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While I agree with your points, it's not the only outcome. As a German, technically the US did the same thing to our country in '45: Throw bombs, invade and the

While I agree with your points, it's not the only outcome. As a German, technically the US did the same thing to our country in '45: Throw bombs, invade and then occupy it — then gradually leave and pull out and let us handle our own stuff including military and defense. Being a bit biased, I'd still say it worked out brilliantly. I'm seriously curious about what made this work out so well, compared to Afghanistan or Vietnam. Is it because there was no big difference in religion? Because there was more mutual respect? Because there was a common enemy in the East? Or because the US _really_ made a giant effort to rebuild the German economy (The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan is still remembered fondly by especially older Germans and to this day is a core reason for friendly sentiment towards the US despite the anti-foreign sentiment into the other direction lately) Like, maybe I'm dumb, but the US went into Afghanistan and theoretically gave "them" weapons and training to defend themselves, but apparently the big majority was either not interested or too scared to defend the country against the Taliban. I'm stumped on the big difference.

tzs 5y ago
Germany was a reasonable country that took a turn at the top toward extreme unreasonableness. When the Allies kicked out the Nazis Germany was able to go back to reasonableness because that was normal for Germany. It just needed some support from the Allies to keep things from falling apart so that it could transition back to reasonableness. Afghanistan was pretty much always a poorly governed country rife with corruption. The US went in to stop it being taken over by something even worse. Stopping the Taliban didn't do anything about a corrupt government that does a poor job of governing. It would either eventually end up a dictatorship from someone within the government seizing permanent power, or someone would topple the government because the government is too corrupt and ineffective to organize a good defense. Really all the US could hope for as long as that government remained in control was to delay the Taliban long enough for it to be someone else who toppled the government and then hope that the new government was sufficiently more competent to handle holding off the Taliban. To really address the Afghanistan problem probably requires someone to go in, smash the Taliban and kick out the current government (as of last night--haven't seen the news today so am not if they are still current), then oversee something like a constitutional convention for all Afghanis to develop a new more democratic government with sufficient safeguards to keep the corruption down somewhat. That's hard to do while trying to stay on the right side of the line between empire building and truly helping a people develop a good stable non-corrupt independent representative government.

tzs 5y ago

Germany was a reasonable country that took a turn at the top toward extreme unreasonableness. When the Allies kicked out the Nazis Germany was able to go back to reasonableness because that was normal for Germany. It just needed some support from the Allies to keep things from falling apart so that it could transition back to reasonableness. Afghanistan was pretty much always a poorly governed country rife with corruption. The US went in to stop it being taken over by something even worse. Stopping the Taliban didn't do anything about a corrupt government that does a poor job of governing. It would either eventually end up a dictatorship from someone within the government seizing permanent power, or someone would topple the government because the government is too corrupt and ineffective to organize a good defense. Really all the US could hope for as long as that government remained in control was to delay the Taliban long enough for it to be someone else who toppled the government and then hope that the new government was sufficiently more competent to handle holding off the Taliban. To really address the Afghanistan problem probably requires someone to go in, smash the Taliban and kick out the current government (as of last night--haven't seen the news today so am not if they are still current), then oversee something like a constitutional convention for all Afghanis to develop a new more democratic government with sufficient safeguards to keep the corruption down somewhat. That's hard to do while trying to stay on the right side of the line between empire building and truly helping a people develop a good stable non-corrupt independent representative government.