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It's 20 years, 100s of billions of dollars, and many thousands of lives -- all wasted. The government that was setup (and then propped up) to replace the Talib

It's 20 years, 100s of billions of dollars, and many thousands of lives -- all wasted. The government that was setup (and then propped up) to replace the Taliban is gone, and replaced again by the Taliban: 0 net gain. All those rights and liberties that had been gained for women and girls have vanished literally overnight. Everything, all efforts, sacrifices, and losses are for absolutely nothing. The depth of this historic failure is mind-boggling.

Jabbles 5y ago
This estimate suggests ~$800B https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-47391821 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-47391821
- eplanit 5y ago
  You're right, will correct.
uniacid 5y ago
$2 Trillion or so, also we have to admit the failure was the US changing its role there from hunting Bin Laden and the Taliban to "Nation building" with an obviously corrupt Govt that has always been there. It shouldn't be a surprise since you need a society that wants to actually break from the same continued cycle, unfortunately Afghanistan isn't it due to many reasons.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > we have to admit the failure was the US changing its role there from hunting Bin Laden and the Taliban to "Nation building" The cause of the failure was when, in 2003, the US decided to focus on an entirely unnecessary war of choice (aggression, really) in Iraq (and a whole bunch of propaganda own-goals scored in that war that affected the US particularly in the Islamic world reinforced that.) Nation building was always an element of fighting the Taliban, not mission drift, since having something stable and broadly supported in place was the key to prevent a resurgence.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I don’t have a strong opinion, but “nation building” always sounds like this horrible thing and I don’t quite understand why. Charitably, bringing democracy to corrupt, oppressed countries seems eminently desirable. Maybe nation building has a bad rep because it’s immensely difficult and we always fail at it (presumably it takes many decades and we always think it will take 5 years?). Genuinely trying to understand.
    - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
      It's just based on a flawed premise. Democracy functions based on the public's democratic beliefs about legitimacy and power, so you can't impose it on a country the way you can install a king or set up an occupational council. No matter how well you mimic the forms and functions of a democracy, if the fundamental root of power is "the Americans said this is how we're doing it", the government's gonna fall as soon as they stop saying that.
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        I kind of agree, but culture is malleable and if you sustain democratic trappings for long enough the culture will adapt accordingly. I think this kind of culture change takes generations and our flaws have always been expecting the change to take place in a handful of years. Indeed, the Chinese and North Koreans have lived through the worst communism has to offer, but after a sustained period they have largely come to accept it as legitimate (although it requires a sustained investment in intense propaganda and isolationism because they are clearly stuck in a local optimum). Similarly Rome was pretty good at this sort of thing as it incorporated even backwater Britain into its empire. If I were going to go about nation building, I would “export democratic values” some 20 years in advance of any military action by way of film, literature, etc. Cynics can think of this as propaganda, but really it’s just giving Afghans or whomever a more accurate taste of western life. When enough people had a good idea about what democracy was concretely and were ready to support it, I would then provide for military support with the expectation that the democrats would need sustained assistance for many decades. Of course, there might be lots of reasons why this still isn’t a good idea, especially that we might be able to do more good per dollar elsewhere. But I don’t think “we tried it (poorly) for 20 years and it didn’t work out” is a good criticism—we shouldn’t expect the kind of requisite culture change to happen over a single generation.
- petre 5y ago
  So now the US weapons supplied to the Afghan army fell into the hands of the Taliban?
  - busymom0 5y ago
    They are leaving behind several fully functioning military equipment which are now under Taliban's control. Basically a gift to them.
    - petre 5y ago
      So basically the exact thing that happened with Daesh in Iraq. I don't even know what to say. My country helped by sending support troops, some of them died there.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    Someone already gave them a supply of Stinger missiles.
  - ruined 5y ago
    yes. there are photos going around of rooms full of weaponry seized, and they are already patrolling in humvees and mraps. there are even some videos of probably ANA defects piloting American helicopters for the Taliban. https://instagram.com/p/CSj-3bgsxKQ https://instagram.com/p/CSj-3bgsxKQ this is absolutely astonishing to me. im honestly surprised the us didn't conduct airstrikes on the vacated armories and hangars. they just got a leg up from antique firearms and fertilizer bombs into modern weaponry and air force. i expect all of this to show up in Iraq, Syria, etc
