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Afghanistan was a war of attrition that the locals felt the most of. Likely one of those wars that your dad and granddad fought (if you trace it back from the S

Afghanistan was a war of attrition that the locals felt the most of. Likely one of those wars that your dad and granddad fought (if you trace it back from the Soviet invasion) and somehow you also ended up fighting in. After a while everyone gets tired and they want to live in peace and not die in a war. Can see why it ended the way it did.

nullifidian 5y ago
It wasn't anywhere near close to a war of attrition. It was a war of different value systems, and one of these value systems simply can't win certain types of war. For Taliban it was not a problem to hide among the civil population, and for the Americans it was problematic to commit China-style ethnocide, or at the least institute authoritarianish high-security measures, depopulate the rural areas, to actually win this war.
- forkLding 5y ago
  War of attrition encompasses guerrilla warfare which is what the Taliban used, see definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attrition_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attrition_warfare War of attrition does not mean casualty numbers, it means the goal of the war is to wear down the enemy so that their will to fight collapses which both the Taliban and the US tried to do, see: https://www.csis.org/analysis/afghan-war-attrition-peace-talks-remain-extension-war-other-means https://www.csis.org/analysis/afghan-war-attrition-peace-tal...
  - forz877 5y ago
    >War of attrition does not mean casualty numbers War of attrition almost certainly requires high continual casualty numbers, it's literally in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article: > Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel.
- kiba 5y ago
  I don't believe these measures contrary to our values would be something that helps us "win" the war, especially not in way that we would have liked. But I do believe that the American people's heart were not into the fight, especially when it became a "forgotten" war. If we commit our full effort and our mind, we might have won the way we would stomach. In the end, if this is not the kind of war the American people are willing to fight, then we shouldn't entered them.
  - merpnderp 5y ago
    Afghanistan has always been poor and its people fractured because it was cut off from the world by its topography, but topography can be overcome. If the US had spent the last 20 years building infrastructure, railroads, highways, mining operations, schools to train engineers, managers, and professionals, Afghanistan would likely look a lot different. But the US missed even low hanging fruit like making poppies a legitimate crop by giving Afghanistan a cut of the legal opioid market.
    - nemo44x 5y ago
      60% of Afghanistan is illiterate. An improvement from when NATO forces invaded 20 years ago, but not too much better. I don’t think your infrastructure dreams would have had any efficacy.
      - merpnderp 5y ago
        What does someone working in a primitive mine need with literacy? It would be a job that paid a lot better than subsistence farming and might allow that person to send their kids to school to become engineers. Without railroads and highways, Afghanistan will never move forward. It should have been the first thing we did, and not only to link up cities, but to locations with large amounts of natural resources to build up some wealth and industry.
        watwut 5y ago
        It was making training army difficult for American troops for example. Soldiers complained about it. Such high illiteracy rates will make it impossible to build enough of management and general bureaucracy needed to build anything large. It will make it hard to train workers in technology. You won't build railroads nor roads, you won't mainten them either. Primitive mines are not competitive. They are not producing enough to feed you. And hungry people won't save money for school. You need technology.
- xtian 5y ago
  You’re saying the US was constrained by its strong sense of morality? 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...
- jeltz 5y ago
  Then why did the Americans not accept the Taliban surrender? No, this was not a war of value systems, this is just proof of how hard someone can fight if you do not allow them to surrender.
- MichaelGroves 5y ago
  > commit China-style ethnocide, or at the least institute authoritarianish high-security measures, depopulate the rural areas The PDPA and Soviets tried this, and it didn't work. Together they killed tens of thousands of combatants and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians. Millions more were displaced. And what did they get for that bloodshed? Certainly not the reform they sought. You may as well try to crush a fistful of water.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    The West had some influence over that, we were busy propping up the opposition.
- darkerside 5y ago
