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To be fair, the lack of strategic vision has also plagued the U.S. since WWII or Korea. We just keep losing wars because no one ever sets out clear achievable

To be fair, the lack of strategic vision has also plagued the U.S. since WWII or Korea. We just keep losing wars because no one ever sets out clear achievable goals. The notable exception was the Powell Doctrine in Desert Storm. For that one, the goal was to kick Iraq out of Kuwait and restore the Kuwaiti monarchy, which was achieved. If you look especially at Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, there is this magical thinking that if we destroy the Evil Dictator and run an election, that everyone will naturally vote to ally with the U.S. and completely change their social organization to be in accordance with western values. The place we spent the most time in the 21st century, Afghanistan, somehow went from an objective of destroying Al Qaeda to ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights. That sort of societal transformation is not possible even with 100,000 troops when they don't even speak the local language. Can you imagine the hubris of trying to tell people in some remote village that the way men and women relate to each other has to change through a translator, because some tall buildings in a place they've never heard of got destroyed? The obvious result was total failure and the Taliban picking up right where they left off in 2001.

treflop 3y ago
I don’t think the language barrier or anything was an issue. We entered Japan and helped rebuild it and now we have some of the best relations in the world. Re-building Afghanistan was more like building Afghanistan. We weren’t fixing a collapsed patio like in Japan — we had to build a whole housing tract, and at no point did we or anyone in the world have that amount of money.
- cameldrv 3y ago
  Yes. We did not try to radically transform Japanese society down to the level of the family. Same in Germany. Both of those countries also had a fairly cohesive sense of nationhood without massive ethnic divisions. We just had to deprogram the hyper-aggressive militarism, but the rest we could pretty much leave alone. Your point about rebuilding Afghanistan really being building Afghanistan is very true. I remember hearing a soldier in Afghanistan talking about how surprised he was at the number of people he met in Afghanistan that had never even heard of Afghanistan.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  This isn't true. Up until the fall of the Soviet Union, there was an Afghan state that was able to motivate enough of the population to believe in it and fight for it in order to largely defeat the Mujahideen. Were it not for external support for the Mujahideen, it is almost certain that an Afghan state would have succeeded in achieving some form of monopoly on violence. The idea that nation-states were something alien to Afghanistan that we had to force on them just isn't true.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> The notable exception was the Powell Doctrine in Desert Storm I dunno, the NATO-Yugoslavia war is both more recent and produced a much clearer and more stable, positive local outcome than the 1991 Iraq War. (And if you argue “but didn't that restart US-Russian geopolitical rivalry, making it worse than Desert Storm,” I would counter that it didn't, Yeltsin designating Putin with his yearning for a return of the USSR’s Eastern European empire as his successor did that, the aftermath of the NATO-Yugoslavia war is just when the West realized it, plus, Desert Storm—well, actually, Desert Shield, but the two are inseparable—by the same token, was, in fact, the proximate trigger for the formation of al-Qaeda, so...)
- cameldrv 3y ago
  That's a great point, and I think that Yugoslavia was one of the very few successful post WWII major military interventions. There's a common pattern where you have a multiethnic state that's held together by a brutal dictator. Often the boundaries of this state were drawn a long time ago in London. There's usually a lot of pent-up ethnic resentment. If you remove the brutal dictator, it spirals into civil war. The Yugoslavia solution of just breaking up the country into tiny ethnic states actually worked pretty well. So well, in fact, that now the constituent parts of Yugoslavia are even coming back together through the EU. We've seen abject failure in Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan, and mixed results in Iraq with the strategy of keeping the country together and assuming democracy will solve everything.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    I'm unconvinced that the lack of success in Afghanistan was not primarily driven by the shift of focus to the naked war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent mismanagement of the occupation of Iraq, starting with radical de-Baathification and other rejections of lessons learned in previous (e.g., post-WWII) occupations, both because of the message that war sent to peopke everywhere, including in Afghanistan, about the US and because of long diversion of resources and focus it produced. (And, obviously, the US involvement in Syria was largely a product of that.) Afghanistan was never going to be easy to succeed at something more than a punitive mission against al-Qaeda, but I think that the fundamental root of much later failure including the ultimate failure in Afghanistan is the 2003 Iraq War.
tivert 3y ago
> To be fair, the lack of strategic vision has also plagued the U.S. since WWII or Korea. We just keep losing wars because no one ever sets out clear achievable goals. > ... > The place we spent the most time in the 21st century, Afghanistan, somehow went from an objective of destroying Al Qaeda to ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights. I think in Afghanistan's case, the goal was clear but it was not achievable. A bombing campaign, some boots on the ground, and killing some leaders could not actually achieve the "objective of destroying Al Qaeda," because it would just re-form afterwards. You'd have to change the society so it wouldn't reform, hence "ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights." Though I suppose installing and supporting some brutal warlord as a secular dictator (e.g. a Saddam Hussein) would have achieved the objective too, but the US would have gotten so much condemnation for that I'm sure the option was not on the table.
- michaelt 3y ago
  > I think in Afghanistan's case, the goal was clear but it was not achievable. I suspect some people thought it was achievable because they looked at post-WW2 Germany and Japan and concluded that: 1. Cities reduced to rubble in a war with America and its allies. 2. Lengthy occupation, plenty of money & loans for rebuilding. 3. Occupation transitions to an democratic government. Some American forces stick around just in case, but they don't have to fight anyone. 4. ???? 5. Successful, stable, western-style democracy with an aversion to armed conflict, a strong economy and a renowned car manufacturing industry. Obviously it didn't actually work in Afghanistan or Iraq, but I can see how politicians surrounded by yes men and pro-war types might have thought they had an achievable plan.
