8 ms·

Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp?

101 points by freddier 5y ago

pjc50 5y ago
The parallel with Jan 6 is instructive; memetic insurgency, but this time successful. As is the Taliban being far better at state-building than the highly corrupt puppet state, whose leaders packed as much cash as possible into their SUVs and fled for Uzbekistan. Should these people have been banned from Twitter and Whatsapp? Well, did they break any rules of the service or are we back to having the CIA hand them a list of enemies? Moreover, did anyone even care enough?
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > The parallel with Jan 6 is instructive; memetic insurgency There is no parallel. The Capitol protesters were unarmed, and were allowed into the building by police. (One of the first arrested was a BLM/antifa-affiliate person.) Same situation as when Democrat Party protesters entered the Capitol in 2018 - there's pictures online, and they look the same as Jan. 6. Video discussing AOC's Three Fabricated Stories about Jan. 6 (She was half a mile from the Capitol Building at the time) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=207wWplqmqs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=207wWplqmqs (The first time I saw a video of AOC, she was telling a paranoid story on the floor of the House about somebody she encountered outside that day. She has a victimhood complex along with delusions about what's real and what's not real.)
diragon 5y ago
Was Afghanistan America's during these 20 years? American taxpayers must be thrilled about this little trip.
throwaway468845 5y ago
'disruption'.
hamburgerwah 5y ago
Read ghost wars and directorate S. Few simple narratives explain afghanistan. It is a clusterfuck but for reasons that are definitely not at all related to whatsapp. In the simplest expression it has been a proxy war with pakistan or at least pakistans psuedo-separate intelligence services. If you want to talk win and lose, we "lost" afghanistan in february 1989 when the soviets left and we promptly abandoned all the afghanis that helped us to assist in driving them out.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Ah, the old Afghanistan resistance. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/robert-fisk-osama-bin-laden-interview-sudan-1993-b1562374.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/robert-fisk-os... (1993)
- Seanambers 5y ago
  From what I gather Pakistan has never been a good ally to the US. Still they receive both military and humanitarian aid to the tune of billions each year. And they were the ones sheltering Bin Laden and from what I can gather the ISI - Pakistani intelligence is the ones funding Taliban. It strikes me as very strange that the US hasn't pressured Pakistan more over the years and that it has accepted this behavior all this time.
  - silurian 5y ago
    Pakistan has never been a good ally to anyone but Muslim majority countries and Islamic terrorist groups. Pakistan is now heavily indebted and dependent on China for economy, military and finance. They will reap what they sow. In 20 years time, they will be begging the West & Western institutions for assistance & intervention and I hope we can all turn our back on them.
    - dang 5y ago
      You can't use HN for nationalistic (or religious) flamewar. We ban accounts that do, and I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
kennethh 5y ago
This article about the fall of Saigon is interesting, lots of pictures of people evacuation. https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/fall-of-saigon-vietnam-anniversary/13/ https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/fall-of-saigon-vietnam-anni... Almost same situation, trying to "save" people who do not want to be "saved"
- pjc50 5y ago
  I recently found out what the significance of this day is to modern Vietnam: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reunification_Day https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reunification_Day Mind you, it's important to note that a lot of the people fleeing Afghanistan right now are absolutely right to do so because they risk execution under the incoming regime, and the West should grant them asylum. We can and should save individuals, even if "we" cannot "save" Afghanistan as a whole.
dependsontheq 5y ago
There are enough other networks and apps they could use. It’s just a modern communication channel. The surrender of complete provinces has nothing to do with WhatsApp or Twitter but is a cultural practice in the 40 years Afghan war.
aaron695 5y ago
It's a good article. I liked this interview where the commentator (Peter Bergen) talks about the symbolism of the USA pulling out. It didn't matter if they were doing nothing, just being there was enough even with limited troops https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2021/08/14/was-it-a-mistake-for-u-s-to-leave-afghanistan.cnn https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2021/08/14/was-it-a-mistak... Which this article plays too. The US left and the default became the Taliban, like a run on the bank. The Taliban needed a free flowing network to get the run going, WhatsApp might have been it. It's certainly an intelligence failure if WhatsApp wasn't considered in depth.
amriksohata 5y ago
No, because they are backed by Pakistan playing double game
- vosper 5y ago
  And Qatar. And Iran. And Russia. And (to a lesser extent - mostly just keen on extracting the minerals) China. BBC’s The Briefing Room had a good podcast about this “Who’s Supporting the Taliban” https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000ymn1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000ymn1
webreac 5y ago
After having raised hopes of democracy in part of the Afghan population, the United States opens the door to the Taliban. Even the "democrats" will hate the US. This disaster is not a surprise: it was announced. I don't have the solution, but what Afghanistan is going through saddens me.
reilly3000 5y ago
For me it’s hard to pin this on Facebook. E2E encryption should mean the provider has no idea about its content, only metadata. The author is right to blame US intel, as it clearly either legitimately had no idea what was about to happen or set Biden up tor embarrassment. However regressive the Taliban turns out to govern, they did everyone right by making this happen peacefully. I just worry all of that about all that Afghan Military equipment and training that they now possess. Is there a dead-man switch on the gear? With that kind of firepower I worry they would feel more empowered to behave in an extreme manner towards their people, knowing an outside or inside force dare not stand against them.