  Much like the Napoleonic invasion of Moscow, the key was home field advantage. Not in the classic Russian winter sense. Once Napoleon's army arrived in Moscow, there was a "what now" aspect to the war. They'd accomplished the goal that was set out and defeated Russia, but they didn't actually want to live in Moscow. So, they eventually left to go fight the Russian army, which had seemingly and unbelievably abandoned its crown city to the invaders. But they hadn't. Because Moscow was home, whether it was filled with these unseemly visitors or not. There was no way Napoleon's forces could win unless the Russians actually decided to sign a piece of paper and let them.
- mcguire 5y ago
  I can recommend 21st Century Ellis: Operational Art and Strategic Prophecy for the Modern Era, edited by B. A. Friedman. It is a collection of articles written by Ellis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Hancock_Ellis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Hancock_Ellis) starting with one on the Philippine-American War, an early example of a loose manual on how to handle counter-insurgency. It also contains his "Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia" which was essentially the US Marines portion of the Navy's plans for WWII in the Pacific.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  That works if you want to win the land. China only wants the land in Xinjiang, they would be ecstatic if the whole place was Han Chinese. The US by contrast has enough territory already, they don't want or need Afghan soil. Instead they went to war so that Afghanistan would have their chosen government. The only way to do that is to colonize it and exert direct control. They never committed to that (it's kind of frowned upon internationally), so it was a failure.
- ramblenode 5y ago
  > and one of these value systems simply can't win certain types of war. You are suggesting that it is the US's gentlemanly morals that puts it at such a disadvantage as to make "winning" impossible. But what is "winning" absent those values? More dead Taliban at the cost of more dead civilians? If that is "winning" for the US, it is almost certainly not "winning" for the Afghans who live in the country and would prefer to be alive. But say you kill more Taliban while generally tolerating civilian casualties, then what? The US is no longer a force protecting Afghans from the Taliban, but a force bent on conquering the land of Afghanistan. The Taliban will increasingly look like liberators against a bloodthirsty invader whose raison d'etre for occupying the country is not the livelihood of Afghans but to install a puppet government. The Taliban will regrow, resupplied by the friends and family of civilian dead, and emboldened with a moral mandate. The more you "win", the more enemies you create for tomorrow. At the strategic level, there is no winning, only various ways to lose more slowly. But eventually the outcome is the same, as it has been in all Western colonies. The difference is that in the old days, the goal was just to extract wealth from a place, not to reconstitute its population (though the French did try).
NonContro 5y ago
After reading this article, Afghanistan doesn't seem inherently like a war of attrition at all. "Men fought, men switched sides, men lined up and fought again. War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends" It seems more like renaissance Europe, where armies of Condottiero would parade against eachother, and the smaller or less extravagant side would back down. This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'. "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war" - Julian Assange, 2011 Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of dragged out death and destruction is a fair outcome for the country.
- at-fates-hands 5y ago
  >> This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'. The role of the US went from hunting and killing Taliban to not allowing them a permanent base from which to launch terror attacks to "nation building" where the military was then building schools and gas stations. The US never wanted a "bloody war". If they did, they could end the Taliban in the span of a few weeks, just like they did ISIS. It wouldn't be a war, it would be a rampage for which many in the US population and politicians wouldn't have the stomach for. Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties. >> Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of death and destruction is actually the best possible outcome for the country. I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country."
  - watwut 5y ago
    > Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties. While US army is significantly better then Taliban, the surgical strikes killed civilians fairly regularly and wish to protect civilians is not exactly "above and beyond". > I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country." I think that OP meant "compare to 2 years long war after which Taliban takes power anyway". That was the estimation as America was leaving - that ANA will be able to hold off for two years. They were not expected to win, but they were not expected to fold that fast.
clipradiowallet 5y ago
> Can see why it ended the way it did. If we learn from all that history, I would imagine it has not ended at all.

