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Given that this thread is driven by the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, I think it's important to remember that the invasion of Afghanistan was a NATO operatio

Given that this thread is driven by the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, I think it's important to remember that the invasion of Afghanistan was a NATO operation after NATO invoked Article 5 (Collective Defence) in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks that Al-Quaeda launched, organized by their leadership based in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban. There are a few additional facts folks forget since this is now 20 years later. Such as on Sept 10th, an assassination attack was launched against the Northern Alliance because they knew that the US would retaliate for the attacks coming the next day. There were also a number of Taliban leadership that directly aided in the planning and execution of 9/11. IMO, "nation building" is always an impossible mission. The objective should have been to attack, destroy the enemy, and leave - immediately. Punishing the sponsors of the 9/11 attacks, not entrenching an ideological split.

the-dude 5y ago
Since you are bringing up NATO, I will just spell out the Hague Invasion Act ELI5 : US Congress signed into law the a priori consent of invading the capitol of one of its NATO allies ( NL ). Disclaimer : I am Dutch.
- blunte 5y ago
  Perhaps the first line of defense against such an invasion would be to agitate the farmers, causing them to drive all their tractors back into town. It's pretty difficult to get anything done with them ruining all transportation.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    You'll certainly slow down the calvary units with tactics like those.
    - oaiey 5y ago
      When they will film that one day it will be glorious. First the landing in the smoke covered canals of Amsterdam, walks through the flower fields and then the final hunt in The Hague by feet due to the tractors.
  - heavenlyblue 5y ago
    You could do that today using Facebook
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
    > It's pretty difficult to get anything done with them ruining all transportation. If the US turn destroyed all the dikes, then it could use amphibious assault ships for troop transport.
    - Beldin 5y ago
      Destroying dikes is part of the Dutch defense plan, actually. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nieuwe_Hollandse_Waterlinie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nieuwe_Hollandse_Waterlinie Of course, officially, "this plan is abandoned" nowadays. Nevertheless, I'd bring boots if I were invading...
    - oaiey 5y ago
      That would be very mean.
  - FridayoLeary 5y ago
    Or make Sadiq khan the mayor...
  - the-dude 5y ago
    They will come in with helicopters, raid the ICC and fly out again.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  >> US Congress signed into law the a priori consent of invading the capitol of one of its NATO allies ( NL ). I don't know what that means. Can you explain?
  - lou1306 5y ago
    The so-called "Hague invasion act" allows the US President to use "any means necessary" to release any US citizen from custody by the International Criminal Court [0]. This, technically, gives the President the power to invade the Netherlands without getting (further) approval from Congress. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > This, technically, gives the President the power to invade the Netherlands without getting (further) approval from Congress. Insofar as it does that, it gives the President the authority to wage open ended war anywhere on the planet as long as a US citizen is held by the ICC, since the President has sole discretion to determine what means are necessary. OTOH, that provision is also arguably an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power with no effect whatsoever, since if it delegates anything less than the ability to do anything Congress could allow it isn't specified. On the gripping hand, the War Powers Act already allows the President to wage war to get a US citizen released from the ICC (and for almost any other reason) anywhere on the planet as long as they ask Congress before too long after starting the war.
blunte 5y ago
Until the full report of the investigation is released to the public, it's pointless to speculate on the decisions made after 9/11. There certainly appears to be indication that the real people behind it were not targeted for retribution. These days, unless the money trail is followed to its source, you never really know the full story. Yes I'm intionally not naming names/groups/countries, but we probably know who I'm talking about. It would not be the first time that a symbolic gesture was made that would appease the victims while not actually punishing those responsible. [ed-spelling] Actually in this case you have even more interests at play from many sides (since US strength in the middle east - because of oil interests) has been a priority for decades. Nation building seems to be a total ruse.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  >> It would not be the first time that a symbolic gesture was made that would appease the victims while not actually punishing those responsible. [ed-spelling] It's a human universal, unfortunately. https://youtu.be/ikTrjQ3Cdbo?t=78 https://youtu.be/ikTrjQ3Cdbo?t=78
- rayiner 5y ago
  After 20 years of the US getting jack shit from Afghanistan, you’d think the “we did it for the oil” people would have moved on. But no.
  - blunte 5y ago
    It's not about oil from Afghanistan, it's about a more solid presence in the region (and in some cases, about preventing an enemy/competitor from having that presence). Most countries around Afghanistan have oil. If Afghanistan could have been managed (as in, exploited without difficulty or consequence), then the US would have probably been financially wise to attempt what they attempted. But it turns out, after observing two major powers attempt to dominate Afghanistan, that it is just too messy to manage. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23608077 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23608077
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
youngtaff 5y ago
Unfortunately Western Governments would rather cosy up to Saudi Arabia and such like who actually seem to have been one of the primary sponsors of 9/11
- dragontamer 5y ago
  Saudi Arabia cooperated with the USA after 9/11. Taliban harbored Al Qaeda and helped OBL reach Pakistan safely. There's a big difference. Saudi Arabia has to answer for creating and sponsoring the ultra-conservative Wahhabi-cult of Islam, but that's getting further removed from the fundamental issue of protecting the 9/11 planners _after_ 9/11 (aka: what the Taliban did)
- koheripbal 5y ago
  Individual Saudis (and other gulf citizens) were the primary financial backers for Al-Quaeda. ...but the largest OUTFLOW of money from Al-Quaeda, a full 2/3rds of their annual budget was to fund the Taliban government - $20 million per year.