- swiley 5y ago
  They have all the metadata and have made it clear that they are analyzing it. Either their marketing is a complete lie or they were very aware of this. It's not unusual for Facebook to just ignore things like this. It's a popular platform for grooming children and Instagram is how people are buying drugs now. As far as I can tell effective moderation of these global platforms might be impossible (or unprofitable.)
zozbot234 5y ago
Meh. WhatsApp had been used by anti-Taliban factions before as mentioned by OP, now the other side is also using it. What's newsworthy about this, exactly? They could be using any number of other channels instead, and it wouldn't change much. We "lost" Afghanistan because as it turned out, no one there actually cared in the least about putting up a fight, even after we spent a lot of resources on giving them the means of doing so. Just let them reap what they have sowed.
- boublepop 5y ago
  > What's newsworthy about this, exactly? The article does a good job of explaining exactly that. Sure other means of communication exist, but the fact that they Taliban put together an ad-hoc reporting system in zero time while running it all through American Servers that could be easily shut down but wasn’t points to either extreme incompetence or willful ignorance.
jl2718 5y ago
This is exactly what they did the first time around, but with a little more tech.
whoaisme 5y ago
Isn't there a general rule where if it's a stupid headline like this the answer is no? So sick of idiots that couldn't predict the obvious now opining about the reasoning behind events they were so consistently wrong about. If we could send these hacks straight into Kabul and the hands of the Taliban western civilization would be a better place.
cheaprentalyeti 5y ago
I've seen this linked elsewhere. The short answer is: No. America lost Afghanistan because we spent twenty years fighting a proxy war with Pakistan without ever being able to actually talk about it. Just like we can't talk about Ecohealth Alliance making the Damn Virus or the fraudulent studies that they used to ban treating the Damn Virus with HCQ, or Obama sending the OPM Database to China, or Joe Biden being a senile puppet. It's rather like how 1940 Russia couldn't talk about how Stalin spent the previous ten years purging the Soviet Army on German Intelligence's orders. It'll all be disturbingly meta and recursively when this comment is voted down so y'all won't have to see all the things y'all won't talk about being talked about.
- mjreacher 5y ago
  It's less so that people are downvoting you because we don't want to talk about these things but rather because you present grandiose claims without presenting any evidence for them.
- graderjs 5y ago
  Biden: "America is back". Throgold: "Back" where? In second place? As the Middle-East's hierodule? - from the bookthetic: Dreams in Trumpistan - A field guide to navigating the United States of China in a post-COVID world. In reply to your above: Can you expoind on the idea that Afghan war was US-vs-Paki proxy war? I thought it was at least US-vs-China or US-vs-Russia or US-vs-Israel (weird...but)???
anm89 5y ago
No. I don't have to read this to know the answer is no.
- indispensible 5y ago
  If you're not familiar with Betteridge's law of headlines, you may be interested to learn of its existence: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...
rini17 5y ago
Wonder if this contributed to recent Chinese decision to choke the social networking (misnamed by SV as "tech") sector.
miguelmurca 5y ago
> I’m a tech guy, not a military guy. And in terms of the kind of tech I’m into it’s that weird decentralized crypto tech like Bitcoin, not SaaS.
tharne 5y ago
What aren't any media outlets picking this up? While the issue is larger than whatsapp, this is an angle that's worth acknowledging and discussing -- An insurgent force used an American tech platform to take over a country, while a former President is banned from that service. Regardless of what you think of the situation, this definitely falls into the category of "man bites dog".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vb6sp6 5y ago
  Picking up what? A blogpost by Preston Byrne? A person you have never heard of until today? Let's take a look at his credentials: "Preston Byrne is a partner in the New York office of Anderson Kill. A corporate lawyer with extensive experience working with cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies, Preston is a member of the firm's Technology, Media and Distributed Systems group as well as its Corporate and Commercial Litigation Group. Preston writes and speaks about, and is quoted widely by print media on, technology law matters." So this blogpost is basically giant hn comment. Any media outlet that "picked this up" would be laughed at. He actually quotes himself at the bottom of the article lol
  - tharne 5y ago
    Don't fall into the trap of credentialism. While the author may not be known outside of the Bitcoin world, he points to a whole slew of public social media posts that clearly show the Taliban usiing a service run by a large American tech company to do all sorts of things that would get most American users banned. Any decent journalism outfit should at least dig into that a little bit - perhaps reach out to Facebook and ask if they had noticed any of this. After all, this was the same company that didn't see anything unusual about American political ads being purchased in Rubles back in 2016.
  - Koiwai 5y ago
    I suppose he meant the fact that whatsapp is used by taliban.
  - 5y ago
skarz 5y ago
This is one guy who says he is a tech expert taking wildly incorrect guesses as to why the Taliban succeeded. It's basically a long HN comment.
calltrak 5y ago
I like the fact that Taliban did not socially distance, wear a mask, or need a vaccine "freedom" passport to take over the country. Strange that ....
vanusa 5y ago
Interesting story, but the short answer is no, the U.S. did not "lose" Afghanistan because of an app. It lost because it (by that I mean the U.S. public) never believed in the mission there (which never had much of a strategic rationale in the first place). And because the Taliban, despite enormous setbacks, never lost faith in theirs. Yes the narrative is "complex" and there's also Pakistan, etc. But in a nutshell, that's what it boils down to.
silexia 5y ago
Wow this article was super insightful into how the Taliban accomplished taking Afghanistan.

