5 ms·

Reminder to all of my fellow Americans about the messiness of the wars of which we are part — these guys were our alternative to the Taliban: https://www.nytim

by numair 5y ago

Reminder to all of my fellow Americans about the messiness of the wars of which we are part — these guys were our alternative to the Taliban: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-to... What would you do if it was your son, or brother, or nephew? And, what would you do to those who bankrolled them? We really gotta stop doing this.

JasonFruit 5y ago
We need to stop doing wars when there isn't a direct, imminent threat to the United States itself, full stop. No "threat to our national interests", no "threat to strategic allies in the region", none of it. We make the world worse and we make the United States worse, and we abandon any moral high ground we may still possess.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  "We need to stop refactoring apps when there isn't a direct, imminent threat to users." * years later * "What do you mean 'technical debt'?"
  - abnry 5y ago
    Right. I don't really stomach how long we've been in the Middle East and I don't like the idea of those with incentives to go to war prolonging and pushing war. But geopolitics is very messy. Instability in a region can encourage other leaders to take advantage and cause even more geopolitical upheaval.
    - JasonFruit 5y ago
      Instability can cause upheaval, sure — but are we preventing instability or upheaval? It seems to me that we are prolonging instability and promoting extremism and terrorism by blundering in with our military. Is the Middle East, for example, any less unstable than it was three decades ago?
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        > are we preventing instability or upheaval? Part of the problem in geopolitics is that there's genuinely no way to ever know this sort of thing, without read/write access to a multiverse. Is the Middle East more or less stable than three decades ago is hard to assess on its own, let alone "what would it have been with/without adding x".
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Part of the problem in geopolitics is that there's genuinely no way to ever know this sort of thing, The other problem is that while people talk about caring about this, none of the actors who pretend to actually have this as their primary goal, its just an excuse used when advantage, not stability, is being sought.
    - gugagore 5y ago
      "Geopolitics is messy" is a wonderful way to justify any atrocity. Where is the accountability?
  - gugagore 5y ago
    Bad analogy for countless reasons, including an absences of version control when a commit is to blow something up.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      Most analogies are imperfect. The point: there's substantial risk to waiting for an indirect, non-imminent threat to become a direct, imminent one. Addressing it is frequently easier and cheaper in the early stages. Isolationism was easier when adversaries took weeks/months/years to get to you.
      - sremani 5y ago
        US can delegate it to the regional powers or power brokers. US needs to make its Asia pivot now, you cannot waste military resources in a desolate land and stretch your self. Getting out of Afghanistan will make the big powers .. China, Russia et al. to pay attention now that Americans are no longer bogged down. 20 years is enough - I do not even know how many trillions are wasted. Do you know the GDP of Afghanistan, it is less than USD50 Billion. Pay-off the warlords put some mercenaries in Kabul, ask Indians and Russians to fund opposition to Taliban because it is their strategic headache. Give Turkey some security role because they seem to have good terms with Pakistan, so that Kabul is out of Taliban control or some kind of compromise. Not putting troops is not isolationism.. you apply other levers of your power.
        numair 5y ago
        As my friends have told me, there are policy papers sitting in staff offices in DC/Virginia that say pretty much exactly what you’ve stated here.
- flyinglizard 5y ago
  History proves you are absolutely wrong. Since WWII the world sees unprecedented peace and prosperity, all thanks to the USA being the world police. Just the freedom of navigation of merchant ships, afforded by the oversight of the US navy, is a huge enabler for world trade. I hope US continues on its course for the next century instead of creating a power vacuum which the Chinese would be happy to fill.