    - nradov 5y ago
      On the positive side the Taliban won't be able to sustain those American helicopters for more than a few flights before they run out of spare parts. Iranian revolutionaries were able to continue operating American aircraft for a while by fabricating their own parts but the Taliban lack that capability.
- est31 5y ago
  The price tag sounds impressive at first but note that most of it never leaves american hands. Instead it is paid to contractors in key congressional districts.
  - iav 5y ago
    While that might be true, that's kind of saying that if I go around breaking windows, I'm helping the economy as people are going to go out and spend money to buy new windows. Our society produces a limited amount of goods and services, and any allocation to one project means we have a little bit less for everything else. Whether the beneficiary is American or not isn't really relevant as it doesn't change the end result that everyone else has to tighten their belts to make room for the war.
- temp8964 5y ago
  OMG! corrupt corrupt corrupt ! I can't believe how many times the US supported local governments have been accused of being corrupt! Kuomintang' China, South Korea, South Vietnam, Iraq, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. You name it! Every single local government supported by the U.S. was and is being accused of being corrupt. You know what? They are all corrupt judged by the western standard. Corruption is the norm in the countries need U.S. support. If, for God's sake, they can build a government which is not corrupt (like a consituational republic???), what kind of society would that be? Why would they even need U.S. support in the first place? And you know what? Corruption is not a choice of the central government. It is not like the central government can choose being corrupt or not. It is a reflection of the society it is in. It is just shameful that because of this extremely naive accusation, the U.S. government made countless foreign police mistakes.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Corruption is not a choice of the central government. Often, it is. > It is not like the central government can choose being corrupt or not. Sure it is. It can also choose how much energy to devote to rooting out corruption at lower levels, but in many of the cases at issue it was the very top leaders that were deeply corrupt, so corruption was, in fact, a very direct choice of the central government.
  - oldway 5y ago
    It's trying to install a puppet regime which ruled for the last 30 years and looted the country in Ethiopia which is hated by 90% of the country. The attitude for the US has changed in a country of more that 100 mil people.
- jscheel 5y ago
  $2 trillion that was paid for with debt. Estimates peg it at $6.5 trillion after interest.
deleted 5y ago
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oezi 5y ago
I am most surprised that there is no fighting back at all. Are all those deserting soldiers really thinking their lifes and the lifes of their families will be spared?
- nradov 5y ago
  Most of the regular soldiers and their families will be spared. The Taliban have nothing to gain now by killing them and making more enemies. They can afford to be magnanimous in victory. Reprisals will largely be targeted towards special operations troops who actually did fight against the Taliban instead of just running away, and the former translators whom we abandoned.
queuebert 5y ago
Agreed. I fear the cold calculus is ... Afghanistan is strategically important for Russia, not the U.S., and making it peaceful is actually not in the best interests of the U.S. If Russia wants a path to a warm-water port, then it can deal with it. I have no evidence of this, so just speculating on the actual motives.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I don't think it makes sense to speculate about a hidden calculus here, because the US military leadership and national security establishment were uniformly opposed to withdrawing from Afghanistan. The pressure to withdraw came from the general public.
- orange_website 5y ago
  I don't concretely know what's happening, but I have an idea. Why didn't the US State Department see the failure of the fledgling and corrupt democratic Afghanistan government? The US should have pulled out 10 years ago, or if it was actually interested in the strategic nature of Afghanistan, it could have arranged to purchase permanent bases independent of the Afghan government, fortify them, install missiles, occupy the Khyber Pass, block China/Russia, shore up rare earths, etc. So why didn't we take these actions sooner if we knew the government couldn't handle it? Incompetence? Too many cooks? My guess is that we were still interested in Afghanistan, but that this is a new shift in geopolitics. It's a chess move, and not one originated by the Trump or the Biden administration directly. My guess is that this is being done to appease Putin. The US is softening up on its approach to Russia as a regional counter against China. This is more important than having forces on the ground in Afghanistan (which have to fly in over Pakistan anyway). And of course it's more important than building and propping up democracies. If it weren't, we'd still be there. The story to look at now is China. This is a chess move in that story. Just my thoughts. I could be wrong.
  - wyldfire 5y ago
