My recollection, from the end of the 90s and turn of the Y2K, is that conditions in Afghanistan were seen as pretty awful, especially for women, but no one (in power) gave a shit about trying to make any of it better.
Then 9/11 happened - one of those seismic shocks that occasionally jar Americans out of our secure isolationist complacency and into full-bore interventionism.
Afghanistan is nice if you're playing the Great Game for colonial control of Central Asia, trying to throw money at the military-industrial complex, or trying to commit imperial suicide, not much else.
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I think Afghanistan is pretty strategically useful if you are into smuggling dope and the revenue thus generated
It's a nice place for military force projection if your country has a war boner for, say, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq, some of the former SSRs.
It really isn't great as a staging area because it's remote, has a ton of difficult terrain and very little infrastructure. Its also nowhere close to Iraq or Syria.
I think Afghanistan is pretty strategically useful if you are into smuggling dope and the revenue thus generated
It's a nice place for military force projection if your country has a war boner for, say, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq, some of the former SSRs.
It really isn't great as a staging area because it's remote, has a ton of difficult terrain and very little infrastructure. Its also nowhere close to Iraq or Syria.
It's a nice place to have some measure of control over if you are, or are bitter arch-rivals with, Pakistan or Iran.
It's true that some of the factions which subsequently became part of the Taliban were armed and funded by the US, but yeah, we didn't back the Taliban themselves.
I was talking about the decade-or-so-long constitutional monarchy under Zahir Shah, and the politically-regressive but functional and competent regime of Daoud Khan which succeeded it. Daoud's government was overthrown by the Khalqists, with Soviet backing, because the Soviets feared Daoud was becoming too independent. The resulting PDPA government was brutally incompetent, overthrown again (this time by GRU Spetsnaz), and essentially marks the start of the disintegration of Afghan civil society. Prior to this, Afghanistan had already started down the difficult road towards constitutionalism and democracy. Helping them back towards that road is not some kind of latter-day civilizing mission. Taliban Wahhabism and, once upon a time, hardline International Communism were the alien, invasive ideologies here.
look dude if you want me to stop using colonialism, stop using it to justify this kind of shit! just say it's about oil or whatever and stop infantilizing other people.
What fucking oil, man? What the fuck do you think there is in Afghanistan that we want so bad?
IIRC there's a whole lot of rare earths in Aghanistan
Which were only discovered in 2011. And its not like Afghanistan has a productive mining sector, despite a lot of resources because, you know, decades of war makes it hard to do business in a place.
I don't think Afghanistan is very strategically useful, relatively speaking. If anyone has an argument to the contrary I'd like to hear it.
I think it is relatively useful in terms of geopolitical strategy. Zbigniew Brzezinski was an architect of the Carter-Reagan policy of arming the Afghan mujahidin - he even admits that the US started sending arms prior to the USSR's tanks rolling in, in order to lure them into an unwinnable conflict.
But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into the war and looked for a way to provoke it?
B: It wasn’t quite like that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q : When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement in Afghanistan , nobody believed them . However, there was an element of truth in this. You don’t regret any of this today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war." Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime , a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B : What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Brzezinski is just one guy, not the US government, but he was a hugely influential foreign policy schemer for decades. He unofficially advised Obama as well, and Obama has acknowledged Brzezinski as influential on his own foreign policy views. In his book "The Grand Chessboard," Brzezinski argues for US dominance of Eurasia in order to prevent the rise of any challengers to American hegemony (Russia and China being the obvious examples). He focuses heavily on Central Asia and Afghanistan, regarding that region as being central to US power in Eurasia generally (IIRC he called it "the world-pivot").
And if you look at a map, it's easy to see why he feels this way. Iran is on Afghanistan's west, and given the US's hostility toward the former it makes sense that they'd want a military presence in the latter (as with Iraq). It also borders China (yes, a very small border, but a border nonetheless). If you look at maps of China's New Silk Road strategy you see that Afghanistan is basically right in the middle of it, making the country a powerful position from which to threaten Chinese trade. And the policy he takes credit for - arming the Mujahidin - is an example of what he's talking about: the USSR, through dominance in much of Eurasia, was able to threaten US hegemony, and the US indirectly engaged them in Central Asia to weaken their strength on the continent.
Is Brzezinski's argument, or similar thinking, a factor in US policy? Is this why the US is in Afghanistan? I don't know. My guess would be "not the only reason, but at the very least one reason, and probably a major one." 9/11 is obviously another (at least for the initial invasion), and if you're more charitable to Washington than I am, you might accept humanitarianism as a plausible motivation (i.e. not wanting the Taliban to reinstate a brutal theocracy). But I find the idea that the US would engage in a 17-year occupation of a Central Asian state with no geopolitical motivation hard to swallow. Brzezinski's argument seems sound from an imperialist perspective, and given the publicly acknowledged influence his views have had on multiple US administrations I would not dismiss his views as irrelevant.
edit- additionally, when I think of China's relationship to Pakistan and Pakistan's relationship to Afghanistan, I sometimes wonder what Beijing really thinks about Afghanistan and the war there. Although I can think of some strong reasons that China would not want a Taliban victory or even a destabilizing conflict in the country.
I've got Brzezinski's book, and I've read that statement from him before. Interestingly though, he doesn't actually talk about Afghanistan as being valuable, at least not directly.
I had a dumb idea a few days ago and I'm going to share it with you guys: Afghanistan is valuable because it's not valuable. Yeah, bear with me.
First off, why isn't it valuable? Well its pretty well defined by its mountains, for one. Its hard as hell to move anything anywhere, which means its always going to be complicated and expensive to invade. And if you did, what would you find? Not good farming land. No huge population. No particularly important trade routes. Yeah its got some farm land but if you wanted lush greenery you're going to need to go to Pakistan, or the Ferenga Valley, or maybe all the way to the Caspian. Yeah its got like 30 million people (the population of Canada, roughly) but it borders Pakistan of over 200 million. Yeah trade goes through Afghanistan but nothing super important, the mountains as always make transportation a challenge, and with no big rivers going through the country boats aren't an alternative. So its really not great territory to hold. Plus its got tough winters, and tough locals, who have a lot of experience at fighting foreigners.