101 points by freddier 5y ago

The parallel with Jan 6 is instructive; memetic insurgency, but this time successful. As is the Taliban being far better at state-building than the highly corrupt puppet state, whose leaders packed as much cash as possible into their SUVs and fled for Uzbekistan. Should these people have been banned from Twitter and Whatsapp? Well, did they break any rules of the service or are we back to having the CIA hand them a list of enemies? Moreover, did anyone even care enough?

redis_mlc 5y ago
> The parallel with Jan 6 is instructive; memetic insurgency There is no parallel. The Capitol protesters were unarmed, and were allowed into the building by police. (One of the first arrested was a BLM/antifa-affiliate person.) Same situation as when Democrat Party protesters entered the Capitol in 2018 - there's pictures online, and they look the same as Jan. 6. Video discussing AOC's Three Fabricated Stories about Jan. 6 (She was half a mile from the Capitol Building at the time) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=207wWplqmqs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=207wWplqmqs (The first time I saw a video of AOC, she was telling a paranoid story on the floor of the House about somebody she encountered outside that day. She has a victimhood complex along with delusions about what's real and what's not real.)

diragon 5y ago

Was Afghanistan America's during these 20 years? American taxpayers must be thrilled about this little trip.

throwaway468845 5y ago

'disruption'.

hamburgerwah 5y ago

Read ghost wars and directorate S. Few simple narratives explain afghanistan. It is a clusterfuck but for reasons that are definitely not at all related to whatsapp. In the simplest expression it has been a proxy war with pakistan or at least pakistans psuedo-separate intelligence services. If you want to talk win and lose, we "lost" afghanistan in february 1989 when the soviets left and we promptly abandoned all the afghanis that helped us to assist in driving them out.