  - Rinzler89 3y ago
    Germany and Japan were culturally different and scientifically, economically superior to how Afganistan was before they were invaded and bombed.
- vkou 3y ago
  > the "objective of destroying Al Qaeda," because it would just re-form afterwards. You'd have to change the society so it wouldn't reform, hence "ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights." How exactly does providing the latter do anything but piss off surviving conservatives and hardliners and reactionaries even more? If you want lasting change, the new regime either needs widespread support from its subjects (Why wasn't it in charge to begin with, then, why did it need to be installed by an occupier..?), or you need to scorched-earth, mass-graves liquidate every single participant in the old regime, and all of their supporters (And not just fire them from their jobs, as we did in Iraq. All the ex-Baathists went on to gainful employment in the various insurgent groups, instead.) Not doing it is exactly why Reconstruction failed. The slavers lost the war, but won the peace, and their politics reasserted as soon as they were allowed to govern themselves.
xanthor 3y ago
Go check the annual opium poppy production in Afghanistan in the years leading up to and following the US invasion if you're interested in a more coherent justification.
resource_waste 3y ago
>the lack of strategic vision The vision is that through liberal democracy we can achieve world peace. Believe it or not, it doesnt matter. That is the core of US foreign policy and there are ~300M americans that believe that. Only leadership can really change that. Also > Can you imagine the hubris of trying to tell people in some remote village that the way men and women relate to each other has to change through a translator, because some tall buildings in a place they've never heard of got destroyed? Religion and Military occupation do this, lets not pretend this doesnt work. I find it interesting, you have some mix of realpolitik but you have a cynicism that takes away your ability to see reality.
- lazide 3y ago
  Occupation over generations with severe and autocratic control of daily life and institutions maybe. Not dudes driving through on patrol once a day and never stopping unless they are attacked.
- ramblenode 3y ago
  > Religion and Military occupation do this, lets not pretend this doesnt work. Most successful occupiers seem to intermarry into the society they are occupying. Without this, there is always a clear distinction between occupier and occupied, that even shared culture, language, and religion will not smooth over.
- Animats 3y ago
  Occupation is very labor-intensive. The Allies did it after WWII.[1] It took a huge number of Allied troops, and continued until 1952. [1] https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/Occ-GY/ch16.htm https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/Occ-GY/ch16.htm
sirspacey 3y ago
The Economist did a great deep dive on why we lost. Short version: a major export of Afghanistan was wheat, which we wouldn’t let them sell to us because of US agricultural interest. With no ready markets, their farmers switched to opium. We wouldn’t prevent it because it would destroy livelihoods, a sure way to spark insurgency. Al Qaeda became drug lords, made a fortune, and bank rolled a resistance and eventual overthrow. As with Charlie Wilson’s war, it is precisely because we wouldn’t fund health economic and development projects that we lost a war we had already won.
- nradov 3y ago
  Something is missing in that story. Afghanistan isn't a great location for any sort of agriculture: it lacks the reliable rainfall and flat plains needed for optimal cereal cultivation. And as a landlocked country it's impossible to export large volumes of grain. Most of what they grow has always been for domestic consumption. It is precisely because of those obstacles that opium poppies are one of the few practical cash crops. One motorcycle can carry the refined output of an entire farm. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24489703 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24489703
  - underlipton 3y ago
    One might consider that it would give something for these farmers to subsist on that didn't enrich the Taliban. With that issue settled and stable, you could make inroads elsewhere without inadvertently filling up the enemy's coffers.
- boppo1 3y ago
  I dunno, I'm gonna go with the parent comment's version of the failure instead of 'No we just didn't neoliberal hard enough'.
- overstay8930 3y ago
  Mountainous arid country economy collapses because of a rough wheat market lol come on do you really think the taliban was going to be unseated by competing with the economies of scale of an American wheat farm? How do people fall for this
ripe 3y ago
> we keep losing wars because no one sets achievable goals In Afghanistan, our goals were in fact achievable, but we screwed up the execution. In 1979, when we used the Mujahideen to kick the Soviets out, we succeeded because we had Pakistan to give us logistical support from the sea, and to do some of our our dirty work. General Zia was a true Islamist, so there was no daylight between him and William Casey in going after the godless communists. After 9/11, George W. Bush had a blank check from the American public. But he went back to the Pakistan military, and this time their goals were very different from ours. The generals took our billions and cooperated with us as little as they could to escape sanctions, while continuing to harbor the Taliban. They themselves were thoroughly penetrated by Al Qaeda. [1] We could never defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan as long as they could just retreat to their sanctuary in Pakistan, get arms and healthcare. But publicly we kept saying that Pakistan was our ally. No wonder the public are confused about why we lost. [1] Steve Coll, "Ghost Wars: the CIA's secret wars in Afghanistan",
- ks2048 3y ago
  What were our goals in Afghanistan, exactly?
  - ripe 3y ago
    Bush said it was to kill or capture Al Qaeda leaders and to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a base for terrorism again.
- cameldrv 3y ago
  My question then is, what was the achievable goal? What is the end state for the country, do any U.S. troops need to be there permanently, and how does the society work such that the U.S. goals are achieved?
lupire 3y ago
Thank you, cameldrive, for this perceptive commentary on culture clash in the mideast :-)

