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You can be as blunt and stupid as you choose. >but there is overwhelming evidence that the purpose of US intervention in the middle east is almost purely for r

You can be as blunt and stupid as you choose. >but there is overwhelming evidence that the purpose of US intervention in the middle east is almost purely for reasons of power and resource Sure, I'll collect my check at the pump, I guess. >and this has been obvious to scholars and even casual laymen observers for nearly half a century I think you're missing the meaning of my original post, which was a comment about people who experienced war in Afghanistan feel about it. You're welcome to contort that into whatever point about human rights, "America is bad", whatever point you feel like. Like I said originally. I don't care.

colordrops 5y ago
I was replying to this: > Does anyone in America actually care about what style of government Afghanistan adopts? Apparently these people in DC think they do.
- remarkEon 5y ago
  Are you asking what I think the DC establishment thinks is the right government structure for Afghanistan?
  - colordrops 5y ago
    No. Buy you seem to think your policy buddies care about finding the right government structure. If they are true establishment and not just cogs they don't care about anything other than game theory and maximum extraction of value.
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      Ah yes, the power and resources that flow from the rich nation of Afghanistan. I had dinner with the ambassador to the Taliban once at Yale, back in 2000. He said they banned TVs because there wasn't any Pashtun programming, so they were effectively just banning porn. He was accompanied by this very nice lady, Lailia Helms, who was the granddaughter of the former king of Afghanistan and married to the son of the former CIA director, Richard Helms. Weird.
      - colordrops 5y ago
        The value that is extracted is not from the "rich" Afghanis, but from American taxpayers, in the trillions to the military industrial complex.
        dr_dshiv 5y ago
        Ah, then we are on the same page.
        bbarnett 5y ago
        Two things. Outside of the excessive dev costs, and high price tags of these things, ongoing, year after year, institutional knowledge of "how to construct weaponry", and "how to test / build" the same is absolutely vital. You absolutely cannot be in a position where no company and employees exist, which knows these things. The cannot be overstated. Imagine a war breaks out, and now you try to build ... missiles. You have no tooling, no factory, no employees which have ever done so, and no supply chains either. Nor even engineered, first step designs! Now, I agree things are not perfect, but something must be in place. Something ongoing. This same logic holds with the military too. You want to lose a war? Have a no standing military, or one which is never deployed. You need trained, experienced troops, which will train other troops if a massive war breaks out and your numbers swell. You need experienced persons to lead, which have not been trained in isolation. Canada tries to solve this, as much as possible by peacekeeping. It's not perfect though, blue hats don't often engage in large scale actions. Point in all this is, trying to pick just, humanitarian causes for troop deployment, and weaponry usage in the field, and to keep supply chains alive, is difficult, yet is literally essential if you want to have a real defense potential. Or should the US, the West, just degrade their military, and hope for the best? (Canada was in Afghanistan for more than a decade.)
        sirtaj 5y ago
        It really sounds like you've managed to reason into "we have a military, so it's best to use it for its own sake." If so, that's pretty frightening logic, particularly for anyone in the rest of the world.

colordrops 5y ago

I was replying to this: > Does anyone in America actually care about what style of government Afghanistan adopts? Apparently these people in DC think they do.

remarkEon 5y ago
Are you asking what I think the DC establishment thinks is the right government structure for Afghanistan?
- colordrops 5y ago
  No. Buy you seem to think your policy buddies care about finding the right government structure. If they are true establishment and not just cogs they don't care about anything other than game theory and maximum extraction of value.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Ah yes, the power and resources that flow from the rich nation of Afghanistan. I had dinner with the ambassador to the Taliban once at Yale, back in 2000. He said they banned TVs because there wasn't any Pashtun programming, so they were effectively just banning porn. He was accompanied by this very nice lady, Lailia Helms, who was the granddaughter of the former king of Afghanistan and married to the son of the former CIA director, Richard Helms. Weird.
    - colordrops 5y ago
      The value that is extracted is not from the "rich" Afghanis, but from American taxpayers, in the trillions to the military industrial complex.
      - dr_dshiv 5y ago
        Ah, then we are on the same page.
      - bbarnett 5y ago
        Two things. Outside of the excessive dev costs, and high price tags of these things, ongoing, year after year, institutional knowledge of "how to construct weaponry", and "how to test / build" the same is absolutely vital. You absolutely cannot be in a position where no company and employees exist, which knows these things. The cannot be overstated. Imagine a war breaks out, and now you try to build ... missiles. You have no tooling, no factory, no employees which have ever done so, and no supply chains either. Nor even engineered, first step designs! Now, I agree things are not perfect, but something must be in place. Something ongoing. This same logic holds with the military too. You want to lose a war? Have a no standing military, or one which is never deployed. You need trained, experienced troops, which will train other troops if a massive war breaks out and your numbers swell. You need experienced persons to lead, which have not been trained in isolation. Canada tries to solve this, as much as possible by peacekeeping. It's not perfect though, blue hats don't often engage in large scale actions. Point in all this is, trying to pick just, humanitarian causes for troop deployment, and weaponry usage in the field, and to keep supply chains alive, is difficult, yet is literally essential if you want to have a real defense potential. Or should the US, the West, just degrade their military, and hope for the best? (Canada was in Afghanistan for more than a decade.)
        sirtaj 5y ago
        It really sounds like you've managed to reason into "we have a military, so it's best to use it for its own sake." If so, that's pretty frightening logic, particularly for anyone in the rest of the world.