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U.S. military starts Afghanistan withdrawal
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pmiller2 6y agoThat's great. Now do Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Libya. The US has been at war for a majority of its existence, like some kind of imperialist bully. It's time for it to stop. https://www.thoughtco.com/american-involvement-wars-colonial-times-present-4059761 https://www.thoughtco.com/american-involvement-wars-colonial...
- oh_sigh 6y agoI don't think Pakistan is very interested in not getting the billions of dollars in aid every year.
- selimthegrim 6y agoThe military or the people?
- pmiller2 6y agoKeep the aid, send the soldiers home.
- imgabe 6y agodeleted
- sudosysgen 6y agoThis is just blatantly false. Most countries were not at war for most of their existence. Even Europe pre-WW1 wasn't at war during most of its time. There was a war going on most of the time yes but they were much more limited in scope until the Seven Day's War.
- imgabe 6y agodeleted
- pmiller2 6y agoSo? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dang 6y agoPlease stop posting flamewar comments. Not cool.
- sudosysgen 6y agoMost of these conflicts implicate only one or two countries. Europe is big, especially in historic times, there were dozens of states. It's simply not true that most countries were at war most of the times. And even then there is a lot more to the world than Europe, which admittedly was quite warlike at times.
- Milkman128 6y agoHistory suggests no intervention doesn't go well. Threading a needle based on the situation is necessary
- pmiller2 6y agoCan you be any more vague? I can't even formulate a proper response to this.
- BelenusMordred 6y agoCan you provide some examples? Are Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos better off because of US interventionism in the 70's? You can't walk around Cambodia without seeing a bunch of legless people who stepped on landmines. Huge swathes of land is unusable because the country has the most unexploded ordinance on Earth from a war that never existed on the books and certainly not in the minds of the public. The sheer arrogance of enforcing your morals and telling people what is best for themselves with the barrel of a gun. None of this stuff is about democracy or western values, it's all about money and power.
- eloff 6y agoIt was never about democracy really, it was all about containing Soviet influence and the spread of communism. Which had little to do with democracy directly and a lot to do with drawing battle lines and trying to keep the other side from gaining too much power. In hindsight it is easy to say it was pointless, because the USSR imploded. However, at the time with the USSR looking strong and expanding influence rapidly internationally, that was not at all clear. And I imagine you don't think it would have been best to allow the USSR to gain a strategic advantage over the West.
- 1986 6y agoI would urge you to read Legacy of Ashes, if you haven't, to get a sense of just how poor US intelligence on the USSR was at the time, and how that impacted policy. One gets the sense that the vast majority of these secret or undeclared wars were driven by a few die hard anti communists who manipulated or manufactured evidence to support their crusade - and to a large extent the USSR "looked strong" largely because it suited them for it to look strong, not because it really was.
- bostonsre 6y agoI'm not sure it's all good news. There was no perfect route out of this where everyone won. Hopefully it ends up being the least bad decision but I'm really worried about individuals that were working against the taliban and with the united states and I'm even more worried about girls not being able to go to school. I don't see how there could possibly be peace when the last US soldier leaves. The country still has a long hard road of war in front of them. It will be a massive power vacuum that the taliban and most likely others will try to fill.
- bostonsre 5y agoThis is only the beginning.. almost all school girls https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/blast-near-afghan-school-kabul-kills-10-injures-dozens-security-official-2021-05-08/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/blast-near-afghan...
- missosoup 6y ago> imperialist bully As far as empires go, America is nothing compared to the larger players. But also consider that global geopolitics is inherently an anarchy. The guy with the biggest stick makes the rules. Between America and the next 3 largest contenders for biggest stick... I'll take America, the alternatives are far worse. And I'm a Russian by birth. Want to talk about actual bullying? Check out CCP blackmailing people overseas for political speech, by threatening their families in the mainland. We're in the middle of the most globally peaceful period in recorded history since 'imperialist pig' USA came to power. The alternatives don't include 'no world leader', they are only choices of a different world leader. If you really want the US to fall from the world stage, I suggest you start learning Chinese or Russian; you're going to need it.
- astrea 6y agoAs if there aren't terrorist cells in any of these countries or they aren't supporting UN actions.
- eloff 6y agoThat's a very one sided take on it. The US has also been playing global peacekeeper for the last century. While also intervening all over and playing imperialist games against the USSR, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany, among others. It's not been all good or all bad, and I flat out reject any one sided critiques of it.
- dang 6y agoPlease don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. Your comment is bad enough (and already against the site guidelines) as a generic tangent and as flamebait. Tossing Molotov cocktails ("imperialist bully") into the thread is downright destructive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the HN guidelines egregiously in other places recently too (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26914977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26914977). No more of this please. Regardless of how wrong or badly-behaved other people (be they HN users, celebrity CEOs, or imperialist bullies) are or you feel they are, you owe this community better if you're participating in it. Other people doing bad things is a poor non-excuse for setting this place on fire.
- pmiller2 6y agoThis is not nationalistic at all. I'd say it about any country exhibiting this type of behavior.
- dang 6y agoIf you throw pejoratives at $country, that's going to lead to a nationalistic flamewar. It is not complicated. No more flamewar comments of any kind, please. It's not what this site is for.
- shakow 6y agoHistory comes and go. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wv4Pe13CK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wv4Pe13CK0
- sebmellen 6y agoHa! I just spent a few hours going through old Soviet music about the war in Afghanistan. Brutal stuff. This song is great https://youtu.be/8iAoibAgAvM https://youtu.be/8iAoibAgAvM.
- 101001001001 6y agoDonald trump is responsible for coming to an agreement with the Taliban. But Biden takes all the credit for it.
- bigth 6y agoDont say the T-word here, that's not allowed. Most of the comments are off topic from the point of the article, but this is an interesting question. Trump initiated the process, yet the media presents this as a Biden achievement. I dont care about politics at all, but the bias is hard to miss.
- Judgmentality 6y agoThe sitting president tends to get recognition for things happening now, regardless of whether or not they had anything to do with it. Likewise, if the economy crashed tomorrow, Biden would get the blame.
- pc86 6y agoI mean there was a decent market hit the other day on that tax proposal/suggestion/comment.
- astrea 6y agoI feel there was sufficient coverage of it during his presidency. Selective memory I suppose.
- paper743cut 6y ago> ...but the bias is hard to miss. I think the major supporters of Trump are the working class white people with "Type B" personalities. The audience of this site is the opposite of that mostly, white or non-white. Hence the bias i guess.
- dbtc 6y agoI honestly don't know, but I am wondering how much credit for this (and many other things, like various machinations the Economy) can really be given to any president, or if it isn't the product of long-term, behind-the-curtain developments.
- xiphias2 6y agoChina is using mainly economic tools (very aggressive ones) instead to take over the world. They want to get to EU through Hungary as the weakest point (estabilishing a university through a $1.5BN loan), and it seems like they are getting what they want.
- qiqing 6y agoJust checked the link at least three times, and I don't see how this is related to the article. Are you reading the same article or did you post this by accident?
- anonu 6y agoWhile the comment may seem off-topic, geopolitics dont happen in a vacuum. You move chess pieces over to one side and you create spaces for your opponents. Maybe China will fill the void in Afghanistan?
- datameta 6y agoPerhaps they are constrasting this particular U.S. strategy of pressure through boots on the ground v.s. aggressive Chinese foreign economic policies. Now that isn't to say I think the U.S. does no economic tweaking and fiddling in foreign nations...