So, why is it valuable? I think because it tends to be the last piece taken on the board. Because it's so irritating to conquer and hold, it tends to not have particularly powerful or stable governments ruling it-- it's kinda perpetual frontier. If you're a power like the Russian or British Empires, or Persia or the US or whomever, a frontier means a place not within your control-- and not within anyone else's either. While you may not want it, your rival just might. This was a central part to the Great Game in the 19th century. The British were worried about Russia expanding down to its India colony and threatening it. The Russians worried about the British colony expanding up into Central Asia, threatening its colonies. The Game resulted in the drawing of the Durand line, giving us the Afghanistan-Pakistan border we have today and almost formalizing Afghanistan's role as a buffer state between empires. The border line is disputed, of course.
In the Soviet experience, Afghanistan was at the farthest communist frontier but in danger of falling (perhaps some of these were rumours planted by Brzezinski's pals, who knows). In the American experience, Afghanistan was a loosely governed country that was hiding wanted men. As usual invading Afghanistan seems easy: it has no army to speak of, it has no allies, and what armed men are there are about 80 years out of date on military technology. Regional powers are either too savvy for the trap (unlikely) or are simply too poor to afford invasions of any kind. Pakistan's central reason for creating and backing the Afghan Taliban is to prevent India (its arch rival) setting up shop in the country. Iran had troops massed on the border in the 90s (fundamentalist sunnis v shia state) but settled for backing the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. I'd expect China to want a piece at some point in the future, and I have no reason to think they'd do better than anyone else.
Afghanistan is everyone's soft underbelly. Important because nobody wants it. Easy to invade, impossible to retreat from. To win all you need to do is give up. For prideful empires, its impossible to avoid.
It's true that some of the factions which subsequently became part of the Taliban were armed and funded by the US, but yeah, we didn't back the Taliban themselves.
I was talking about the decade-or-so-long constitutional monarchy under Zahir Shah, and the politically-regressive but functional and competent regime of Daoud Khan which succeeded it. Daoud's government was overthrown by the Khalqists, with Soviet backing, because the Soviets feared Daoud was becoming too independent. The resulting PDPA government was brutally incompetent, overthrown again (this time by GRU Spetsnaz), and essentially marks the start of the disintegration of Afghan civil society. Prior to this, Afghanistan had already started down the difficult road towards constitutionalism and democracy. Helping them back towards that road is not some kind of latter-day civilizing mission. Taliban Wahhabism and, once upon a time, hardline International Communism were the alien, invasive ideologies here.
look dude if you want me to stop using colonialism, stop using it to justify this kind of shit! just say it's about oil or whatever and stop infantilizing other people.
What fucking oil, man? What the fuck do you think there is in Afghanistan that we want so bad?
IIRC there's a whole lot of rare earths in Aghanistan
Also, at least for American companies, the rare earth metals they'd be mining in Afghanistan would basically have to go past China to get to the US, so I dunno why they'd bother doing that, even if they could somehow get the price of mining in Afghanistan down to the same as in China.
leftist scuttlebutt around the time of the invasion was that was the afghan war was actually about was establishing a friendly government so that oil and natural gas pipelines could be constructed, but that theory more or less came to nothing (not the least because a particularly stable government has never really been established)
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
It's true that some of the factions which subsequently became part of the Taliban were armed and funded by the US, but yeah, we didn't back the Taliban themselves.
I was talking about the decade-or-so-long constitutional monarchy under Zahir Shah, and the politically-regressive but functional and competent regime of Daoud Khan which succeeded it. Daoud's government was overthrown by the Khalqists, with Soviet backing, because the Soviets feared Daoud was becoming too independent. The resulting PDPA government was brutally incompetent, overthrown again (this time by GRU Spetsnaz), and essentially marks the start of the disintegration of Afghan civil society. Prior to this, Afghanistan had already started down the difficult road towards constitutionalism and democracy. Helping them back towards that road is not some kind of latter-day civilizing mission. Taliban Wahhabism and, once upon a time, hardline International Communism were the alien, invasive ideologies here.
look dude if you want me to stop using colonialism, stop using it to justify this kind of shit! just say it's about oil or whatever and stop infantilizing other people.
What fucking oil, man? What the fuck do you think there is in Afghanistan that we want so bad?
IIRC there's a whole lot of rare earths in Aghanistan
Also, at least for American companies, the rare earth metals they'd be mining in Afghanistan would basically have to go past China to get to the US, so I dunno why they'd bother doing that, even if they could somehow get the price of mining in Afghanistan down to the same as in China.
There is value in rare earths in places that haven't had a mining industry to regulate yet.
The US has tons of rare earth minerals, but we don't mine them much because the limit that we allow companies to poison communities is too low for rare earth mining. Flammabe tap water, rampant birth defects, and stunting whole generations is on the table, but regulation is still too steep.
China's influence in that market isn't because they have more, but because they look the other way on a lot. Their dominance in solar is largely because most countries' industries spend a lot of effort and money managing toxic byproducts, while China's just dumps them in a convenient river.
+2
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
It's true that some of the factions which subsequently became part of the Taliban were armed and funded by the US, but yeah, we didn't back the Taliban themselves.
I was talking about the decade-or-so-long constitutional monarchy under Zahir Shah, and the politically-regressive but functional and competent regime of Daoud Khan which succeeded it. Daoud's government was overthrown by the Khalqists, with Soviet backing, because the Soviets feared Daoud was becoming too independent. The resulting PDPA government was brutally incompetent, overthrown again (this time by GRU Spetsnaz), and essentially marks the start of the disintegration of Afghan civil society. Prior to this, Afghanistan had already started down the difficult road towards constitutionalism and democracy. Helping them back towards that road is not some kind of latter-day civilizing mission. Taliban Wahhabism and, once upon a time, hardline International Communism were the alien, invasive ideologies here.
look dude if you want me to stop using colonialism, stop using it to justify this kind of shit! just say it's about oil or whatever and stop infantilizing other people.
What fucking oil, man? What the fuck do you think there is in Afghanistan that we want so bad?
IIRC there's a whole lot of rare earths in Aghanistan
Also, at least for American companies, the rare earth metals they'd be mining in Afghanistan would basically have to go past China to get to the US, so I dunno why they'd bother doing that, even if they could somehow get the price of mining in Afghanistan down to the same as in China.
There is value in rare earths in places that haven't had a mining industry to regulate yet.
The US has tons of rare earth minerals, but we don't mine them much because the limit that we allow companies to poison communities is too low for rare earth mining. Flammabe tap water, rampant birth defects, and stunting whole generations is on the table, but regulation is still too steep.
