from history where it did work. I'd say it worked fine in WWII Germany.
      - eropple 7y ago
        Total defeat tends to do that, yeah. A better description might be that resisted regime change usually doesn’t work. Which is certainly not unfair with regards to Afghanistan.
      - platz 7y ago
        The next time we're in a world war I'll grant your point Can we talk about things that happened in the last 70 years please
        AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        If we had rebuilt Iraq like we did Germany and Japan, it probably would have worked. We could have created a secular, democratic state. We would have had to keep several hundred thousand troops there for a decade or more to make it happen, though, and there wasn't the political will to do so.
        apta 7y ago
        It's quite egregious how the US thinks it has the right to force a regime change in any state it chooses, and that "secular" and "democratic" is always the answer. This is an extremely Western biased, and sorry to say, extremely ignorant way of thinking.
        AnimalMuppet 7y ago
- ccsnags 7y ago
  That was the issue the whole time. There were no defined conditions of victory. On the ground, victory or defeat weren’t on the table. When we were there, we just wanted to come home in one piece.
- x0re4x 7y ago
  Huge profits for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_industrial_complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_industrial_complex
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  Military-industrial dollars from the US taxpayers?
- smackay 7y ago
  It's probably strategically important, particularly with regards to China's Belt and Road Initiative, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  Well that's the reason the War on Terror is such a stupid concept. There was no win condition, because we never defined one or stuck to it. As Kissinger pointed out in World Order (love or hate the man, it's a good read) - military force is a political tool to achieve political goals. And just like Kissinger's abject failure to achieve any meaningful political goals other than endless, meaningless war and death, it's because he could never define goals that could be achieved in the first place. And that's the story of American foreign policy in the middle east. Our leaders and political theorists can't even agree on what goals should be or even goals that can be reached - just meaningless diatribe about "presence" and "if we're not there someone else will step in."
  - throwaway22920 7y ago
    Not just the middle east, but the world over. We can't have normal relations with Cuba because they're repressive, yet we'll sell weapons to Vietnam? Politicians get maligned for simply meeting with Bashar al-Assad, but selling weapons to Saudi Arabia gets met with a shrug? The political establishment in the U.S., usually backed by the media, pushes a nonsensical foreign policy that's often against U.S. interests. Turning Iraq, Libya, and Syria into failed states runs contrary to just about any goal you can imagine for the U.S., but the political and media establishment decided to go at it full bore for whatever reason.
    - unlinked_dll 7y ago
      I think you missed my point, which was that the wars in the Middle East failed because we didn't have clear political objectives. That's not true in the other examples you listed, we have pretty clear goals as it relates to the Saudis and Cubans. With respect to Libya and Syria we're more sideline players but the goals are still fairly clear. If you try and apply a consistent morality onto geopolitics you're going to see everyone is hypocritical. But geopolitics is not a debate between philosophers on morality and political theory. It's applied game theory closer to what Sun Tzu wrote than Hobbes or Locke.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      The US can't have normal relations with Cuba because the families of those who fled are swing voters in Florida. Whereas nobody cares about Vietnam and they're now a fairly normal far east state (effectively one-party, but so is Singapore) and communist in name only like China. > Turning Iraq, Libya, and Syria into failed states runs contrary to just about any goal you can imagine for the U.S All of them had publicly defied the US at some point. It's the insult that matters to the establishment.
- alfiedotwtf 7y ago
  Military contracts
- pjc50 7y ago
  Revenge for 9/11? Of course, since OBL was being sheltered in Pakistan by the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, and much of the support for extreme Islamism was coming from Saudi Arabia (as were some of the hijackers), and those countries were untouchable, the reprisals had to be carried out against the two Arab Muslim countries that were least popular with the US instead. (Much of the supplies for Afghanistan had to be driven across a thousand miles of lawless Pakistani frontier and were occasionally attacked there; the Afghan occupation was also hampered by being unable to pursue or fire across the Pakistani border.)
- sytelus 7y ago
  -
  - boomboomsubban 7y ago
    >back on to achieve the same objectives they were in 2000. Sovereignty and economic stability for their communities? Or do you imagine their goal involves hurting the West rather than improving their lives?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- arminiusreturns 7y ago