Pet_Ant 5y ago
> IMO, "nation building" is always an impossible mission. The objective should have been to attack, destroy the enemy, and leave - immediately. They should never do anything that makes the lives of ordinary Afghans worse who suffered more from the Taliban than the US. You can’t just bomb a country, create a power vacuum, and nope out of there. Moral cowardice in the extreme. As a counter example see Japan and Iraq.
- bitwize 5y ago
  Japan was "shock and awe" done (strategically, not morally) right. The US fire-bombed Tokyo and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leaving no question in the Japanese mind of who was the overwhelmingly superior force. There was no honor in death fighting such a force; there was only oblivion with nothing left to remember you by. The Japanese happily accepted rule by a "gaijin shogun" rather than face that kind of defeat. And MacArthur turned out to be a rather magnanimous shogun, even arranging for the Emperor to avoid liability for his role in the war and especially Pearl Harbor so that the Japanese had something of their traditional order to cling to during the American occupation and beyond. The political will to commit to that level of destruction and rebuilding hasn't existed since then. Iraq begat ISIS. Iraq was a clusterfuck since 1990.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    We were very fortunate Japan surrendered. They certainly didn't after nearly a year of fire bombing, they didn't after Hiroshima, and they almost didn't after Nagasaki. In fact there was an attempted coup when it was discovered the emperor wanted to surrender. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
- galangalalgol 5y ago
  This whole post is about holding leaders accountable. The same should be true for those leaders in Afghanistan who aided the attacks on 9/11. But staying to prop up a government in a nation that had already suffered a proxy war occupation by Russia, and had sent them packing (with our help) was always a doomed effort. The culture there won't permit such a thing. So I think leaving a power vacuum would have been the lesser evil, vs prolonging it, or leaving the guilty unaccountable, as we did in SA.
mschuster91 5y ago
> IMO, "nation building" is always an impossible mission. The objective should have been to attack, destroy the enemy, and leave - immediately. Punishing the sponsors of the 9/11 attacks, not entrenching an ideological split. That's bollocks. I'm German, had the Allied Powers followed the Morgenthau plan Germany would be essentially an Afghanistan today - an agro state and nothing more. But you all followed through with Marshall, and that was perhaps the ideal example that nation building works. It is just very complex, requires understanding of cultural differences, and patience. The Western countries didn't even have a proper post-immediate-hostility strategy (partially because Bush's cronies clearly hadn't invested a single second of thought beyond "how to fill the coffers of the MIC) in Afghanistan, much less a plan on how to give Afghanistan-the-country an economic perspective beyond farming opium. Afghanistan has a lot of precious natural resources: minerals, metals, oil and gas. Had the Western countries invested in kickstarting mining these, providing locals with employment and the government with a steady stream of funds, the situation would have been very difficult today. Especially since a population that has security, stability and income doesn't go and look for the next fundamentalist terrorist for a perspective! As a result: I refuse to put blame on any ANA soldier or civilian for deserting against the Taliban. Why fight for a country that has literally no way to survive on its own? And fwiw, the lack of a modern "Marshall Plan" clone is also what led to the shitshows that are Libya, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. You can't just go into a place, depose a dictator and then hope that the situation will turn out all right on its own. If you want democracy, you have to make it appealing to people!
- foobarian 5y ago
  > But you all followed through with Marshall, and that was perhaps the ideal example that nation building works. I don't know about this. I may call it "nation re-building" - Europe already had highly developed societies, infrastructure, and institutions. But coming into a less developed country and trying to insert those institutions by force - or even worse replace them - sounds unlikely to work. I wonder if maybe the Americans started actually believing the nation building stuff after saying it over and over for 5 decades...
- rayiner 5y ago
  You’re completely overlooking how unprepared Afghans are for secular democracy. Germany and Japan had well developed states before World War II. Afghanistan had never been more than a pastoral tribal society. They’re hundreds of years of development away from the democracy we tried to impose on them. See: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-afghanistan-occupation-and-the https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-afghanistan-occupation...
wintermutestwin 5y ago
>There were also a number of Taliban leadership that directly aided in the planning and execution of 9/11. Source? I've never heard that. All we ever heard was "harboring AQ."
- koheripbal 5y ago
  The support and relationship between the two organizations was bilateral and extremely close. > Prior to 9/11 the largest single al Qaeda expense was support for the Taliban, estimated at about $20 million per year. https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/staff_statements/911_TerrFin_Monograph.pdf https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/staff_statements/911_Ter... https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/16/911.commission/ https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/16/911.commission/ > As final preparations were under way during the summer of 2001, dissent emerged among al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan over whether to proceed. The Taliban's chief, Mullah Omar, opposed attacking the United States. Although facing opposition from many of his senior lieutenants, Bin Ladin effectively overruled their objections, and the attacks went forward. https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Exec.htm https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Exec.ht... There was also a report outlining several Taliban officials that were identified specifically in their roles, which I can't find anymore on google... ...and they continue to nurture that alliance: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2015/08/20/the-taliban-affirm-their-alliance-with-al-qaida-afghan-peace-talks-in-doubt/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2015/08/20/the-taliban... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/26/afghanistan.features11 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/26/afghanistan.fe...
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    Just by your summaries, these links do not seem to support your initial claim.