treflop 3y ago

I don’t think the language barrier or anything was an issue. We entered Japan and helped rebuild it and now we have some of the best relations in the world. Re-building Afghanistan was more like building Afghanistan. We weren’t fixing a collapsed patio like in Japan — we had to build a whole housing tract, and at no point did we or anyone in the world have that amount of money.

cameldrv 3y ago
Yes. We did not try to radically transform Japanese society down to the level of the family. Same in Germany. Both of those countries also had a fairly cohesive sense of nationhood without massive ethnic divisions. We just had to deprogram the hyper-aggressive militarism, but the rest we could pretty much leave alone. Your point about rebuilding Afghanistan really being building Afghanistan is very true. I remember hearing a soldier in Afghanistan talking about how surprised he was at the number of people he met in Afghanistan that had never even heard of Afghanistan.
sudosysgen 3y ago
This isn't true. Up until the fall of the Soviet Union, there was an Afghan state that was able to motivate enough of the population to believe in it and fight for it in order to largely defeat the Mujahideen. Were it not for external support for the Mujahideen, it is almost certain that an Afghan state would have succeeded in achieving some form of monopoly on violence. The idea that nation-states were something alien to Afghanistan that we had to force on them just isn't true.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> The notable exception was the Powell Doctrine in Desert Storm I dunno, the NATO-Yugoslavia war is both more recent and produced a much clearer and more stable, positive local outcome than the 1991 Iraq War. (And if you argue “but didn't that restart US-Russian geopolitical rivalry, making it worse than Desert Storm,” I would counter that it didn't, Yeltsin designating Putin with his yearning for a return of the USSR’s Eastern European empire as his successor did that, the aftermath of the NATO-Yugoslavia war is just when the West realized it, plus, Desert Storm—well, actually, Desert Shield, but the two are inseparable—by the same token, was, in fact, the proximate trigger for the formation of al-Qaeda, so...)