China's influence in that market isn't because they have more, but because they look the other way on a lot. Their dominance in solar is largely because most countries' industries spend a lot of effort and money managing toxic byproducts, while China's just dumps them in a convenient river.
To be fair, they also invested Billions where we invested tens of millions, and also some of our investments were used as a gotcha against the president.
+3
JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
Actually I was talking about the government the Soviets overthrew before we then backed the overthrow of the Khalqist government. You seem to be under the misapprehension that Afghan instability tracks back solely to American imperial scheming when the CIA station in Kabul was almost totally indifferent to Afghan politics before the Soviets plunged them into civil war.
Granted we should have backed Massoud instead of Hekmatyar but that was mostly due to ISI fuckery.
I figured you were talking about the prior government and not just one that you want to make your point.
I am not under the illusion that America is the sole cause of trouble. I do know that the Taliban were helped to power by the USA, so pointing to the time before the Taliban as some sort of justification for occupation is incredibly silly. again, why trust the guys who broke it a couple of times already to fix it now?
You were misinformed, I'm afraid. The timeline goes like this:
1979: Soviet invasion
80s: Soviet occupation, US funding of mujihadeen, with Saudi cash, via Pakistan's ISI.
89: Soviets withdraw, mujihadeen continues to fight communist government under Najibullah, US loses interest
92: Najibullah government falls, fighting continues between various factions and now splintered mujihadeen
96: Taliban, backed by Pakistan, seize Kabul and most of the country.
01: We know what happens here
The US did not back the Taliban. The Taliban is not synonymous with mujihadeen who fought the Soviets in the 80s. Both were backed by Pakistan's ISI, it is true. But the Taliban were able to gain support by fighting against the old mujiadeen groups which had long since turned into mere bandits; the Taliban represented a return to order, an extremely harsh order though it was. The US hadn't been caring about Afghanistan since the Soviets withdrew.
You can say the US contributed to instability in Afghanistan by funding rebel/jihadist groups, and you'd be right. You could say the US failed to support/rebuild the country after the Soviets left, and you'd be right (though also remember the government was still communist for several years). And you can say the resulting power vacuum led to the Taliban's rise, and you'd be right. But saying the US helped the Taliban to power, that's not right, that's wrong, and I wish I didn't have to state this every 6 month or so on these boards.
Mohammed Omar was trained by an organization directly funded by the CIA. I get that you want to deny responsibility by pointing out that the US stopped caring pretty early, but I'm confused as to why I should care.
The Taliban would not have been able to seize power without the US giving them that option. That it could have been any other group of religious fundamentalists founded by mujihadeen is irrelevant.
(I suppose it is relevant to distinguish them from the groups that the US directly helped to power. But these subtle differences are besides the point.)
Using this reasoning you could say the US helped the Soviet Union crush the Hungarian revolution. After all, the US had been supplying the USSR with arms only a decade before! But that's absurd, of course. Working together doesn't make one party responsible for the other's actions later on. Responsibility is a big word, you need to actually demonstrate that instead of making vague linkages and hand-waving away the details.
bro I'm saying that supporting a bunch of religious fundamentalists to take over a country and then abandoning the whole thing does not absolve you from responsibility if one of them starts a repressive regime. just because they didn't start a repressive regime together doesn't mean that them fighting it out suddenly makes you not responsible. Every faction would have done a similar thing!
you can't go "Oh WOW! Who would have ever thought that that one guy specifically would grab power and start his own regime?!", because you literally left no other option than such a regime. The US didn't fund various ideologically different groups, it funded jihadists who fell out over the exact way to run an Islamic sharia based country. And, you know, if you claim that the US needs to stay in Afghanistan to stop the Taliban from regaining power you already cede the validity of this argument. You can't be both responsible for what happens after you leave but also not.
i mean, and this is taking your word for it that the US never supported the Taliban even though various sources claim they did for some time (though "support" is a vague term) because of their political stances(also ISI??). I realize the CIA is a fundamentally honest organization with a noble goal they never stray from. I am just playing devil's advocate and saying what if we imagine an US government and CIA that would support a murderous dictatorship for its own political goals?
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
Imperialism and colonialism differ in what the superior seeks, not in the implied equality or inequality with conqueror and conquered. Colonialism, the superior seeks economic benefit from the inferior. Imperialism, the superior seeks political or military benefit from the inferior.
In both cases, the conqueror generally prescribes and supports the development and government is of the conquered in terms of what is demanded of them.
ok whatever dude but my definition is just as valid, and also highlighting the specific issue I had a problem with. But you could also of course make it about distance, centrality or even just the practice of settling. I found the term fitting for describing the assumption of the moral rightness of occupation of others. Though I must say I am now more interested in the fact people here are very concerned with which term is the right one. (also what is with superior and inferior?)
also, your definition is dumb as shit because what if I seek economic, political and military benefit? Does it even make sense to separate these? Is it only imperialism when you take barren pieces of rock for strategic purposes? Is it only colonialism if you take fertile lands with zero ability to defend it?
It appeared that your issue wasn't solely with OEF/the US but with the socialization process itself. Is that no longer the case? Or do you also think socialization and recognizing it as positive in other cases infantilizes those affected (e.g. post secondary education)?
I mean it is kind of insulting to suggest that Afghans need to be socialized to very easily understandable concepts like democracy and not hating other people. But the other difference with colleges is that you are dealing with, basically, kids. I just now saw (my apologies) that you pointed at a distinction between post secondary education and not in your previous post, but I don't think that is relevant. The point is that you leave the shelter of your immediate family, not that you go to a specific place for the good socialization or whatever. One can easily learn that good shit somewhere else, indeed colleges may be in some regards too conservative.
But yeah my issue wasn't solely with the US, it was with the common idea that non-western countries just need to learn/be socialize to our great western values. As if that is the issue. It is infantilizing because it assumes they just don't understand these things, instead of them simply rejecting them. You're not saying they are wrong, you are saying that they are ignorant. And I'm not attacking you so much, as pointing out that this idea is exactly what colonialists used to justify their colonialism. (Also used to deny black people the vote, for that matter.)
I think Afghanistan is pretty strategically useful if you are into smuggling dope and the revenue thus generated
It's a nice place for military force projection if your country has a war boner for, say, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq, some of the former SSRs.