pjc50 5y ago
Ah, the old Afghanistan resistance. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/robert-fisk-osama-bin-laden-interview-sudan-1993-b1562374.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/robert-fisk-os... (1993)
Seanambers 5y ago
From what I gather Pakistan has never been a good ally to the US. Still they receive both military and humanitarian aid to the tune of billions each year. And they were the ones sheltering Bin Laden and from what I can gather the ISI - Pakistani intelligence is the ones funding Taliban. It strikes me as very strange that the US hasn't pressured Pakistan more over the years and that it has accepted this behavior all this time.
- silurian 5y ago
  Pakistan has never been a good ally to anyone but Muslim majority countries and Islamic terrorist groups. Pakistan is now heavily indebted and dependent on China for economy, military and finance. They will reap what they sow. In 20 years time, they will be begging the West & Western institutions for assistance & intervention and I hope we can all turn our back on them.
  - dang 5y ago
    You can't use HN for nationalistic (or religious) flamewar. We ban accounts that do, and I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

kennethh 5y ago

This article about the fall of Saigon is interesting, lots of pictures of people evacuation. https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/fall-of-saigon-vietnam-anniversary/13/ https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/fall-of-saigon-vietnam-anni... Almost same situation, trying to "save" people who do not want to be "saved"

pjc50 5y ago
I recently found out what the significance of this day is to modern Vietnam: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reunification_Day https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reunification_Day Mind you, it's important to note that a lot of the people fleeing Afghanistan right now are absolutely right to do so because they risk execution under the incoming regime, and the West should grant them asylum. We can and should save individuals, even if "we" cannot "save" Afghanistan as a whole.

dependsontheq 5y ago

There are enough other networks and apps they could use. It’s just a modern communication channel. The surrender of complete provinces has nothing to do with WhatsApp or Twitter but is a cultural practice in the 40 years Afghan war.

aaron695 5y ago

It's a good article. I liked this interview where the commentator (Peter Bergen) talks about the symbolism of the USA pulling out. It didn't matter if they were doing nothing, just being there was enough even with limited troops https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2021/08/14/was-it-a-mistake-for-u-s-to-leave-afghanistan.cnn https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2021/08/14/was-it-a-mistak... Which this article plays too. The US left and the default became the Taliban, like a run on the bank. The Taliban needed a free flowing network to get the run going, WhatsApp might have been it. It's certainly an intelligence failure if WhatsApp wasn't considered in depth.

amriksohata 5y ago

No, because they are backed by Pakistan playing double game

vosper 5y ago
And Qatar. And Iran. And Russia. And (to a lesser extent - mostly just keen on extracting the minerals) China. BBC’s The Briefing Room had a good podcast about this “Who’s Supporting the Taliban” https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000ymn1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000ymn1

webreac 5y ago

After having raised hopes of democracy in part of the Afghan population, the United States opens the door to the Taliban. Even the "democrats" will hate the US. This disaster is not a surprise: it was announced. I don't have the solution, but what Afghanistan is going through saddens me.

reilly3000 5y ago

For me it’s hard to pin this on Facebook. E2E encryption should mean the provider has no idea about its content, only metadata. The author is right to blame US intel, as it clearly either legitimately had no idea what was about to happen or set Biden up tor embarrassment. However regressive the Taliban turns out to govern, they did everyone right by making this happen peacefully. I just worry all of that about all that Afghan Military equipment and training that they now possess. Is there a dead-man switch on the gear? With that kind of firepower I worry they would feel more empowered to behave in an extreme manner towards their people, knowing an outside or inside force dare not stand against them.

swiley 5y ago
They have all the metadata and have made it clear that they are analyzing it. Either their marketing is a complete lie or they were very aware of this. It's not unusual for Facebook to just ignore things like this. It's a popular platform for grooming children and Instagram is how people are buying drugs now. As far as I can tell effective moderation of these global platforms might be impossible (or unprofitable.)

zozbot234 5y ago

Meh. WhatsApp had been used by anti-Taliban factions before as mentioned by OP, now the other side is also using it. What's newsworthy about this, exactly? They could be using any number of other channels instead, and it wouldn't change much. We "lost" Afghanistan because as it turned out, no one there actually cared in the least about putting up a fight, even after we spent a lot of resources on giving them the means of doing so. Just let them reap what they have sowed.

boublepop 5y ago
> What's newsworthy about this, exactly? The article does a good job of explaining exactly that. Sure other means of communication exist, but the fact that they Taliban put together an ad-hoc reporting system in zero time while running it all through American Servers that could be easily shut down but wasn’t points to either extreme incompetence or willful ignorance.

jl2718 5y ago

This is exactly what they did the first time around, but with a little more tech.