  - crubier 5y ago
    Sure, tell me more about how the Afghanistan and Irak war helped make the world a better place
    - flyinglizard 5y ago
      The person doing nothing never errs. I did not say all US intervention was good, but that as a whole, Pax Americana has been great to us. The Chinese or Russian alternatives are not very enticing.
      - crubier 5y ago
        But China and Russia do not interfere nearly as much with countries all over the planet. And the “just let countries live their life peacefully” alternative is actually much more enticing than “force capitalism and democracy on countries that don’t care, by killing hundreds of thousands and ruining lives so they end up hating it for generations” reality that we live in. Vietnam, Irak, Afghanistan, maybe learn from your mistakes at some point and acknowledge this strategy is not the best?
        eitland 5y ago
        > But China and Russia do not interfere nearly as much with countries all over the planet. Tell that to Taiwan and Ukraine. Or go back and tell it to the entire eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Tibet etc. I also guess most Cubans today would have wished Sovjet didn't interfere back in the day. America and the west generally is prone to mindless self-flaggelation.
- undfg 5y ago
  This is a very anti-Semitic argument.
  - s5300 5y ago
    This is a very strange bot or troll poster.
    - JasonFruit 5y ago
      I think they were just taking my general "strategic allies in the region" comment to refer to Israel specifically, when it was intended as a category of countries, like Israel, South Korea, and Ukraine.
      - s5300 5y ago
        To instantly hop on the "anti-Semitic" train is asinine though. I wonder if he knows the U.S. government turned away Jewish refugees by boat in WWII and that we didn't really land in Europe to go save the Jews or anything, but to stop Russia from marking territory all the way to where we landed... Nothing is about religion... tis all about power.
- chmod600 5y ago
  Would you have opposed interfering in Europe during WW2? Do you generally oppose any kind of alliance, like NATO?
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    In general, yes to both questions. There's a point where a large-scale conflict becomes a direct threat to the United States, and WWII might have been that by 1941, but I would at least initially have opposed interfering.
    - spfzero 5y ago
      The majority in the US opposed entering the war until Pearl Harbor, even though the administration of the time strongly wanted to.
      - systemvoltage 5y ago
        I think there is a big difference between the powers that committed those atrociticies. Japan was behind Pearl Harbor wheareas a scraggly fundamentalist group in the middle east was behind 9/11 attacks. The former was a full blown exercise of military power and neutralization of some half of our naval fleet in the Pacific. The latter was a targetted terrorist attack largely organized by one main guy. We got the guy, and we could have probably gotten him without 20 years of war.
        corty 5y ago
        Probably Afghanistan was also the wrong target, or at least not the only country in the region that should have been targeted. Bin Laden hid in Pakistan after all, and the Taliban often crossed the border to Pakistan to seek refuge.
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Afghanistan was also the wrong target, or at least not the only country in the region that should have been targeted. Afghanistan wasn't the only country in the region (nor weas that the only region in the world) in which the US conducted campaigns against al-Qaeda and factions allied with them. > Bin Laden hid in Pakistan after all, and the Taliban often crossed the border to Pakistan to seek refuge. And the US conducted attacks against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan from very early in the war, and also against bin Laden himself there.
- cameldrv 5y ago
  We need to stop doing wars where we cannot clearly envision the end state and have a clear plan for getting there. The U.S. has engaged in far too many conflicts where we simply didn't like what some country was doing and so we removed the government. Almost universally though, we did not know how to, or were unwilling to install a stable replacement government or governments.