It really isn't great as a staging area because it's remote, has a ton of difficult terrain and very little infrastructure. Its also nowhere close to Iraq or Syria.
It's a nice place to have some measure of control over if you are, or are bitter arch-rivals with, Pakistan or Iran.
Oh, hey, there's Pakistan's name again.
One could argue that the refusal of the US to accept the offer by the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden to a third country was due to a desire to control Afghanistan, but that would be obviously crazy and out of line.
There is no good reason to occupy Afghanistan, so the US doing that for nearly 17 years is just a mystery. Just finding it hard to leave like I do at a party.
One could argue that the refusal of the US to accept the offer by the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden to a third country was due to a desire to control Afghanistan, but that would be obviously crazy and out of line.
There is no good reason to occupy Afghanistan, so the US doing that for nearly 17 years is just a mystery. Just finding it hard to leave like I do at a party.
The Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden to the US, al Qaeda are allies to the Taliban regime that's why they stay there. It's a safe haven for them. Nor was the 2001 Afghan war entirely about controlling Afghanistan it was going to war with a terrorist group who used that nation as a staging ground. After the 9/11 attack the US hasn't just going to let that go and unlike Iraq that was a war which didn't divide the country over whether it was legitimate reprisal.
It's not a mystery why the US remains in Afghanistan, the war never ended with al-Queda and the Taliban. It's difficult to leave because the US leaving might make things worse in that region. There are no easy answers to what to do with Afghanistan, there are a lot of parties involved in this and the US is merely one faction.
Actually I was talking about the government the Soviets overthrew before we then backed the overthrow of the Khalqist government. You seem to be under the misapprehension that Afghan instability tracks back solely to American imperial scheming when the CIA station in Kabul was almost totally indifferent to Afghan politics before the Soviets plunged them into civil war.
Granted we should have backed Massoud instead of Hekmatyar but that was mostly due to ISI fuckery.
I figured you were talking about the prior government and not just one that you want to make your point.
I am not under the illusion that America is the sole cause of trouble. I do know that the Taliban were helped to power by the USA, so pointing to the time before the Taliban as some sort of justification for occupation is incredibly silly. again, why trust the guys who broke it a couple of times already to fix it now?
You were misinformed, I'm afraid. The timeline goes like this:
1979: Soviet invasion
80s: Soviet occupation, US funding of mujihadeen, with Saudi cash, via Pakistan's ISI.
89: Soviets withdraw, mujihadeen continues to fight communist government under Najibullah, US loses interest
92: Najibullah government falls, fighting continues between various factions and now splintered mujihadeen
96: Taliban, backed by Pakistan, seize Kabul and most of the country.
01: We know what happens here
The US did not back the Taliban. The Taliban is not synonymous with mujihadeen who fought the Soviets in the 80s. Both were backed by Pakistan's ISI, it is true. But the Taliban were able to gain support by fighting against the old mujiadeen groups which had long since turned into mere bandits; the Taliban represented a return to order, an extremely harsh order though it was. The US hadn't been caring about Afghanistan since the Soviets withdrew.
You can say the US contributed to instability in Afghanistan by funding rebel/jihadist groups, and you'd be right. You could say the US failed to support/rebuild the country after the Soviets left, and you'd be right (though also remember the government was still communist for several years). And you can say the resulting power vacuum led to the Taliban's rise, and you'd be right. But saying the US helped the Taliban to power, that's not right, that's wrong, and I wish I didn't have to state this every 6 month or so on these boards.
Mohammed Omar was trained by an organization directly funded by the CIA. I get that you want to deny responsibility by pointing out that the US stopped caring pretty early, but I'm confused as to why I should care.
The Taliban would not have been able to seize power without the US giving them that option. That it could have been any other group of religious fundamentalists founded by mujihadeen is irrelevant.
(I suppose it is relevant to distinguish them from the groups that the US directly helped to power. But these subtle differences are besides the point.)
Using this reasoning you could say the US helped the Soviet Union crush the Hungarian revolution. After all, the US had been supplying the USSR with arms only a decade before! But that's absurd, of course. Working together doesn't make one party responsible for the other's actions later on. Responsibility is a big word, you need to actually demonstrate that instead of making vague linkages and hand-waving away the details.
bro I'm saying that supporting a bunch of religious fundamentalists to take over a country and then abandoning the whole thing does not absolve you from responsibility if one of them starts a repressive regime. just because they didn't start a repressive regime together doesn't mean that them fighting it out suddenly makes you not responsible. Every faction would have done a similar thing!
My analogy stands. The US does share some responsibility for the 90s civil war but so do a host of other actors. It's not equivalent to backing the Taliban.
you can't go "Oh WOW! Who would have ever thought that that one guy specifically would grab power and start his own regime?!", because you literally left no other option than such a regime. The US didn't fund various ideologically different groups, it funded jihadists who fell out over the exact way to run an Islamic sharia based country. And, you know, if you claim that the US needs to stay in Afghanistan to stop the Taliban from regaining power you already cede the validity of this argument. You can't be both responsible for what happens after you leave but also not.
Well good thing I've never argued the US should stay in Afghanistan. I argued it was futile just a few pages back.
i mean, and this is taking your word for it that the US never supported the Taliban even though various sources claim they did for some time (though "support" is a vague term) because of their political stances(also ISI??). I realize the CIA is a fundamentally honest organization with a noble goal they never stray from. I am just playing devil's advocate and saying what if we imagine an US government and CIA that would support a murderous dictatorship for its own political goals?
You won't get disagreement from me that the CIA is shit and US foreign policy is awful: go to the ME threads to see me saying exactly this since forever. I can imagine people I don't like doing bad things until the cows come home; instead, I try to find out what actually happens. So go ahead with your sources.
Honestly, I think the main reason why the US hasn't already ended the war is because they don't want to admit that they can't beat these people.
There would be negative political consequences to ending the war and that's really the only incentive that matters for any President. And the public cares so little about the war's proceedings that there's no pressure going the other way.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
Actually I was talking about the government the Soviets overthrew before we then backed the overthrow of the Khalqist government. You seem to be under the misapprehension that Afghan instability tracks back solely to American imperial scheming when the CIA station in Kabul was almost totally indifferent to Afghan politics before the Soviets plunged them into civil war.
Granted we should have backed Massoud instead of Hekmatyar but that was mostly due to ISI fuckery.