whoaisme 5y ago

Isn't there a general rule where if it's a stupid headline like this the answer is no? So sick of idiots that couldn't predict the obvious now opining about the reasoning behind events they were so consistently wrong about. If we could send these hacks straight into Kabul and the hands of the Taliban western civilization would be a better place.

cheaprentalyeti 5y ago

I've seen this linked elsewhere. The short answer is: No. America lost Afghanistan because we spent twenty years fighting a proxy war with Pakistan without ever being able to actually talk about it. Just like we can't talk about Ecohealth Alliance making the Damn Virus or the fraudulent studies that they used to ban treating the Damn Virus with HCQ, or Obama sending the OPM Database to China, or Joe Biden being a senile puppet. It's rather like how 1940 Russia couldn't talk about how Stalin spent the previous ten years purging the Soviet Army on German Intelligence's orders. It'll all be disturbingly meta and recursively when this comment is voted down so y'all won't have to see all the things y'all won't talk about being talked about.

mjreacher 5y ago
It's less so that people are downvoting you because we don't want to talk about these things but rather because you present grandiose claims without presenting any evidence for them.
graderjs 5y ago
Biden: "America is back". Throgold: "Back" where? In second place? As the Middle-East's hierodule? - from the bookthetic: Dreams in Trumpistan - A field guide to navigating the United States of China in a post-COVID world. In reply to your above: Can you expoind on the idea that Afghan war was US-vs-Paki proxy war? I thought it was at least US-vs-China or US-vs-Russia or US-vs-Israel (weird...but)???

anm89 5y ago

No. I don't have to read this to know the answer is no.

indispensible 5y ago
If you're not familiar with Betteridge's law of headlines, you may be interested to learn of its existence: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...

rini17 5y ago

Wonder if this contributed to recent Chinese decision to choke the social networking (misnamed by SV as "tech") sector.

miguelmurca 5y ago

> I’m a tech guy, not a military guy. And in terms of the kind of tech I’m into it’s that weird decentralized crypto tech like Bitcoin, not SaaS.

tharne 5y ago

What aren't any media outlets picking this up? While the issue is larger than whatsapp, this is an angle that's worth acknowledging and discussing -- An insurgent force used an American tech platform to take over a country, while a former President is banned from that service. Regardless of what you think of the situation, this definitely falls into the category of "man bites dog".

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
vb6sp6 5y ago
Picking up what? A blogpost by Preston Byrne? A person you have never heard of until today? Let's take a look at his credentials: "Preston Byrne is a partner in the New York office of Anderson Kill. A corporate lawyer with extensive experience working with cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies, Preston is a member of the firm's Technology, Media and Distributed Systems group as well as its Corporate and Commercial Litigation Group. Preston writes and speaks about, and is quoted widely by print media on, technology law matters." So this blogpost is basically giant hn comment. Any media outlet that "picked this up" would be laughed at. He actually quotes himself at the bottom of the article lol
- tharne 5y ago
  Don't fall into the trap of credentialism. While the author may not be known outside of the Bitcoin world, he points to a whole slew of public social media posts that clearly show the Taliban usiing a service run by a large American tech company to do all sorts of things that would get most American users banned. Any decent journalism outfit should at least dig into that a little bit - perhaps reach out to Facebook and ask if they had noticed any of this. After all, this was the same company that didn't see anything unusual about American political ads being purchased in Rubles back in 2016.
- Koiwai 5y ago
  I suppose he meant the fact that whatsapp is used by taliban.
- 5y ago

skarz 5y ago

This is one guy who says he is a tech expert taking wildly incorrect guesses as to why the Taliban succeeded. It's basically a long HN comment.

calltrak 5y ago

I like the fact that Taliban did not socially distance, wear a mask, or need a vaccine "freedom" passport to take over the country. Strange that ....

vanusa 5y ago

Interesting story, but the short answer is no, the U.S. did not "lose" Afghanistan because of an app. It lost because it (by that I mean the U.S. public) never believed in the mission there (which never had much of a strategic rationale in the first place). And because the Taliban, despite enormous setbacks, never lost faith in theirs. Yes the narrative is "complex" and there's also Pakistan, etc. But in a nutshell, that's what it boils down to.

silexia 5y ago

Wow this article was super insightful into how the Taliban accomplished taking Afghanistan.