  If I gave you an honest answer you probably wouldnt believe it, nor would others, and I'd be called many names (as has happened before). Truth is treason in an empire of lies.
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    You might as well.
    - arminiusreturns 7y ago
      I initially wrote a response about why it isn't worth it. Many downsides and not as many upsides, but on second thought I realized I was prejudging the HN community and I don't like that I was doing that. Considering this is a day old and probably only people particularly interested in the topic are still reading, I'll give a go. I'm not fully sure how to structure this, so I'm just going to dive into a list of potential answers to the original question: What was/is there to win? While I am aiming at the question about Afghanistan, general region topics and Iraq factor in very much as well. 1. Destabilization: Much of the problem in the GWOT was and is due to the confusion of purpose. Some saw it as to defeat Al Qaeda. Some as revenge for 9/11 (despite the fact that most of the hijackers were Saudi Wahhabists, even if they had been in the Afghan training camps. That eventually evolved over time to issues with the Taliban, and it's various networks like the Haqqani and the Quetta councils in Pakistan. The problem is that while certain groups like the military leadership (such as Petraeus) bought into this, they didn't understand or weren't empowered to counter the underlying desire for instability at the political and above level. When I say above I mean what I call the political "shadow players", the ones that exist through multiple presidencies and have a huge influence over top-down decision trees in government. I like to use Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger as prime examples. They in turn influenced the top level political entities to make moves often counter to the surface purpose of the war(s). A great example of this would be when Ian Bremmer and Rumsfeld, despite protestation from the military, decided to tell the Iraqi commander with 40k troops asking what to do with them to go fuck off. In the end, much of actions of that type were very much geared towards keeping things unstable, for reasons I will go into further, and it's worth noting that's pretty much exactly what has happened. 2. Containment: Let's be frank. Iran is sandwiched in between Iraq and Afghanistan and it has been in the crosshairs for quite some time now. Also worth remembering in context is that much of Saddams power was increased when we quietly backed him in the Iran-Iraq war. The joke on the ground used to be "How do we know Saddam has WMDs? Because we still have the receipts!" Not much actually changed from the 90's and destabilization of the region plays into keeping Iran busy there instead of elsewhere such as in Lebanon and Syria, at least to a degree. It's more than that, but Iran is the main target of containment. It also was used as a draw to get fighters to show up there instead of in western countries, another form of containment. Lots of foreign fighters started showing up the body count. 3. Presence: By establishing and expanding the middle east and western asian connections, infrastructure, bases, etc, we have closer inroads for conflicts in the future, and that's not even necessarily geared towards ME countries. It could be China, Russia, Africa, etc. Africa in particular happened to play this out with Libya, Sudan, etc, and it continues to this day. 4. Combat hardiness: at a more Machiavellian level, the relatively tame conflict(s) on blue-side were seen as a good proving ground to refine modern combat techniques, tools, tactics and strategies. Lots of think-tank analysis after the fact to help gear up towards conflicts in a future that might be more tri-polar conflict likely. It's a dirty business to be a general and have to think like that, but it is what it is. 5. Black markets: Just as in Vietnam, the destabilization and control offered a great opportunity for certain organizations to participate in black markets. See, for example, congress is supposed to have purse string control of the CIA... but if they can pull some Iran-Contra esque gun-drug running on a suddenly booming opium producing country that has almost no rule of law and is swarming with military who don't ask too many questions, they can essentially remove themselves from congressional oversight. Just look at the growth of the opioid epidemic in America in time with Afghanistan. Ignoring the pharma part, a huge percentage of tested heroin in America traces it's origins too... yep, Afghanistan. It's an age old playbook the 3-letters have been using for a while. (Cocaine cowboys like Barry Seal into Arkansas... who was the governor there again?) 6. Kickbacks: You also have to realize that a lot of the policy influencers tend to be old white guys who own or on the boards of defense companies in Virginia (or oil companies like Halliburton), and those good ol boys have lots of power. Lots of what happened was just plain old money laundering from taxpayers/the treasury into their pockets. There is a reason a few counties in Virginia have had the highest growth of millions in the country since the GWOT started. 