the-dude 5y ago

Since you are bringing up NATO, I will just spell out the Hague Invasion Act ELI5 : US Congress signed into law the a priori consent of invading the capitol of one of its NATO allies ( NL ). Disclaimer : I am Dutch.

blunte 5y ago
Perhaps the first line of defense against such an invasion would be to agitate the farmers, causing them to drive all their tractors back into town. It's pretty difficult to get anything done with them ruining all transportation.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  You'll certainly slow down the calvary units with tactics like those.
  - oaiey 5y ago
    When they will film that one day it will be glorious. First the landing in the smoke covered canals of Amsterdam, walks through the flower fields and then the final hunt in The Hague by feet due to the tractors.
- heavenlyblue 5y ago
  You could do that today using Facebook
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  > It's pretty difficult to get anything done with them ruining all transportation. If the US turn destroyed all the dikes, then it could use amphibious assault ships for troop transport.
  - Beldin 5y ago
    Destroying dikes is part of the Dutch defense plan, actually. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nieuwe_Hollandse_Waterlinie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nieuwe_Hollandse_Waterlinie Of course, officially, "this plan is abandoned" nowadays. Nevertheless, I'd bring boots if I were invading...
  - oaiey 5y ago
    That would be very mean.
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  Or make Sadiq khan the mayor...
- the-dude 5y ago
  They will come in with helicopters, raid the ICC and fly out again.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> US Congress signed into law the a priori consent of invading the capitol of one of its NATO allies ( NL ). I don't know what that means. Can you explain?
- lou1306 5y ago
  The so-called "Hague invasion act" allows the US President to use "any means necessary" to release any US citizen from custody by the International Criminal Court [0]. This, technically, gives the President the power to invade the Netherlands without getting (further) approval from Congress. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > This, technically, gives the President the power to invade the Netherlands without getting (further) approval from Congress. Insofar as it does that, it gives the President the authority to wage open ended war anywhere on the planet as long as a US citizen is held by the ICC, since the President has sole discretion to determine what means are necessary. OTOH, that provision is also arguably an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power with no effect whatsoever, since if it delegates anything less than the ability to do anything Congress could allow it isn't specified. On the gripping hand, the War Powers Act already allows the President to wage war to get a US citizen released from the ICC (and for almost any other reason) anywhere on the planet as long as they ask Congress before too long after starting the war.