    > Why didn't the US State Department see the failure of the fledgling and corrupt democratic Afghanistan government? They almost certainly did, but they serve the foreign policy directives of the executive-at-the-time. > The US should have pulled out 10 years ago, Of course, but there's nearly no upside to breaking this status quo. It's all downside. Biden will take this hit because it looks embarrassing to withdraw and leave people worse off than when we found them. I agree with you: his predecessors should have done it.
dayforit 5y ago
There is an one particular group of winner from all of this tho. Why is it so hard for you and people to see? All was there to make profit from the war for certain people? It was never about the peace and it can't be. War profiteering is really really old proffession, isn't it? older than so many nations?
- vehementi 5y ago
  Like, of course this war has been about profiting arms companies etc. all along - did people think otherwise?
  - pydry 5y ago
    In 2002 they did. The war had, like 90% support among the public. I can still remember Jon Stewart saying "hey, afghanistan was good. we should have another one of those." A year or two later. That was the peacenik end of the political spectrum.
    - vehementi 5y ago
      It was obvious at the time (from outside the US)... I guess the propaganda was strong. I remember everyone I talked to seeing it was bullshit.
kazinator 5y ago
This was at least forty years in the making, starting with at least the Soviet-Afghan war. Afghanistan was used for conducting a proxy war between the Soviet Union and the USA, similarly to another Vietnam. This proxy war militarized the region and sowed the seeds for radicalism.
gremloni 5y ago
The Afghans want to live under sharia. They just want to do with money like the Saudis.
tlogan 5y ago
> women and girls have > vanished literally overnight. This is not a very intellectually honest comment. What about Saudi Arabia? What about women and girls there? Why raise issue about women rights in Afghanistan but be silent about Saudi Arabia, Emirates, etc. For god sake they are going to host World Cup.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Because even Saudi Arabia allows education for females. The Taliban does not (seriously, it’s a crime to teach women to read).
  - tlogan 5y ago
    I get it: we will do all kinds of moral gymnastics to keep Saudis (and others with oil) happy.
- sofixa 5y ago
  > This is not a very intellectually honest comment. What about Saudi Arabia? What about women and girls there? Why raise issue about women rights in Afghanistan but be silent about Saudi Arabia, Emirates, etc. For god sake they are going to host World Cup The Taliban don't allow women to get any sort of education or work, which is worse than the situation in SA, UAE and Qatar ( the ones who are going to host a World Cup)
jjcc 5y ago
There are many reasons why the mistakes happened again and again and can not be fixed. Mainly human cognition defects that confuse beliefs driven by spiritual satisfaction with solid facts. The deep root cause can not be addressed so they will make the same mistake again. If somebody want give some advice that can prevent the next 2-trillion dollar mistake here in HN what will happen? The advice will be down voted heavily and maybe it will been seen as a bot from repressive regime. So most of people know the ground truth but also understand this collective bias choose keep silent. In machine learning the trainer want to select the data from different sources to avoid over fitting. In real world there's no role acting as a god to feed different types of data. The human brain train their own neural networks. The consequence is people select the data that reinforce their existing belief because of impact from million of years evolution, even ignore the facts that can not add up. (Does any body suspect something wrong with all our perception due Taliban take control of power so quickly, I ask HNers think about it for intellectual challenge, not about or beyond politics )
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  I have a fine, really simple advice - don't start wars. I don't know where some US citizens take the idea that half of the world is longing to get invaded and westernized, it is simply not the case. If some politician tells you so, he/she is lying and you should seriously questions their motivation (like Bush' administration after 9/11 and its ties to companies who got many of the army orders). The idea that politicians are up there for the good of mankind if laughable at best, and dangerously naive at worst, regardless of country. Don't start wars half around the world for made up / weak reasons with a country that is not anyhow threatening you, the amount of evil that is 'inserted' into mankind doesn't dissipate but all of us have to deal with it for generations to come. On top of all the destruction and death/murders/rape/torture/etc. This is valid for any country, I may be bashing chinese in 10 years (and would be bashing colonizing west european states 100+ years ago), but for now its clear on whom this is aimed. I can't imagine how all the patriotic US veterans must feel now - all the things they went through and lost friends, physical and mental health meant much less than nothing. Nothing would mean there wasn't 20 years of war and death, that would be a damn fine thing compared to current situation. Oh and one final one, that one is also easy - don't start war in Afghanistan. Graveyard of empires they called it.
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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Jabbles 5y ago