nullifidian 5y ago

It wasn't anywhere near close to a war of attrition. It was a war of different value systems, and one of these value systems simply can't win certain types of war. For Taliban it was not a problem to hide among the civil population, and for the Americans it was problematic to commit China-style ethnocide, or at the least institute authoritarianish high-security measures, depopulate the rural areas, to actually win this war.

forkLding 5y ago
War of attrition encompasses guerrilla warfare which is what the Taliban used, see definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attrition_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attrition_warfare War of attrition does not mean casualty numbers, it means the goal of the war is to wear down the enemy so that their will to fight collapses which both the Taliban and the US tried to do, see: https://www.csis.org/analysis/afghan-war-attrition-peace-talks-remain-extension-war-other-means https://www.csis.org/analysis/afghan-war-attrition-peace-tal...
- forz877 5y ago
  >War of attrition does not mean casualty numbers War of attrition almost certainly requires high continual casualty numbers, it's literally in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article: > Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel.
kiba 5y ago
I don't believe these measures contrary to our values would be something that helps us "win" the war, especially not in way that we would have liked. But I do believe that the American people's heart were not into the fight, especially when it became a "forgotten" war. If we commit our full effort and our mind, we might have won the way we would stomach. In the end, if this is not the kind of war the American people are willing to fight, then we shouldn't entered them.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  Afghanistan has always been poor and its people fractured because it was cut off from the world by its topography, but topography can be overcome. If the US had spent the last 20 years building infrastructure, railroads, highways, mining operations, schools to train engineers, managers, and professionals, Afghanistan would likely look a lot different. But the US missed even low hanging fruit like making poppies a legitimate crop by giving Afghanistan a cut of the legal opioid market.
  - nemo44x 5y ago
    60% of Afghanistan is illiterate. An improvement from when NATO forces invaded 20 years ago, but not too much better. I don’t think your infrastructure dreams would have had any efficacy.
    - merpnderp 5y ago
      What does someone working in a primitive mine need with literacy? It would be a job that paid a lot better than subsistence farming and might allow that person to send their kids to school to become engineers. Without railroads and highways, Afghanistan will never move forward. It should have been the first thing we did, and not only to link up cities, but to locations with large amounts of natural resources to build up some wealth and industry.
      - watwut 5y ago
        It was making training army difficult for American troops for example. Soldiers complained about it. Such high illiteracy rates will make it impossible to build enough of management and general bureaucracy needed to build anything large. It will make it hard to train workers in technology. You won't build railroads nor roads, you won't mainten them either. Primitive mines are not competitive. They are not producing enough to feed you. And hungry people won't save money for school. You need technology.
xtian 5y ago
You’re saying the US was constrained by its strong sense of morality? 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...
jeltz 5y ago
Then why did the Americans not accept the Taliban surrender? No, this was not a war of value systems, this is just proof of how hard someone can fight if you do not allow them to surrender.
MichaelGroves 5y ago
> commit China-style ethnocide, or at the least institute authoritarianish high-security measures, depopulate the rural areas The PDPA and Soviets tried this, and it didn't work. Together they killed tens of thousands of combatants and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians. Millions more were displaced. And what did they get for that bloodshed? Certainly not the reform they sought. You may as well try to crush a fistful of water.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  The West had some influence over that, we were busy propping up the opposition.
darkerside 5y ago
Much like the Napoleonic invasion of Moscow, the key was home field advantage. Not in the classic Russian winter sense. Once Napoleon's army arrived in Moscow, there was a "what now" aspect to the war. They'd accomplished the goal that was set out and defeated Russia, but they didn't actually want to live in Moscow. So, they eventually left to go fight the Russian army, which had seemingly and unbelievably abandoned its crown city to the invaders. But they hadn't. Because Moscow was home, whether it was filled with these unseemly visitors or not. There was no way Napoleon's forces could win unless the Russians actually decided to sign a piece of paper and let them.
mcguire 5y ago
I can recommend 21st Century Ellis: Operational Art and Strategic Prophecy for the Modern Era, edited by B. A. Friedman. It is a collection of articles written by Ellis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Hancock_Ellis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Hancock_Ellis) starting with one on the Philippine-American War, an early example of a loose manual on how to handle counter-insurgency. It also contains his "Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia" which was essentially the US Marines portion of the Navy's plans for WWII in the Pacific.
zarzavat 5y ago
That works if you want to win the land. China only wants the land in Xinjiang, they would be ecstatic if the whole place was Han Chinese. The US by contrast has enough territory already, they don't want or need Afghan soil. Instead they went to war so that Afghanistan would have their chosen government. The only way to do that is to colonize it and exert direct control. They never committed to that (it's kind of frowned upon internationally), so it was a failure.
ramblenode 5y ago
> and one of these value systems simply can't win certain types of war. You are suggesting that it is the US's gentlemanly morals that puts it at such a disadvantage as to make "winning" impossible. But what is "winning" absent those values? More dead Taliban at the cost of more dead civilians? If that is "winning" for the US, it is almost certainly not "winning" for the Afghans who live in the country and would prefer to be alive. But say you kill more Taliban while generally tolerating civilian casualties, then what? The US is no longer a force protecting Afghans from the Taliban, but a force bent on conquering the land of Afghanistan. The Taliban will increasingly look like liberators against a bloodthirsty invader whose raison d'etre for occupying the country is not the livelihood of Afghans but to install a puppet government. The Taliban will regrow, resupplied by the friends and family of civilian dead, and emboldened with a moral mandate. The more you "win", the more enemies you create for tomorrow. At the strategic level, there is no winning, only various ways to lose more slowly. But eventually the outcome is the same, as it has been in all Western colonies. The difference is that in the old days, the goal was just to extract wealth from a place, not to reconstitute its population (though the French did try).

NonContro 5y ago

After reading this article, Afghanistan doesn't seem inherently like a war of attrition at all. "Men fought, men switched sides, men lined up and fought again. War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends" It seems more like renaissance Europe, where armies of Condottiero would parade against eachother, and the smaller or less extravagant side would back down. This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'. "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war" - Julian Assange, 2011 Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of dragged out death and destruction is a fair outcome for the country.

at-fates-hands 5y ago
>> This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'. The role of the US went from hunting and killing Taliban to not allowing them a permanent base from which to launch terror attacks to "nation building" where the military was then building schools and gas stations. The US never wanted a "bloody war". If they did, they could end the Taliban in the span of a few weeks, just like they did ISIS. It wouldn't be a war, it would be a rampage for which many in the US population and politicians wouldn't have the stomach for. Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties. >> Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of death and destruction is actually the best possible outcome for the country. I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country."
- watwut 5y ago
  > Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties. While US army is significantly better then Taliban, the surgical strikes killed civilians fairly regularly and wish to protect civilians is not exactly "above and beyond". > I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country." I think that OP meant "compare to 2 years long war after which Taliban takes power anyway". That was the estimation as America was leaving - that ANA will be able to hold off for two years. They were not expected to win, but they were not expected to fold that fast.

clipradiowallet 5y ago

> Can see why it ended the way it did. If we learn from all that history, I would imagine it has not ended at all.