I figured you were talking about the prior government and not just one that you want to make your point.
I am not under the illusion that America is the sole cause of trouble. I do know that the Taliban were helped to power by the USA, so pointing to the time before the Taliban as some sort of justification for occupation is incredibly silly. again, why trust the guys who broke it a couple of times already to fix it now?
You were misinformed, I'm afraid. The timeline goes like this:
1979: Soviet invasion
80s: Soviet occupation, US funding of mujihadeen, with Saudi cash, via Pakistan's ISI.
89: Soviets withdraw, mujihadeen continues to fight communist government under Najibullah, US loses interest
92: Najibullah government falls, fighting continues between various factions and now splintered mujihadeen
96: Taliban, backed by Pakistan, seize Kabul and most of the country.
01: We know what happens here
The US did not back the Taliban. The Taliban is not synonymous with mujihadeen who fought the Soviets in the 80s. Both were backed by Pakistan's ISI, it is true. But the Taliban were able to gain support by fighting against the old mujiadeen groups which had long since turned into mere bandits; the Taliban represented a return to order, an extremely harsh order though it was. The US hadn't been caring about Afghanistan since the Soviets withdrew.
You can say the US contributed to instability in Afghanistan by funding rebel/jihadist groups, and you'd be right. You could say the US failed to support/rebuild the country after the Soviets left, and you'd be right (though also remember the government was still communist for several years). And you can say the resulting power vacuum led to the Taliban's rise, and you'd be right. But saying the US helped the Taliban to power, that's not right, that's wrong, and I wish I didn't have to state this every 6 month or so on these boards.
Mohammed Omar was trained by an organization directly funded by the CIA. I get that you want to deny responsibility by pointing out that the US stopped caring pretty early, but I'm confused as to why I should care.
The Taliban would not have been able to seize power without the US giving them that option. That it could have been any other group of religious fundamentalists founded by mujihadeen is irrelevant.
(I suppose it is relevant to distinguish them from the groups that the US directly helped to power. But these subtle differences are besides the point.)
Using this reasoning you could say the US helped the Soviet Union crush the Hungarian revolution. After all, the US had been supplying the USSR with arms only a decade before! But that's absurd, of course. Working together doesn't make one party responsible for the other's actions later on. Responsibility is a big word, you need to actually demonstrate that instead of making vague linkages and hand-waving away the details.
bro I'm saying that supporting a bunch of religious fundamentalists to take over a country and then abandoning the whole thing does not absolve you from responsibility if one of them starts a repressive regime. just because they didn't start a repressive regime together doesn't mean that them fighting it out suddenly makes you not responsible. Every faction would have done a similar thing!
My analogy stands. The US does share some responsibility for the 90s civil war but so do a host of other actors. It's not equivalent to backing the Taliban.
you can't go "Oh WOW! Who would have ever thought that that one guy specifically would grab power and start his own regime?!", because you literally left no other option than such a regime. The US didn't fund various ideologically different groups, it funded jihadists who fell out over the exact way to run an Islamic sharia based country. And, you know, if you claim that the US needs to stay in Afghanistan to stop the Taliban from regaining power you already cede the validity of this argument. You can't be both responsible for what happens after you leave but also not.
Well good thing I've never argued the US should stay in Afghanistan. I argued it was futile just a few pages back.
You did jump in a conversation with someone who very much argued the US should stay in Afghanistan. Also, the point is not about the futility but about responsibility for consequences.
But whatever man. You can't just ignore my argument. I'm saying your example is not analogous, the Taliban were a direct result of the situation the US helped bring about. They were backed until they won. That they themselves are also responsible is irrelevant. You can't egg people on to do a war and then act innocent of the logical and predictable follow up.
Something like the Taliban was guaranteed to rise from the victors of the war. You literally trained the dude who founded it. ISI never stopped funding. It's likely that the US government at the time actually wanted this. They would never go communist, and they were never likely to establish a genuine military threat.
like, are you saying that the US stopped supporting ISI a couple of years before the end of the cold war? not monitarily, but also just diplomatically? shit even if they did they could have told them to stop supporting the Taliban, or not fund war in Afghanistan in the first place.
maybe we're just talking past each other though. I am saying that the guy selling the gun carries an important sort of responsibility, and selling guns to some weird guys who you are pretty sure are going to do some fucked up shit is wrong. sure they and perhaps others also have some responsibility, but you are giving them guns. Those things you kill other people with.
You won't get disagreement from me that the CIA is shit and US foreign policy is awful: go to the ME threads to see me saying exactly this since forever. I can imagine people I don't like doing bad things until the cows come home; instead, I try to find out what actually happens. So go ahead with your sources.
I realize it's an illogical rule, but I propose we just assume that the CIA does all the shady shit unless proven otherwise. It saves us the bother of listening to the CIA deny everything and all the info on what they do is secret for years. And eventually you find that they were totally behind that shit but it was years ago so who cares.
+2
JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
One could argue that the refusal of the US to accept the offer by the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden to a third country was due to a desire to control Afghanistan, but that would be obviously crazy and out of line.
There is no good reason to occupy Afghanistan, so the US doing that for nearly 17 years is just a mystery. Just finding it hard to leave like I do at a party.
The Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden to the US,
And said they would hand him over to a neutral third party.
Which I think is a totally reasonable idea.
In response the USA invaded Afghanistan and occupied it for over 17 years.
One could argue that the refusal of the US to accept the offer by the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden to a third country was due to a desire to control Afghanistan, but that would be obviously crazy and out of line.
There is no good reason to occupy Afghanistan, so the US doing that for nearly 17 years is just a mystery. Just finding it hard to leave like I do at a party.
The Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden to the US, al Qaeda are allies to the Taliban regime that's why they stay there. It's a safe haven for them. Nor was the 2001 Afghan war entirely about controlling Afghanistan it was going to war with a terrorist group who used that nation as a staging ground. After the 9/11 attack the US hasn't just going to let that go and unlike Iraq that was a war which didn't divide the country over whether it was legitimate reprisal.
It's not a mystery why the US remains in Afghanistan, the war never ended with al-Queda and the Taliban. It's difficult to leave because the US leaving might make things worse in that region. There are no easy answers to what to do with Afghanistan, there are a lot of parties involved in this and the US is merely one faction.
... except then the Taliban just stayed in Pakistan.