This estimate suggests ~$800B https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-47391821 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-47391821

eplanit 5y ago
You're right, will correct.

uniacid 5y ago

$2 Trillion or so, also we have to admit the failure was the US changing its role there from hunting Bin Laden and the Taliban to "Nation building" with an obviously corrupt Govt that has always been there. It shouldn't be a surprise since you need a society that wants to actually break from the same continued cycle, unfortunately Afghanistan isn't it due to many reasons.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> we have to admit the failure was the US changing its role there from hunting Bin Laden and the Taliban to "Nation building" The cause of the failure was when, in 2003, the US decided to focus on an entirely unnecessary war of choice (aggression, really) in Iraq (and a whole bunch of propaganda own-goals scored in that war that affected the US particularly in the Islamic world reinforced that.) Nation building was always an element of fighting the Taliban, not mission drift, since having something stable and broadly supported in place was the key to prevent a resurgence.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I don’t have a strong opinion, but “nation building” always sounds like this horrible thing and I don’t quite understand why. Charitably, bringing democracy to corrupt, oppressed countries seems eminently desirable. Maybe nation building has a bad rep because it’s immensely difficult and we always fail at it (presumably it takes many decades and we always think it will take 5 years?). Genuinely trying to understand.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    It's just based on a flawed premise. Democracy functions based on the public's democratic beliefs about legitimacy and power, so you can't impose it on a country the way you can install a king or set up an occupational council. No matter how well you mimic the forms and functions of a democracy, if the fundamental root of power is "the Americans said this is how we're doing it", the government's gonna fall as soon as they stop saying that.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      I kind of agree, but culture is malleable and if you sustain democratic trappings for long enough the culture will adapt accordingly. I think this kind of culture change takes generations and our flaws have always been expecting the change to take place in a handful of years. Indeed, the Chinese and North Koreans have lived through the worst communism has to offer, but after a sustained period they have largely come to accept it as legitimate (although it requires a sustained investment in intense propaganda and isolationism because they are clearly stuck in a local optimum). Similarly Rome was pretty good at this sort of thing as it incorporated even backwater Britain into its empire. If I were going to go about nation building, I would “export democratic values” some 20 years in advance of any military action by way of film, literature, etc. Cynics can think of this as propaganda, but really it’s just giving Afghans or whomever a more accurate taste of western life. When enough people had a good idea about what democracy was concretely and were ready to support it, I would then provide for military support with the expectation that the democrats would need sustained assistance for many decades. Of course, there might be lots of reasons why this still isn’t a good idea, especially that we might be able to do more good per dollar elsewhere. But I don’t think “we tried it (poorly) for 20 years and it didn’t work out” is a good criticism—we shouldn’t expect the kind of requisite culture change to happen over a single generation.
petre 5y ago
So now the US weapons supplied to the Afghan army fell into the hands of the Taliban?
- busymom0 5y ago
  They are leaving behind several fully functioning military equipment which are now under Taliban's control. Basically a gift to them.
  - petre 5y ago
    So basically the exact thing that happened with Daesh in Iraq. I don't even know what to say. My country helped by sending support troops, some of them died there.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Someone already gave them a supply of Stinger missiles.
- ruined 5y ago
  yes. there are photos going around of rooms full of weaponry seized, and they are already patrolling in humvees and mraps. there are even some videos of probably ANA defects piloting American helicopters for the Taliban. https://instagram.com/p/CSj-3bgsxKQ https://instagram.com/p/CSj-3bgsxKQ this is absolutely astonishing to me. im honestly surprised the us didn't conduct airstrikes on the vacated armories and hangars. they just got a leg up from antique firearms and fertilizer bombs into modern weaponry and air force. i expect all of this to show up in Iraq, Syria, etc
  - nradov 5y ago
    On the positive side the Taliban won't be able to sustain those American helicopters for more than a few flights before they run out of spare parts. Iranian revolutionaries were able to continue operating American aircraft for a while by fabricating their own parts but the Taliban lack that capability.
est31 5y ago
The price tag sounds impressive at first but note that most of it never leaves american hands. Instead it is paid to contractors in key congressional districts.
- iav 5y ago
  While that might be true, that's kind of saying that if I go around breaking windows, I'm helping the economy as people are going to go out and spend money to buy new windows. Our society produces a limited amount of goods and services, and any allocation to one project means we have a little bit less for everything else. Whether the beneficiary is American or not isn't really relevant as it doesn't change the end result that everyone else has to tighten their belts to make room for the war.
temp8964 5y ago
OMG! corrupt corrupt corrupt ! I can't believe how many times the US supported local governments have been accused of being corrupt! Kuomintang' China, South Korea, South Vietnam, Iraq, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. You name it! Every single local government supported by the U.S. was and is being accused of being corrupt. You know what? They are all corrupt judged by the western standard. Corruption is the norm in the countries need U.S. support. If, for God's sake, they can build a government which is not corrupt (like a consituational republic???), what kind of society would that be? Why would they even need U.S. support in the first place? And you know what? Corruption is not a choice of the central government. It is not like the central government can choose being corrupt or not. It is a reflection of the society it is in. It is just shameful that because of this extremely naive accusation, the U.S. government made countless foreign police mistakes.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Corruption is not a choice of the central government. Often, it is. > It is not like the central government can choose being corrupt or not. Sure it is. It can also choose how much energy to devote to rooting out corruption at lower levels, but in many of the cases at issue it was the very top leaders that were deeply corrupt, so corruption was, in fact, a very direct choice of the central government.
- oldway 5y ago
  It's trying to install a puppet regime which ruled for the last 30 years and looted the country in Ethiopia which is hated by 90% of the country. The attitude for the US has changed in a country of more that 100 mil people.
jscheel 5y ago
$2 trillion that was paid for with debt. Estimates peg it at $6.5 trillion after interest.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