blunte 5y ago

Until the full report of the investigation is released to the public, it's pointless to speculate on the decisions made after 9/11. There certainly appears to be indication that the real people behind it were not targeted for retribution. These days, unless the money trail is followed to its source, you never really know the full story. Yes I'm intionally not naming names/groups/countries, but we probably know who I'm talking about. It would not be the first time that a symbolic gesture was made that would appease the victims while not actually punishing those responsible. [ed-spelling] Actually in this case you have even more interests at play from many sides (since US strength in the middle east - because of oil interests) has been a priority for decades. Nation building seems to be a total ruse.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> It would not be the first time that a symbolic gesture was made that would appease the victims while not actually punishing those responsible. [ed-spelling] It's a human universal, unfortunately. https://youtu.be/ikTrjQ3Cdbo?t=78 https://youtu.be/ikTrjQ3Cdbo?t=78
rayiner 5y ago
After 20 years of the US getting jack shit from Afghanistan, you’d think the “we did it for the oil” people would have moved on. But no.
- blunte 5y ago
  It's not about oil from Afghanistan, it's about a more solid presence in the region (and in some cases, about preventing an enemy/competitor from having that presence). Most countries around Afghanistan have oil. If Afghanistan could have been managed (as in, exploited without difficulty or consequence), then the US would have probably been financially wise to attempt what they attempted. But it turns out, after observing two major powers attempt to dominate Afghanistan, that it is just too messy to manage. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23608077 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23608077
- AlexandrB 5y ago

youngtaff 5y ago

Unfortunately Western Governments would rather cosy up to Saudi Arabia and such like who actually seem to have been one of the primary sponsors of 9/11

dragontamer 5y ago
Saudi Arabia cooperated with the USA after 9/11. Taliban harbored Al Qaeda and helped OBL reach Pakistan safely. There's a big difference. Saudi Arabia has to answer for creating and sponsoring the ultra-conservative Wahhabi-cult of Islam, but that's getting further removed from the fundamental issue of protecting the 9/11 planners _after_ 9/11 (aka: what the Taliban did)
koheripbal 5y ago
Individual Saudis (and other gulf citizens) were the primary financial backers for Al-Quaeda. ...but the largest OUTFLOW of money from Al-Quaeda, a full 2/3rds of their annual budget was to fund the Taliban government - $20 million per year.

Pet_Ant 5y ago

> IMO, "nation building" is always an impossible mission. The objective should have been to attack, destroy the enemy, and leave - immediately. They should never do anything that makes the lives of ordinary Afghans worse who suffered more from the Taliban than the US. You can’t just bomb a country, create a power vacuum, and nope out of there. Moral cowardice in the extreme. As a counter example see Japan and Iraq.

bitwize 5y ago
Japan was "shock and awe" done (strategically, not morally) right. The US fire-bombed Tokyo and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leaving no question in the Japanese mind of who was the overwhelmingly superior force. There was no honor in death fighting such a force; there was only oblivion with nothing left to remember you by. The Japanese happily accepted rule by a "gaijin shogun" rather than face that kind of defeat. And MacArthur turned out to be a rather magnanimous shogun, even arranging for the Emperor to avoid liability for his role in the war and especially Pearl Harbor so that the Japanese had something of their traditional order to cling to during the American occupation and beyond. The political will to commit to that level of destruction and rebuilding hasn't existed since then. Iraq begat ISIS. Iraq was a clusterfuck since 1990.
- Clubber 5y ago
  We were very fortunate Japan surrendered. They certainly didn't after nearly a year of fire bombing, they didn't after Hiroshima, and they almost didn't after Nagasaki. In fact there was an attempted coup when it was discovered the emperor wanted to surrender. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
galangalalgol 5y ago
This whole post is about holding leaders accountable. The same should be true for those leaders in Afghanistan who aided the attacks on 9/11. But staying to prop up a government in a nation that had already suffered a proxy war occupation by Russia, and had sent them packing (with our help) was always a doomed effort. The culture there won't permit such a thing. So I think leaving a power vacuum would have been the lesser evil, vs prolonging it, or leaving the guilty unaccountable, as we did in SA.