7. Resource control: along with presence and control of these places, comes the ability to influence resource flow routes (and who gets those contracts, see above). This is one of the most important and oft overlooked aspects of the whole thing. See cries that the wars were about us taking the oil weren't quite true. It was more about controlling who the oil did go to. Even in the modern context a lot of the action in say Syria has a lot of hidden resource control route justifications the public never hears about. On the Afghanistan side one thing it does is help prevent natural gas and oil from reaching China to the east and Russia to the north. I saw the current Russia-gate hysteria coming many years ago because the shadow players like ZB telegraphed it so much... always talking about the return to a tri-polar world. 8. Banking: Banks and economies tend to boom in times of war (until the war is over and things contract, or if you are in the country the war actually happens in). This is also highly under-analyzed. 9. The elephant(s) in the room: Israel and Suadi Arabia. Much of the actions in ME have been due to a large level of influence they both have over policy makers in the US. Many of the above reasons seem to benefit them more than the US, especially when the repeat blowback comes home to roost in another 20 years. 10. Destruction of rights at home: when the people cried out for a response, the military congressional academic think-tank complex immediately used the opportunity to further undermine individual rights at home. They have constantly moved the overton window further and further towards acceptance of a dystopian semi-totalitarian state. Just look at any topic in HN, a forum full of hackers, to see the excuses and servile placations for these things. There are multiple reasons, some of which are a bit over the top to get into, but the more reasonable justification is that technology has changed the threat model away from nation states and more and more towards single actors being able to pull off big things (bio-engineering, infrastructure hacking, etc). Many of the MICC/good ol boys in DC/VA buy into this reasoning on the surface, despite really understanding they are undermining the foundational principles of America (and lining their pockets at the same time). A prime example of this would be William Binney's report that he had designed a surveillance program called ThinThread that would have protected American's privacy and still enabled the gov to track threats, and implimentation would costed in the 10s of millions. The program was scrapped in favor of a multi-billion dollar program that didn't protect Americans privacy and lost threats in the haystack of information. Just a few off the top of my head. Hanlon's razor just can't account for all these things. Yes incompetence runs rampant, but incompetence in these cases is often just as bad as malice, or is easily manipulable by those with malice.
sintaxi 7y ago
Israel lost. U.S. had no business being there in the first place.
basementcat 7y ago
Alternatively it is an inspiring story of a bunch of ragtag rebels who never gave up and never lost faith for decades and ultimately defeated the World’s most powerful military.
- sytelus 7y ago
  This has been a recurring theme in history. If you want to overthrow the world's largest best equipped most powerful armies, build a small guerilla force of ragtag rebels. This also applies to startups, research, engineering and other facets of life.
chewz 7y ago
Actually there were many more successful conquerors of Afganistan (Greco-Baktrian Kingdon, Mauryan Empire, Kushan Empire, Sassanian Empire, Ghaznavids, Mongol Empire, Timurid Empire, Mughal Empire and Safavid Empire to name just a few) then failed ones. Alexander of Macedon[2], British, Soviets and now USA have failed because they all have had unrealistic objectives. But Afghanistan had been ruled by "foreign" rulers for most of it's history. They all had one thing in common - they have kept multiple forces in balance and limited their rule to the capital. > He shows how governing these peoples was relatively easy when power was concentrated in a small dynastic elite, but how this delicate political order broke down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Afghanistan's rulers mobilized rural militias to expel first the British and later the Soviets. Armed insurgency proved remarkably successful against the foreign occupiers, but it also undermined the Afghan government's authority and rendered the country ever more difficult to govern as time passed. > Afghanistan is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how a land conquered and ruled by foreign dynasties for more than a thousand years became the "graveyard of empires" for the British and Soviets, and what the United States must do to avoid a similar fate. Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History by Thomas Barfield [1] [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7718203-afghanistan https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7718203-afghanistan > Recounting the plight of the most powerful leader of the time as he led the most sophisticated army of its day into the treacherous world of tribal warlords, Holt describes those grueling campaigns and the impact they had on Alexander, his generals, their troops, and the world. Into the Land of Bones also examines the conflict from the point of view of the local warlords who pushed the invading Greeks to the limits of their endurance—and sometimes beyond, into mania and mutiny. [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1584212.Into_the_Land_of_Bones https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1584212.Into_the_Land_of...