Actually I was talking about the government the Soviets overthrew before we then backed the overthrow of the Khalqist government. You seem to be under the misapprehension that Afghan instability tracks back solely to American imperial scheming when the CIA station in Kabul was almost totally indifferent to Afghan politics before the Soviets plunged them into civil war.
Granted we should have backed Massoud instead of Hekmatyar but that was mostly due to ISI fuckery.
I figured you were talking about the prior government and not just one that you want to make your point.
I am not under the illusion that America is the sole cause of trouble. I do know that the Taliban were helped to power by the USA, so pointing to the time before the Taliban as some sort of justification for occupation is incredibly silly. again, why trust the guys who broke it a couple of times already to fix it now?
You were misinformed, I'm afraid. The timeline goes like this:
1979: Soviet invasion
80s: Soviet occupation, US funding of mujihadeen, with Saudi cash, via Pakistan's ISI.
89: Soviets withdraw, mujihadeen continues to fight communist government under Najibullah, US loses interest
92: Najibullah government falls, fighting continues between various factions and now splintered mujihadeen
96: Taliban, backed by Pakistan, seize Kabul and most of the country.
01: We know what happens here
The US did not back the Taliban. The Taliban is not synonymous with mujihadeen who fought the Soviets in the 80s. Both were backed by Pakistan's ISI, it is true. But the Taliban were able to gain support by fighting against the old mujiadeen groups which had long since turned into mere bandits; the Taliban represented a return to order, an extremely harsh order though it was. The US hadn't been caring about Afghanistan since the Soviets withdrew.
You can say the US contributed to instability in Afghanistan by funding rebel/jihadist groups, and you'd be right. You could say the US failed to support/rebuild the country after the Soviets left, and you'd be right (though also remember the government was still communist for several years). And you can say the resulting power vacuum led to the Taliban's rise, and you'd be right. But saying the US helped the Taliban to power, that's not right, that's wrong, and I wish I didn't have to state this every 6 month or so on these boards.
Mohammed Omar was trained by an organization directly funded by the CIA. I get that you want to deny responsibility by pointing out that the US stopped caring pretty early, but I'm confused as to why I should care.
The Taliban would not have been able to seize power without the US giving them that option. That it could have been any other group of religious fundamentalists founded by mujihadeen is irrelevant.
(I suppose it is relevant to distinguish them from the groups that the US directly helped to power. But these subtle differences are besides the point.)
Using this reasoning you could say the US helped the Soviet Union crush the Hungarian revolution. After all, the US had been supplying the USSR with arms only a decade before! But that's absurd, of course. Working together doesn't make one party responsible for the other's actions later on. Responsibility is a big word, you need to actually demonstrate that instead of making vague linkages and hand-waving away the details.
bro I'm saying that supporting a bunch of religious fundamentalists to take over a country and then abandoning the whole thing does not absolve you from responsibility if one of them starts a repressive regime. just because they didn't start a repressive regime together doesn't mean that them fighting it out suddenly makes you not responsible. Every faction would have done a similar thing!
you can't go "Oh WOW! Who would have ever thought that that one guy specifically would grab power and start his own regime?!", because you literally left no other option than such a regime. The US didn't fund various ideologically different groups, it funded jihadists who fell out over the exact way to run an Islamic sharia based country. And, you know, if you claim that the US needs to stay in Afghanistan to stop the Taliban from regaining power you already cede the validity of this argument. You can't be both responsible for what happens after you leave but also not.
So, wait. Let's suppose the US is fully responsible for the rise of the Jihadists. Doesn't that mean we should assume responsibility for preventing them from taking power now?
I mean, the way your narrative runs, walking away now would be just repeating the crime we committed 30 years ago. Why should a modern US administration countenance leaving the Afghans to monsters of our own making?
It appeared that your issue wasn't solely with OEF/the US but with the socialization process itself. Is that no longer the case? Or do you also think socialization and recognizing it as positive in other cases infantilizes those affected (e.g. post secondary education)?
I mean it is kind of insulting to suggest that Afghans need to be socialized to very easily understandable concepts like democracy and not hating other people. But the other difference with colleges is that you are dealing with, basically, kids. I just now saw (my apologies) that you pointed at a distinction between post secondary education and not in your previous post, but I don't think that is relevant. The point is that you leave the shelter of your immediate family, not that you go to a specific place for the good socialization or whatever. One can easily learn that good shit somewhere else, indeed colleges may be in some regards too conservative.
But yeah my issue wasn't solely with the US, it was with the common idea that non-western countries just need to learn/be socialize to our great western values. As if that is the issue. It is infantilizing because it assumes they just don't understand these things, instead of them simply rejecting them. You're not saying they are wrong, you are saying that they are ignorant. And I'm not attacking you so much, as pointing out that this idea is exactly what colonialists used to justify their colonialism. (Also used to deny black people the vote, for that matter.)
Agreed, I absolutely am. There is a significant difference between being told how something is from a single perspective and experiencing how it really is and learning from multiple perspectives. There are unknown unknowns. Individuals from the region can be told, for example, what America is really like and what Americans are really like and what democracy is etc.. And many of them are told what America and western liberal democratic values are like almost exclusively through a perspective similar to Sayyid Qutb and his disciples and Ruhollah Khomeini and his disciples. And then they come to the US or work with Americans and they have a different experience. One of the most common experiences I've come to learn is holding the presupposition that Americans are largely non-religious (something which influenced Sayyid Qutb's particular distaste for the US and general dislike for western political philosophy) only to come to the US and find that Americans are much more religious and religiosity is more widespread than they were initially taught.