oezi 5y ago

I am most surprised that there is no fighting back at all. Are all those deserting soldiers really thinking their lifes and the lifes of their families will be spared?

nradov 5y ago
Most of the regular soldiers and their families will be spared. The Taliban have nothing to gain now by killing them and making more enemies. They can afford to be magnanimous in victory. Reprisals will largely be targeted towards special operations troops who actually did fight against the Taliban instead of just running away, and the former translators whom we abandoned.

queuebert 5y ago

Agreed. I fear the cold calculus is ... Afghanistan is strategically important for Russia, not the U.S., and making it peaceful is actually not in the best interests of the U.S. If Russia wants a path to a warm-water port, then it can deal with it. I have no evidence of this, so just speculating on the actual motives.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
I don't think it makes sense to speculate about a hidden calculus here, because the US military leadership and national security establishment were uniformly opposed to withdrawing from Afghanistan. The pressure to withdraw came from the general public.
orange_website 5y ago
I don't concretely know what's happening, but I have an idea. Why didn't the US State Department see the failure of the fledgling and corrupt democratic Afghanistan government? The US should have pulled out 10 years ago, or if it was actually interested in the strategic nature of Afghanistan, it could have arranged to purchase permanent bases independent of the Afghan government, fortify them, install missiles, occupy the Khyber Pass, block China/Russia, shore up rare earths, etc. So why didn't we take these actions sooner if we knew the government couldn't handle it? Incompetence? Too many cooks? My guess is that we were still interested in Afghanistan, but that this is a new shift in geopolitics. It's a chess move, and not one originated by the Trump or the Biden administration directly. My guess is that this is being done to appease Putin. The US is softening up on its approach to Russia as a regional counter against China. This is more important than having forces on the ground in Afghanistan (which have to fly in over Pakistan anyway). And of course it's more important than building and propping up democracies. If it weren't, we'd still be there. The story to look at now is China. This is a chess move in that story. Just my thoughts. I could be wrong.
- wyldfire 5y ago
  > Why didn't the US State Department see the failure of the fledgling and corrupt democratic Afghanistan government? They almost certainly did, but they serve the foreign policy directives of the executive-at-the-time. > The US should have pulled out 10 years ago, Of course, but there's nearly no upside to breaking this status quo. It's all downside. Biden will take this hit because it looks embarrassing to withdraw and leave people worse off than when we found them. I agree with you: his predecessors should have done it.