mercora 7y ago

whats up with the "text only" version? is it somehow required to deliver any service at all if i decline the consent dialog and this is what they came up with?

pixxel 7y ago
I don’t know, but if declining tracking consent serves a plain text view I’d love all websites to adopt it. Saves clicking reader mode which doesn’t always work. I’m on mobile though which wraps text nicely. What happens on desktop? Browser full width?
- oneplane 7y ago
  Works fine on desktop. I think most people that have a problem with it didn't use the internet in the 90's.
Semaphor 7y ago
I absolutely love it. I click decline, go into reader mode, and have by far the most readable and best designed news site on the internet.
- mercora 7y ago
  ACK. i am still curious if this got implemented because of the consent dialog and legal requirements to deliver a service in case consent is declined... maybe it is the first time i see it properly implemented somehow?

option 7y ago

what was achieved there? will anyone be held responsible for dragging us into that mess?

option 7y ago
remember that some people who voted in support of that war are on the ballots now.
pirate_dev 7y ago
Nothing and no. It served as a jobs program of sorts to a lot of places that have nothing else, so that's about all it has boiled down to in the past 20 years. The people who started it all will die peacefully, though I hope I am wrong.

RestAndVest 7y ago

Big, huge embarrassment for USA. They should've kept it going at all cost.

donatj 7y ago
And in order news the Vietnam War continues to rage.
- RestAndVest 7y ago
  North Vietnam was going to break in 1989, US just had to hold the fort with yearly Linebacker bombings for 30 more years.
mythrwy 7y ago
They still might. After 20 years I'm guessing the US doesn't just "last helicopter out" with the Vietcong closing in. I'll be there will still be US presence/monitoring in Afghanistan for some time to come.

donatj 7y ago

A well-armed militia took on the most powerful military in the world and won?

alpha_squared 7y ago
Isn't that how America was founded?
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  I like how the US Department of Defense became the US Department of War right about the time it changed its name from the Department of War to the Department of Defense.
  - codr7 7y ago
    Newspeak, attack is defense, war is peace.
    - Udik 7y ago
      And arbitrary armed violence is "world police". And militias we decide to back are "rebels", the ones we don't are "terrorists". And governments we don't like are "regimes". And acts of terrorism from our side are "targeted killings". And killed civilians are "collateral damage". The list is endless.
      - igravious 7y ago
        Watched Vice[0] recently starring Christian Bale as a corpulent power-grabbing[1] vengeful, power-behind-the-throne, Dick Cheney; Amy Adams as his steely missus; Sam Rockwell as a likable "W"; and Steve Carell (of all people) playing Donald "Don" Rumsfeld. They get to the part post 9/11 where the gloves come off and they sit down with corrupt legal advisers (Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo), many who are advocates of the Unitary Executive Theory[2], to concoct a legal firewall around their actions. The twisted logic is: The US does not torture therefore the varieties of "enhanced interrogation" being used cannot, ipso facto, be torture. Alongside "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture) we have those other Newspeak euphemisms[3] "extraordinary rendition" (state-sponsored kidnapping) and "enemy combatants" (any fighting-age male present in a combat zone). Then there's the legal limbo that is Guantanamo Bay, the suspension of habeas corpus[4] (a foundational legal right in modern democracies), and the frankly draconian USA PATRIOT Act. Ah, good times. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6266538/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6266538/ [1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/etc/network.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/etc/networ... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory [3] https://vizettes.com/kt/american_empire/pages/euphemisms-glossary.htm https://vizettes.com/kt/american_empire/pages/euphemisms-glo... [4] https://www.thoughtco.com/bush-lincoln-both-suspended-habeas-corpus-3321847 https://www.thoughtco.com/bush-lincoln-both-suspended-habeas...

causality0 7y ago

You can't save a people from themselves. I don't know how many times the US is going to have to learn this lesson.

dntbnmpls 7y ago
Do you really believe we invaded afghanistan to save these people? You think we invaded iraq to bring freedom and democracy to the iraqis? Was turning libya and syria into rubble part of our campaign to bring happiness to these people? I guess propaganda does work. "Mission Accomplished".
- pjc50 7y ago
  I assumed he meant you can't save America from the Americans.
heartbeats 7y ago
You can. As they said in Vietnam, we had to destroy the village in order to save it. If the alternative is an Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban, I really do not see what there is to lose.

erentz 7y ago

Over 20,000 US servicemen and women killed and wounded. Countless Afghans killed and wounded. And $2 trillion in lost opportunities for the USA.

gibolt 7y ago
Imagine if much of that had instead been invested in renewable energy. The same people trumpeting energy independence could have had it and made the U.S. the dominant renewable exporter. Yet we still do everything possible to equate only oil to energy
hrdwdmrbl 7y ago
Not to mention the reputational damage around the world and the lasting legacy of hatred that will be felt for generations of Afghan people towards the US. That kind of thing can take more than century to forget. The Chinese still hate the Japanese for the Rape of Nanjing in 1938 (there are probably better examples but I'm not a historian).
- wbl 7y ago
  Reputational damage? Are you forgetting that the Taliban were utter bastards who banned female education, were unrecognized by most countries and murdered 3,000 US civilians one fine fall day? The reputational damage is done because we didn't kill them all when we had the chance. This deal is capitulation. Only this time there won't be refugees grasping at the skies of helicopters. We'll just lock them out and watch the Taliban kill every educated woman in the country.
  - strken 7y ago
    The Northern Alliance, which the US sided with, also contained its fair share of bastards: they've been accused of summarily executing thousands of Taliban POWs, murdering civilians in raids on villages, and profiting from the opium trade, among other things. Despite fighting alongside Al-Qaeda and despite harbouring bin Laden, the Taliban aren't Al-Qaeda.
  - 7y ago