by numair 5y ago

JasonFruit 5y ago

We need to stop doing wars when there isn't a direct, imminent threat to the United States itself, full stop. No "threat to our national interests", no "threat to strategic allies in the region", none of it. We make the world worse and we make the United States worse, and we abandon any moral high ground we may still possess.

ceejayoz 5y ago
"We need to stop refactoring apps when there isn't a direct, imminent threat to users." * years later * "What do you mean 'technical debt'?"
- abnry 5y ago
  Right. I don't really stomach how long we've been in the Middle East and I don't like the idea of those with incentives to go to war prolonging and pushing war. But geopolitics is very messy. Instability in a region can encourage other leaders to take advantage and cause even more geopolitical upheaval.
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    Instability can cause upheaval, sure — but are we preventing instability or upheaval? It seems to me that we are prolonging instability and promoting extremism and terrorism by blundering in with our military. Is the Middle East, for example, any less unstable than it was three decades ago?
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      > are we preventing instability or upheaval? Part of the problem in geopolitics is that there's genuinely no way to ever know this sort of thing, without read/write access to a multiverse. Is the Middle East more or less stable than three decades ago is hard to assess on its own, let alone "what would it have been with/without adding x".
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Part of the problem in geopolitics is that there's genuinely no way to ever know this sort of thing, The other problem is that while people talk about caring about this, none of the actors who pretend to actually have this as their primary goal, its just an excuse used when advantage, not stability, is being sought.
  - gugagore 5y ago
    "Geopolitics is messy" is a wonderful way to justify any atrocity. Where is the accountability?
- gugagore 5y ago
  Bad analogy for countless reasons, including an absences of version control when a commit is to blow something up.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    Most analogies are imperfect. The point: there's substantial risk to waiting for an indirect, non-imminent threat to become a direct, imminent one. Addressing it is frequently easier and cheaper in the early stages. Isolationism was easier when adversaries took weeks/months/years to get to you.
    - sremani 5y ago
      US can delegate it to the regional powers or power brokers. US needs to make its Asia pivot now, you cannot waste military resources in a desolate land and stretch your self. Getting out of Afghanistan will make the big powers .. China, Russia et al. to pay attention now that Americans are no longer bogged down. 20 years is enough - I do not even know how many trillions are wasted. Do you know the GDP of Afghanistan, it is less than USD50 Billion. Pay-off the warlords put some mercenaries in Kabul, ask Indians and Russians to fund opposition to Taliban because it is their strategic headache. Give Turkey some security role because they seem to have good terms with Pakistan, so that Kabul is out of Taliban control or some kind of compromise. Not putting troops is not isolationism.. you apply other levers of your power.
      - numair 5y ago
        As my friends have told me, there are policy papers sitting in staff offices in DC/Virginia that say pretty much exactly what you’ve stated here.
flyinglizard 5y ago
History proves you are absolutely wrong. Since WWII the world sees unprecedented peace and prosperity, all thanks to the USA being the world police. Just the freedom of navigation of merchant ships, afforded by the oversight of the US navy, is a huge enabler for world trade. I hope US continues on its course for the next century instead of creating a power vacuum which the Chinese would be happy to fill.
- crubier 5y ago
  Sure, tell me more about how the Afghanistan and Irak war helped make the world a better place
  - flyinglizard 5y ago
    The person doing nothing never errs. I did not say all US intervention was good, but that as a whole, Pax Americana has been great to us. The Chinese or Russian alternatives are not very enticing.
    - crubier 5y ago
      But China and Russia do not interfere nearly as much with countries all over the planet. And the “just let countries live their life peacefully” alternative is actually much more enticing than “force capitalism and democracy on countries that don’t care, by killing hundreds of thousands and ruining lives so they end up hating it for generations” reality that we live in. Vietnam, Irak, Afghanistan, maybe learn from your mistakes at some point and acknowledge this strategy is not the best?
      - eitland 5y ago
        > But China and Russia do not interfere nearly as much with countries all over the planet. Tell that to Taiwan and Ukraine. Or go back and tell it to the entire eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Tibet etc. I also guess most Cubans today would have wished Sovjet didn't interfere back in the day. America and the west generally is prone to mindless self-flaggelation.
undfg 5y ago
This is a very anti-Semitic argument.
- s5300 5y ago
  This is a very strange bot or troll poster.
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    I think they were just taking my general "strategic allies in the region" comment to refer to Israel specifically, when it was intended as a category of countries, like Israel, South Korea, and Ukraine.
    - s5300 5y ago
      To instantly hop on the "anti-Semitic" train is asinine though. I wonder if he knows the U.S. government turned away Jewish refugees by boat in WWII and that we didn't really land in Europe to go save the Jews or anything, but to stop Russia from marking territory all the way to where we landed... Nothing is about religion... tis all about power.
chmod600 5y ago
Would you have opposed interfering in Europe during WW2? Do you generally oppose any kind of alliance, like NATO?
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  In general, yes to both questions. There's a point where a large-scale conflict becomes a direct threat to the United States, and WWII might have been that by 1941, but I would at least initially have opposed interfering.
  - spfzero 5y ago
    The majority in the US opposed entering the war until Pearl Harbor, even though the administration of the time strongly wanted to.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      I think there is a big difference between the powers that committed those atrociticies. Japan was behind Pearl Harbor wheareas a scraggly fundamentalist group in the middle east was behind 9/11 attacks. The former was a full blown exercise of military power and neutralization of some half of our naval fleet in the Pacific. The latter was a targetted terrorist attack largely organized by one main guy. We got the guy, and we could have probably gotten him without 20 years of war.
      - corty 5y ago
        Probably Afghanistan was also the wrong target, or at least not the only country in the region that should have been targeted. Bin Laden hid in Pakistan after all, and the Taliban often crossed the border to Pakistan to seek refuge.
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Afghanistan was also the wrong target, or at least not the only country in the region that should have been targeted. Afghanistan wasn't the only country in the region (nor weas that the only region in the world) in which the US conducted campaigns against al-Qaeda and factions allied with them. > Bin Laden hid in Pakistan after all, and the Taliban often crossed the border to Pakistan to seek refuge. And the US conducted attacks against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan from very early in the war, and also against bin Laden himself there.
cameldrv 5y ago
We need to stop doing wars where we cannot clearly envision the end state and have a clear plan for getting there. The U.S. has engaged in far too many conflicts where we simply didn't like what some country was doing and so we removed the government. Almost universally though, we did not know how to, or were unwilling to install a stable replacement government or governments.