cameldrv 3y ago
That's a great point, and I think that Yugoslavia was one of the very few successful post WWII major military interventions. There's a common pattern where you have a multiethnic state that's held together by a brutal dictator. Often the boundaries of this state were drawn a long time ago in London. There's usually a lot of pent-up ethnic resentment. If you remove the brutal dictator, it spirals into civil war. The Yugoslavia solution of just breaking up the country into tiny ethnic states actually worked pretty well. So well, in fact, that now the constituent parts of Yugoslavia are even coming back together through the EU. We've seen abject failure in Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan, and mixed results in Iraq with the strategy of keeping the country together and assuming democracy will solve everything.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  I'm unconvinced that the lack of success in Afghanistan was not primarily driven by the shift of focus to the naked war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent mismanagement of the occupation of Iraq, starting with radical de-Baathification and other rejections of lessons learned in previous (e.g., post-WWII) occupations, both because of the message that war sent to peopke everywhere, including in Afghanistan, about the US and because of long diversion of resources and focus it produced. (And, obviously, the US involvement in Syria was largely a product of that.) Afghanistan was never going to be easy to succeed at something more than a punitive mission against al-Qaeda, but I think that the fundamental root of much later failure including the ultimate failure in Afghanistan is the 2003 Iraq War.

tivert 3y ago

> To be fair, the lack of strategic vision has also plagued the U.S. since WWII or Korea. We just keep losing wars because no one ever sets out clear achievable goals. > ... > The place we spent the most time in the 21st century, Afghanistan, somehow went from an objective of destroying Al Qaeda to ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights. I think in Afghanistan's case, the goal was clear but it was not achievable. A bombing campaign, some boots on the ground, and killing some leaders could not actually achieve the "objective of destroying Al Qaeda," because it would just re-form afterwards. You'd have to change the society so it wouldn't reform, hence "ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights." Though I suppose installing and supporting some brutal warlord as a secular dictator (e.g. a Saddam Hussein) would have achieved the objective too, but the US would have gotten so much condemnation for that I'm sure the option was not on the table.

michaelt 3y ago
> I think in Afghanistan's case, the goal was clear but it was not achievable. I suspect some people thought it was achievable because they looked at post-WW2 Germany and Japan and concluded that: 1. Cities reduced to rubble in a war with America and its allies. 2. Lengthy occupation, plenty of money & loans for rebuilding. 3. Occupation transitions to an democratic government. Some American forces stick around just in case, but they don't have to fight anyone. 4. ???? 5. Successful, stable, western-style democracy with an aversion to armed conflict, a strong economy and a renowned car manufacturing industry. Obviously it didn't actually work in Afghanistan or Iraq, but I can see how politicians surrounded by yes men and pro-war types might have thought they had an achievable plan.
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  Germany and Japan were culturally different and scientifically, economically superior to how Afganistan was before they were invaded and bombed.
vkou 3y ago
> the "objective of destroying Al Qaeda," because it would just re-form afterwards. You'd have to change the society so it wouldn't reform, hence "ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights." How exactly does providing the latter do anything but piss off surviving conservatives and hardliners and reactionaries even more? If you want lasting change, the new regime either needs widespread support from its subjects (Why wasn't it in charge to begin with, then, why did it need to be installed by an occupier..?), or you need to scorched-earth, mass-graves liquidate every single participant in the old regime, and all of their supporters (And not just fire them from their jobs, as we did in Iraq. All the ex-Baathists went on to gainful employment in the various insurgent groups, instead.) Not doing it is exactly why Reconstruction failed. The slavers lost the war, but won the peace, and their politics reasserted as soon as they were allowed to govern themselves.

xanthor 3y ago

Go check the annual opium poppy production in Afghanistan in the years leading up to and following the US invasion if you're interested in a more coherent justification.