dx87 7y ago

It's probably for the best now, but it shouldn't have needed to come to this. In "Call Sign Chaos" by Jim Mattis, he talks about how the Bush and Obama administrations both repeatedly ignored the recommendations of military and intelligence officials. The Bush administration was too cavalier and thought they knew best, the Obama administration was too weak and wanted to score political points by not providing the force that was required. When I was in the Marines, they told us that we shouldn't need to be there, but politicians from the 80s/90s left things such a mess after trying to stop the Soviets, that now we had to go try and clean up the mess created 20 years prior.

anm89 7y ago
>When I was in the Marines, they told us that we shouldn't need to be there, but politicians from the 80s/90s left things such a mess after trying to stop the Soviets, that now we had to go try and clean up the mess created 20 years prior. This is of course true but you can play this fallacy out forever. The right thing to do in the 80s was not to meddle. Then after that we should have cut our losses and stopped meddling. And now 40 years later we are cleaning up failed clean up attempts on failed clean up attempts. At every point in this chain, the correct move is to admit you can't be world police and stop meddling.
- Udik 7y ago
  > you can't be world police Off topic, but the whole concept of "world police" is just spin. A police force is one that enforces equally laws established by others. You cannot be at the same time the one who establishes the rules and who decides when and where to use force against those who break them. This is just arbitary use of violence.
- ggm 7y ago
  left things such a mess after trying to stop the Soviets So much contained in this one sentence. People need to go look at what backing an insurgency against a repressive but modernising government does and ask questions.
  - 7y ago

buboard 7y ago

So there will no longer be a war in afghanistan? So those thousands of people fleeing to Europe are no longer refugees?

pjc50 7y ago
You can seek asylum if it is unsafe to return regardless. And most of the people are now from Syria.
superflit 7y ago
WHOooaaHH! Wrong THINK detected!
jonathankoren 7y ago
Well, perhaps the Americans and the rest of NATO can go back to ignoring it. Afghanistan is a country that has been in a civil war for over 40 years. It’s a tragedy for sure, especially when you compare photos of Kabul in 1979[0] to today, but ultimately no one is going to impose a peace there. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans could. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview/18bumiller.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview/18bumiller.h...
postingawayonhn 7y ago
I expect there will be many more refugees. Once the Taliban regains control of the country I'm sure there will be many reprisals against those who supported the elected government.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Of course there won't be. I just watched Trump in a press conference say that (literal quote) "If bad things happen there after we leave we will be back with a huge force". You really can't make this stuff up.

realhermit 7y ago

It took the Trump Administration to finally wake up and end this war. Kudos

krapp 7y ago
If a Democrat had done the same, they would be called a coward and a traitor.

didericis 7y ago

While poking around for information about other places I ran across a great little documentary on Afghanistan by a guy named David Adams, who was one of the last people to see the Buddhas before they were destroyed. It’s a firsthand look into the history and culture of the country from a relatively apolitical, exploration based perspective, although it’s now somewhat old. Some people might find the whole Indiana Jones thing and the “quest” hook to the series a bit camp, but I quite enjoyed it. Encourage people give it a watch if they want to learn a bit more about the history of the place. https://youtu.be/VXXmcGirPMA https://youtu.be/VXXmcGirPMA

grizzles 7y ago

Something that came up in lots of Congressional hearings on the war, no one in the U.S. military knew what the goal was in Afghanistan. For 19 years.

yhoiseth 7y ago
Care to share a source?
- grizzles 7y ago
  Some recent hearings were a consequence of this reporting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
  - yhoiseth 7y ago
    Thanks! That’s a great read. And very disappointing.

cheese4242 7y ago

What an absolute mess this whole situation has been. Sadly no one will be held accountable.

yumraj 7y ago

Peace deal with Taliban sounds like an oxymoron

foxx-boxx 7y ago

Drug lords of Eurasia are unbeatable even by the US. Because government officials get involved in growing opioids. Corruption everywhere. Help Afghanistan to take their market niche of supplying neighbors with tons of drugs!

thinkingemote 7y ago

I like thinking about how today would look like from the perspective of someone 100 years in the future. For example Bill Gates might be more well known for his philanthropy (like Carnegie now) or, on some kind of level Trump might be listed as the most peaceful president. Sounds bizarre - I guess theres a paradox of intervention and non intervention at work.