dayforit 5y ago

There is an one particular group of winner from all of this tho. Why is it so hard for you and people to see? All was there to make profit from the war for certain people? It was never about the peace and it can't be. War profiteering is really really old proffession, isn't it? older than so many nations?

vehementi 5y ago
Like, of course this war has been about profiting arms companies etc. all along - did people think otherwise?
- pydry 5y ago
  In 2002 they did. The war had, like 90% support among the public. I can still remember Jon Stewart saying "hey, afghanistan was good. we should have another one of those." A year or two later. That was the peacenik end of the political spectrum.
  - vehementi 5y ago
    It was obvious at the time (from outside the US)... I guess the propaganda was strong. I remember everyone I talked to seeing it was bullshit.

kazinator 5y ago

This was at least forty years in the making, starting with at least the Soviet-Afghan war. Afghanistan was used for conducting a proxy war between the Soviet Union and the USA, similarly to another Vietnam. This proxy war militarized the region and sowed the seeds for radicalism.

gremloni 5y ago

The Afghans want to live under sharia. They just want to do with money like the Saudis.

tlogan 5y ago

> women and girls have > vanished literally overnight. This is not a very intellectually honest comment. What about Saudi Arabia? What about women and girls there? Why raise issue about women rights in Afghanistan but be silent about Saudi Arabia, Emirates, etc. For god sake they are going to host World Cup.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
Because even Saudi Arabia allows education for females. The Taliban does not (seriously, it’s a crime to teach women to read).
- tlogan 5y ago
  I get it: we will do all kinds of moral gymnastics to keep Saudis (and others with oil) happy.
sofixa 5y ago
> This is not a very intellectually honest comment. What about Saudi Arabia? What about women and girls there? Why raise issue about women rights in Afghanistan but be silent about Saudi Arabia, Emirates, etc. For god sake they are going to host World Cup The Taliban don't allow women to get any sort of education or work, which is worse than the situation in SA, UAE and Qatar ( the ones who are going to host a World Cup)

jjcc 5y ago

There are many reasons why the mistakes happened again and again and can not be fixed. Mainly human cognition defects that confuse beliefs driven by spiritual satisfaction with solid facts. The deep root cause can not be addressed so they will make the same mistake again. If somebody want give some advice that can prevent the next 2-trillion dollar mistake here in HN what will happen? The advice will be down voted heavily and maybe it will been seen as a bot from repressive regime. So most of people know the ground truth but also understand this collective bias choose keep silent. In machine learning the trainer want to select the data from different sources to avoid over fitting. In real world there's no role acting as a god to feed different types of data. The human brain train their own neural networks. The consequence is people select the data that reinforce their existing belief because of impact from million of years evolution, even ignore the facts that can not add up. (Does any body suspect something wrong with all our perception due Taliban take control of power so quickly, I ask HNers think about it for intellectual challenge, not about or beyond politics )

saiya-jin 5y ago
I have a fine, really simple advice - don't start wars. I don't know where some US citizens take the idea that half of the world is longing to get invaded and westernized, it is simply not the case. If some politician tells you so, he/she is lying and you should seriously questions their motivation (like Bush' administration after 9/11 and its ties to companies who got many of the army orders). The idea that politicians are up there for the good of mankind if laughable at best, and dangerously naive at worst, regardless of country. Don't start wars half around the world for made up / weak reasons with a country that is not anyhow threatening you, the amount of evil that is 'inserted' into mankind doesn't dissipate but all of us have to deal with it for generations to come. On top of all the destruction and death/murders/rape/torture/etc. This is valid for any country, I may be bashing chinese in 10 years (and would be bashing colonizing west european states 100+ years ago), but for now its clear on whom this is aimed. I can't imagine how all the patriotic US veterans must feel now - all the things they went through and lost friends, physical and mental health meant much less than nothing. Nothing would mean there wasn't 20 years of war and death, that would be a damn fine thing compared to current situation. Oh and one final one, that one is also easy - don't start war in Afghanistan. Graveyard of empires they called it.

deleted 5y ago

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deleted 5y ago

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