resource_waste 3y ago

>the lack of strategic vision The vision is that through liberal democracy we can achieve world peace. Believe it or not, it doesnt matter. That is the core of US foreign policy and there are ~300M americans that believe that. Only leadership can really change that. Also > Can you imagine the hubris of trying to tell people in some remote village that the way men and women relate to each other has to change through a translator, because some tall buildings in a place they've never heard of got destroyed? Religion and Military occupation do this, lets not pretend this doesnt work. I find it interesting, you have some mix of realpolitik but you have a cynicism that takes away your ability to see reality.

lazide 3y ago
Occupation over generations with severe and autocratic control of daily life and institutions maybe. Not dudes driving through on patrol once a day and never stopping unless they are attacked.
ramblenode 3y ago
> Religion and Military occupation do this, lets not pretend this doesnt work. Most successful occupiers seem to intermarry into the society they are occupying. Without this, there is always a clear distinction between occupier and occupied, that even shared culture, language, and religion will not smooth over.
Animats 3y ago
Occupation is very labor-intensive. The Allies did it after WWII.[1] It took a huge number of Allied troops, and continued until 1952. [1] https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/Occ-GY/ch16.htm https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/Occ-GY/ch16.htm

sirspacey 3y ago

The Economist did a great deep dive on why we lost. Short version: a major export of Afghanistan was wheat, which we wouldn’t let them sell to us because of US agricultural interest. With no ready markets, their farmers switched to opium. We wouldn’t prevent it because it would destroy livelihoods, a sure way to spark insurgency. Al Qaeda became drug lords, made a fortune, and bank rolled a resistance and eventual overthrow. As with Charlie Wilson’s war, it is precisely because we wouldn’t fund health economic and development projects that we lost a war we had already won.

nradov 3y ago
Something is missing in that story. Afghanistan isn't a great location for any sort of agriculture: it lacks the reliable rainfall and flat plains needed for optimal cereal cultivation. And as a landlocked country it's impossible to export large volumes of grain. Most of what they grow has always been for domestic consumption. It is precisely because of those obstacles that opium poppies are one of the few practical cash crops. One motorcycle can carry the refined output of an entire farm. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24489703 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24489703
- underlipton 3y ago
  One might consider that it would give something for these farmers to subsist on that didn't enrich the Taliban. With that issue settled and stable, you could make inroads elsewhere without inadvertently filling up the enemy's coffers.
boppo1 3y ago
I dunno, I'm gonna go with the parent comment's version of the failure instead of 'No we just didn't neoliberal hard enough'.
overstay8930 3y ago
Mountainous arid country economy collapses because of a rough wheat market lol come on do you really think the taliban was going to be unseated by competing with the economies of scale of an American wheat farm? How do people fall for this

ripe 3y ago

> we keep losing wars because no one sets achievable goals In Afghanistan, our goals were in fact achievable, but we screwed up the execution. In 1979, when we used the Mujahideen to kick the Soviets out, we succeeded because we had Pakistan to give us logistical support from the sea, and to do some of our our dirty work. General Zia was a true Islamist, so there was no daylight between him and William Casey in going after the godless communists. After 9/11, George W. Bush had a blank check from the American public. But he went back to the Pakistan military, and this time their goals were very different from ours. The generals took our billions and cooperated with us as little as they could to escape sanctions, while continuing to harbor the Taliban. They themselves were thoroughly penetrated by Al Qaeda. [1] We could never defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan as long as they could just retreat to their sanctuary in Pakistan, get arms and healthcare. But publicly we kept saying that Pakistan was our ally. No wonder the public are confused about why we lost. [1] Steve Coll, "Ghost Wars: the CIA's secret wars in Afghanistan",

ks2048 3y ago
What were our goals in Afghanistan, exactly?
- ripe 3y ago
  Bush said it was to kill or capture Al Qaeda leaders and to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a base for terrorism again.
cameldrv 3y ago
My question then is, what was the achievable goal? What is the end state for the country, do any U.S. troops need to be there permanently, and how does the society work such that the U.S. goals are achieved?

lupire 3y ago

Thank you, cameldrive, for this perceptive commentary on culture clash in the mideast :-)