mschuster91 5y ago

> IMO, "nation building" is always an impossible mission. The objective should have been to attack, destroy the enemy, and leave - immediately. Punishing the sponsors of the 9/11 attacks, not entrenching an ideological split. That's bollocks. I'm German, had the Allied Powers followed the Morgenthau plan Germany would be essentially an Afghanistan today - an agro state and nothing more. But you all followed through with Marshall, and that was perhaps the ideal example that nation building works. It is just very complex, requires understanding of cultural differences, and patience. The Western countries didn't even have a proper post-immediate-hostility strategy (partially because Bush's cronies clearly hadn't invested a single second of thought beyond "how to fill the coffers of the MIC) in Afghanistan, much less a plan on how to give Afghanistan-the-country an economic perspective beyond farming opium. Afghanistan has a lot of precious natural resources: minerals, metals, oil and gas. Had the Western countries invested in kickstarting mining these, providing locals with employment and the government with a steady stream of funds, the situation would have been very difficult today. Especially since a population that has security, stability and income doesn't go and look for the next fundamentalist terrorist for a perspective! As a result: I refuse to put blame on any ANA soldier or civilian for deserting against the Taliban. Why fight for a country that has literally no way to survive on its own? And fwiw, the lack of a modern "Marshall Plan" clone is also what led to the shitshows that are Libya, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. You can't just go into a place, depose a dictator and then hope that the situation will turn out all right on its own. If you want democracy, you have to make it appealing to people!

foobarian 5y ago
> But you all followed through with Marshall, and that was perhaps the ideal example that nation building works. I don't know about this. I may call it "nation re-building" - Europe already had highly developed societies, infrastructure, and institutions. But coming into a less developed country and trying to insert those institutions by force - or even worse replace them - sounds unlikely to work. I wonder if maybe the Americans started actually believing the nation building stuff after saying it over and over for 5 decades...
rayiner 5y ago
You’re completely overlooking how unprepared Afghans are for secular democracy. Germany and Japan had well developed states before World War II. Afghanistan had never been more than a pastoral tribal society. They’re hundreds of years of development away from the democracy we tried to impose on them. See: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-afghanistan-occupation-and-the https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-afghanistan-occupation...

wintermutestwin 5y ago

>There were also a number of Taliban leadership that directly aided in the planning and execution of 9/11. Source? I've never heard that. All we ever heard was "harboring AQ."

koheripbal 5y ago
The support and relationship between the two organizations was bilateral and extremely close. > Prior to 9/11 the largest single al Qaeda expense was support for the Taliban, estimated at about $20 million per year. https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/staff_statements/911_TerrFin_Monograph.pdf https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/staff_statements/911_Ter... https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/16/911.commission/ https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/16/911.commission/ > As final preparations were under way during the summer of 2001, dissent emerged among al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan over whether to proceed. The Taliban's chief, Mullah Omar, opposed attacking the United States. Although facing opposition from many of his senior lieutenants, Bin Ladin effectively overruled their objections, and the attacks went forward. https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Exec.htm https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Exec.ht... There was also a report outlining several Taliban officials that were identified specifically in their roles, which I can't find anymore on google... ...and they continue to nurture that alliance: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2015/08/20/the-taliban-affirm-their-alliance-with-al-qaida-afghan-peace-talks-in-doubt/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2015/08/20/the-taliban... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/26/afghanistan.features11 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/26/afghanistan.fe...
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  Just by your summaries, these links do not seem to support your initial claim.