6 ms·

What was there ever to win?

by boznz 7y ago

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
        First of all, I didn't say that the US had the right to force a regime change on anyone it chose. You're reading that into my comment. I only said that, if we wanted to actually change a place like Iraq, we couldn't do it "on the cheap" like we tried to do. Back in World War II, we didn't initiate the "forcing". Once we won, what did you want us to do? Leave Germany and Japan to nurse their grievances, rebuild their militaries, and come back 20 years later for another round? (Note the pattern of Germany between World Wars I and II.) Having won, we (quite rightly in my view) decided that they were going to be transformed. Don't want your society transformed by outsiders by force? Don't start wars with them that you're going to lose in the end. If you want to say that Iraq is a less justified case, I might agree. If you want to say that going to war to remove him was the wrong thing to do, that's a reasonable position. But having removed him, what should we do next? Just help the people set up any semblance of a government, and walk away? It may be that secular can't work in some place like Iraq. That's possible. It may be that democratic can't work, either, not without preparing people for a generation. But what would you shoot for instead? Who should be the non-democratic leader, and why should it be them? And why do you think that way would work better?
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Germany and Japan were mono-ethnic industrial states that largely didn't have anyone sabotaging the reconstruction, and Germany had the disadvantage of being split in half; everyone wanted to surrender to the US, because the alternative was the Soviet Union.
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.

What was there ever to win?

by 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
        First of all, I didn't say that the US had the right to force a regime change on anyone it chose. You're reading that into my comment. I only said that, if we wanted to actually change a place like Iraq, we couldn't do it "on the cheap" like we tried to do. Back in World War II, we didn't initiate the "forcing". Once we won, what did you want us to do? Leave Germany and Japan to nurse their grievances, rebuild their militaries, and come back 20 years later for another round? (Note the pattern of Germany between World Wars I and II.) Having won, we (quite rightly in my view) decided that they were going to be transformed. Don't want your society transformed by outsiders by force? Don't start wars with them that you're going to lose in the end. If you want to say that Iraq is a less justified case, I might agree. If you want to say that going to war to remove him was the wrong thing to do, that's a reasonable position. But having removed him, what should we do next? Just help the people set up any semblance of a government, and walk away? It may be that secular can't work in some place like Iraq. That's possible. It may be that democratic can't work, either, not without preparing people for a generation. But what would you shoot for instead? Who should be the non-democratic leader, and why should it be them? And why do you think that way would work better?
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Germany and Japan were mono-ethnic industrial states that largely didn't have anyone sabotaging the reconstruction, and Germany had the disadvantage of being split in half; everyone wanted to surrender to the US, because the alternative was the Soviet Union.

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.