No one is immune from unknown unknowns or presuppositions. As a young practitioner I found myself in the same situation. In the US military, while I was in, there was a major push for "cultural sensitivity" training for all troops. Typically this instruction was low quality and given by an NCO who had him or herself just recently been given the same instruction and had no expertise outside of the given instruction. I had the benefit of having access, due to my job, to much higher quality and more intensive instruction from individuals who were actually from and/or lived in the region for long periods of time and had expertise outside of a given curriculum of instruction. I even took to learning on my own. I could tell you about the ideology of Salafism, facts about Sunnism and Shiism, the general political histories of states in the region etc. This was largely good, but my perspective as a practitioner was still largely informed by the same sources, experiences, and environment which inform the majority of Americans and the majority of practitioners from the US and the West concerning the region, the people, and the history. I wasn't aware of the things and perspectives I wasn't aware of. Once I was exposed to the region in person and perspectives that I didn't know I was missing [for example at the time I couldn't tell you who Sayyid Qutb, Ali Shariati, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Ruholla Khomeini, Abdolkarim Soroush were much less what they wrote, or what context their thoughts about Islamic modernism, Islam, and the region and its interactions with the West was I couldn't tell you in any real depth about the differences between Sunnism or Shiism or even that there were further divisions within each e.g. fiver Shia, twelver Shia, Alawi, Ismaili, Nizari Ismaili, Sufi etc., what the actual history was like, how Islam is really used politically, that Salafist's ideas about Islam are actually relatively modern despite both their and our attempts to label it otherwise etc.] following my initial time as a practitioner I found out what presuppositions I was making, what internal biases I held, and recognized that my perspective was colored heavily by my previous socialization as an American, Westerner, and my previous environments in which I was bombarded with overly simplified, heavily biased, and sometimes outright factually incorrect perspectives and environments which influenced what information and perspectives I thought were important.
Individuals from the Middle East are not immune from internal biases informed by narrow and overly simplified, heavily biased, and sometimes factually incorrect perspectives, previous socialization, and existing in an environment in which they are bombarded with the previous simply because they aren't American or Western. In the fight to point out that the Arab world or the Muslim world isn't made up of "mentally stunted savages who we need to civilize" you've gone right past this. You've seen Orientalism, said it's wrong, and over-corrected. Are there individuals, including practitioners in the West, who believe that? Absolutely, I've even met and worked with some. That doesn't negate this point.
Actually I was talking about the government the Soviets overthrew before we then backed the overthrow of the Khalqist government. You seem to be under the misapprehension that Afghan instability tracks back solely to American imperial scheming when the CIA station in Kabul was almost totally indifferent to Afghan politics before the Soviets plunged them into civil war.
Granted we should have backed Massoud instead of Hekmatyar but that was mostly due to ISI fuckery.
I figured you were talking about the prior government and not just one that you want to make your point.
I am not under the illusion that America is the sole cause of trouble. I do know that the Taliban were helped to power by the USA, so pointing to the time before the Taliban as some sort of justification for occupation is incredibly silly. again, why trust the guys who broke it a couple of times already to fix it now?
You were misinformed, I'm afraid. The timeline goes like this:
1979: Soviet invasion
80s: Soviet occupation, US funding of mujihadeen, with Saudi cash, via Pakistan's ISI.
89: Soviets withdraw, mujihadeen continues to fight communist government under Najibullah, US loses interest
92: Najibullah government falls, fighting continues between various factions and now splintered mujihadeen
96: Taliban, backed by Pakistan, seize Kabul and most of the country.
01: We know what happens here
The US did not back the Taliban. The Taliban is not synonymous with mujihadeen who fought the Soviets in the 80s. Both were backed by Pakistan's ISI, it is true. But the Taliban were able to gain support by fighting against the old mujiadeen groups which had long since turned into mere bandits; the Taliban represented a return to order, an extremely harsh order though it was. The US hadn't been caring about Afghanistan since the Soviets withdrew.
You can say the US contributed to instability in Afghanistan by funding rebel/jihadist groups, and you'd be right. You could say the US failed to support/rebuild the country after the Soviets left, and you'd be right (though also remember the government was still communist for several years). And you can say the resulting power vacuum led to the Taliban's rise, and you'd be right. But saying the US helped the Taliban to power, that's not right, that's wrong, and I wish I didn't have to state this every 6 month or so on these boards.
Mohammed Omar was trained by an organization directly funded by the CIA. I get that you want to deny responsibility by pointing out that the US stopped caring pretty early, but I'm confused as to why I should care.
The Taliban would not have been able to seize power without the US giving them that option. That it could have been any other group of religious fundamentalists founded by mujihadeen is irrelevant.
(I suppose it is relevant to distinguish them from the groups that the US directly helped to power. But these subtle differences are besides the point.)
Using this reasoning you could say the US helped the Soviet Union crush the Hungarian revolution. After all, the US had been supplying the USSR with arms only a decade before! But that's absurd, of course. Working together doesn't make one party responsible for the other's actions later on. Responsibility is a big word, you need to actually demonstrate that instead of making vague linkages and hand-waving away the details.
bro I'm saying that supporting a bunch of religious fundamentalists to take over a country and then abandoning the whole thing does not absolve you from responsibility if one of them starts a repressive regime. just because they didn't start a repressive regime together doesn't mean that them fighting it out suddenly makes you not responsible. Every faction would have done a similar thing!
you can't go "Oh WOW! Who would have ever thought that that one guy specifically would grab power and start his own regime?!", because you literally left no other option than such a regime. The US didn't fund various ideologically different groups, it funded jihadists who fell out over the exact way to run an Islamic sharia based country. And, you know, if you claim that the US needs to stay in Afghanistan to stop the Taliban from regaining power you already cede the validity of this argument. You can't be both responsible for what happens after you leave but also not.
So, wait. Let's suppose the US is fully responsible for the rise of the Jihadists. Doesn't that mean we should assume responsibility for preventing them from taking power now?
I mean, the way your narrative runs, walking away now would be just repeating the crime we committed 30 years ago. Why should a modern US administration countenance leaving the Afghans to monsters of our own making?
I feel the need to point out that this argument (I recognize that you are not making it but pushing back against it) is taking away agency from actors who were involved in a movement based on issues and contexts in which the US was largely absent as an actor prior to Afghanistan in the 80's. This is presupposing that the "Afghan Arabs", the Salafists/Qutbists, Islamists, the Islamic Modernists etc. are entirely the product of US intervention in the region when these ideologies and actors were building and holding these ideologies and conducting actions based on them prior to this time period.
Actually I was talking about the government the Soviets overthrew before we then backed the overthrow of the Khalqist government. You seem to be under the misapprehension that Afghan instability tracks back solely to American imperial scheming when the CIA station in Kabul was almost totally indifferent to Afghan politics before the Soviets plunged them into civil war.
Granted we should have backed Massoud instead of Hekmatyar but that was mostly due to ISI fuckery.
I figured you were talking about the prior government and not just one that you want to make your point.