3pt14159 7y ago

Counterfactuals are hard. If Nato had stepped in after Syria used chemical weapons we may not have had a global refugee crisis. America has kept the peace pretty much everywhere but the middle east, and even there, I'd wager that Saudi Arabia would have nukes by now were it not for the American presence in the region.

pjc50 7y ago
Russia made it quite clear that they would defend the Assad regime, and ending that was the only way to realistically end the refugee crisis. Turkey has stepped in to fight Russia in Syria instead. I'm not sure how many Russian aircraft NATO intervention would have been able to shoot down before Putin explicitly brought up the nuke threat? The US is currently quietly supporting Saudi Arabi in their war against the Houthis.
- 3pt14159 7y ago
  Again, hard to say with counterfactuals. Obama made the red line quite clear and he backed down anyway. In my view, Russia isn't going to start a nuclear war because they lost a few servicepersons in a unimportant regional ally.
- yyyk 7y ago
  That's post-Oct. 2015 at best. Before that, there was no direct Russian involvement and plenty of time for NATO to intervene.
fit2rule 7y ago
NATO didn't step in, because Syria didn't use chemical weapons.
- 3pt14159 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_chemical_weapons_in_the_Syrian_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_chemical_weapons_in_the...

0xfeeddeadbeef 7y ago

Homeland season 8 predicted this.

squarefoot 7y ago

...while still hunting for Snowden and Assange.

dmode 7y ago

So after 20 years of waging war with the Taliban and spending trillions of dollars, we sign a peace deal ? At the same time, we always seem to be eager to cut food stamps, refugee support, healthcare.

pjc50 7y ago
The peace deal is the best opportunity to stop pouring money into graves.
- drdeadringer 7y ago
  Honest Question: What if we started pouring that money into food stamps and similar instead of "not and graves"? Or am I missing a something like "these are apples and oranges"?
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Putting money into buying weapons puts money in the elite arms company owners pockets, and the politician lapdogs pockets by extension. If you can work out how supporting food stamps can make those same people filthy rich, and maintain their hegemony, then I'm sure they'll go for it.

iambateman 7y ago

Other comments have taken shots at the foreign policy for Bush and Obama. We should remember how messy and complicated the region is, not to mention the home front. “Add 100,000 troops and blast them all”, “get our boys home now”, “get revenge for 9/11”, “don’t repeat Soviet mistakes”. There’s a lot of clamoring at home, and a lot of long-standing tensions abroad. We can assume for both the Bush and Obama administrations that most people were basically trying to do the best they could to solve intractable problems. Foreign policy is really hard. And despite my concern about the political motivations surrounding this deal, hints of peace are welcome.

LatteLazy 7y ago

It was a bad idea to go in. Having done so, killed so many people, made promises to so many more, pulling out is frankly disgraceful. America and the other countries involved have set that country back at least 100 years socially and ruined millions of lives.

baobabKoodaa 7y ago

So what happened to "we don't negotiate with terrorists"?

animalnewbie 7y ago

Here's something that political (either way) Americans will understand but not accept. If your neighborhood has termites, sooner or later they will destroy your property too. It wouldn't matter if they started from the house of your friend or your enemy. If you have a neighbor who is deliberately raising termites, you forget about termites and neutralize that neighbor first. America, both parties really, deliberately side with the bad guys and later give excuses when things work out against them. I wouldn't name names but it's not hard to guess who in this particular context is the neighbor raising termites.

chriselles 7y ago

Having been there for 3 short tours, it’s time to get out. If only, the US had destroyed Pakistan’s air bridge out of Kunduz in 2001 allowing thousands to escape by air to Pakistani safe areas. If only, the US had kept the mission to light footprint special operations only, a la the very successful Central America model in the 80’s/90’s. If only, Pakistan couldn’t guarantee the perpetual failure of Afghanistan. There was a need to intervene 19.5 years ago like there was a need for Iran to intervene 20.5 years ago(Taliban liquidated Iranian Shi’a diplomats). Few know US and Iranian forces actually worked together briefly capturing Herat in 2001. I once had the chance to grill a former US ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009-2011, unfortunately I handled it poorly. Time to decisively end the sunk cost fallacy bias.