I am not under the illusion that America is the sole cause of trouble. I do know that the Taliban were helped to power by the USA, so pointing to the time before the Taliban as some sort of justification for occupation is incredibly silly. again, why trust the guys who broke it a couple of times already to fix it now?
You were misinformed, I'm afraid. The timeline goes like this:
1979: Soviet invasion
80s: Soviet occupation, US funding of mujihadeen, with Saudi cash, via Pakistan's ISI.
89: Soviets withdraw, mujihadeen continues to fight communist government under Najibullah, US loses interest
92: Najibullah government falls, fighting continues between various factions and now splintered mujihadeen
96: Taliban, backed by Pakistan, seize Kabul and most of the country.
01: We know what happens here
The US did not back the Taliban. The Taliban is not synonymous with mujihadeen who fought the Soviets in the 80s. Both were backed by Pakistan's ISI, it is true. But the Taliban were able to gain support by fighting against the old mujiadeen groups which had long since turned into mere bandits; the Taliban represented a return to order, an extremely harsh order though it was. The US hadn't been caring about Afghanistan since the Soviets withdrew.
You can say the US contributed to instability in Afghanistan by funding rebel/jihadist groups, and you'd be right. You could say the US failed to support/rebuild the country after the Soviets left, and you'd be right (though also remember the government was still communist for several years). And you can say the resulting power vacuum led to the Taliban's rise, and you'd be right. But saying the US helped the Taliban to power, that's not right, that's wrong, and I wish I didn't have to state this every 6 month or so on these boards.
Mohammed Omar was trained by an organization directly funded by the CIA. I get that you want to deny responsibility by pointing out that the US stopped caring pretty early, but I'm confused as to why I should care.
The Taliban would not have been able to seize power without the US giving them that option. That it could have been any other group of religious fundamentalists founded by mujihadeen is irrelevant.
(I suppose it is relevant to distinguish them from the groups that the US directly helped to power. But these subtle differences are besides the point.)
Using this reasoning you could say the US helped the Soviet Union crush the Hungarian revolution. After all, the US had been supplying the USSR with arms only a decade before! But that's absurd, of course. Working together doesn't make one party responsible for the other's actions later on. Responsibility is a big word, you need to actually demonstrate that instead of making vague linkages and hand-waving away the details.
bro I'm saying that supporting a bunch of religious fundamentalists to take over a country and then abandoning the whole thing does not absolve you from responsibility if one of them starts a repressive regime. just because they didn't start a repressive regime together doesn't mean that them fighting it out suddenly makes you not responsible. Every faction would have done a similar thing!
you can't go "Oh WOW! Who would have ever thought that that one guy specifically would grab power and start his own regime?!", because you literally left no other option than such a regime. The US didn't fund various ideologically different groups, it funded jihadists who fell out over the exact way to run an Islamic sharia based country. And, you know, if you claim that the US needs to stay in Afghanistan to stop the Taliban from regaining power you already cede the validity of this argument. You can't be both responsible for what happens after you leave but also not.
So, wait. Let's suppose the US is fully responsible for the rise of the Jihadists. Doesn't that mean we should assume responsibility for preventing them from taking power now?
I mean, the way your narrative runs, walking away now would be just repeating the crime we committed 30 years ago. Why should a modern US administration countenance leaving the Afghans to monsters of our own making?
The corruption in the Afghan government is so deep that the Taliban is getting our military equipment and aid money from corrupt Afghan military members who would much rather pay off the Taliban than fight them.
There is no way to tell if the Afghan troops we're training are actually loyal to the Afghan state, or loyal to the Taliban, or loyal to any of the various local warlords or tribal chiefs.
We're basically fighting ourselves at this point.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
My problem with calls indefinite engagement in Afghanistan are with how ill defined the goals seem to be.
Is there an extant plan for reopening peace talks with the Taliban, a structure for what an acceptable outcome would be, or a vision of what exit conditions would look like in the absence of a deal with the Taliban?
Like, the thing about afghanistan is that there is no winning move; This is already the longest hot war the US has been involved in, theres no real sign that the taliban is getting any closer to cracking, and pulling out means the local government will get whooped in about 3 months flat.
I can understand not wanting to give up, I didn't want to accept defeat when canada began pulling out years ago, but the simple fact is that their isn't any way to bring a satisfactory close to the conflict and barring a mass influx of international cash and troops combined with pakistan cleaning house on their end I don't see any ways to break the death march the conflict is locked into.
Like, the thing about afghanistan is that there is no winning move; This is already the longest hot war the US has been involved in, theres no real sign that the taliban is getting any closer to cracking, and pulling out means the local government will get whooped in about 3 months flat.
I can understand not wanting to give up, I didn't want to accept defeat when canada began pulling out years ago, but the simple fact is that their isn't any way to bring a satisfactory close to the conflict and barring a mass influx of international cash and troops combined with pakistan cleaning house on their end I don't see any ways to break the death march the conflict is locked into.
Well, we could conquer Pakistan. That'd resolve at least some of the issues.
+1
daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
Like, the thing about afghanistan is that there is no winning move; This is already the longest hot war the US has been involved in, theres no real sign that the taliban is getting any closer to cracking, and pulling out means the local government will get whooped in about 3 months flat.
I can understand not wanting to give up, I didn't want to accept defeat when canada began pulling out years ago, but the simple fact is that their isn't any way to bring a satisfactory close to the conflict and barring a mass influx of international cash and troops combined with pakistan cleaning house on their end I don't see any ways to break the death march the conflict is locked into.
Well, we could conquer Pakistan. That'd resolve at least some of the issues.
It'd be a complete shitshow of course, but the ISI are such horrible gits that it's nice to think about every so often. Never actually do it of course, there's no way it'd not end in all the (nuclear) tears, but Christ what a bunch of assholes.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
One could argue that the refusal of the US to accept the offer by the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden to a third country was due to a desire to control Afghanistan, but that would be obviously crazy and out of line.
There is no good reason to occupy Afghanistan, so the US doing that for nearly 17 years is just a mystery. Just finding it hard to leave like I do at a party.
The Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden to the US, al Qaeda are allies to the Taliban regime that's why they stay there. It's a safe haven for them. Nor was the 2001 Afghan war entirely about controlling Afghanistan it was going to war with a terrorist group who used that nation as a staging ground. After the 9/11 attack the US hasn't just going to let that go and unlike Iraq that was a war which didn't divide the country over whether it was legitimate reprisal.
It's not a mystery why the US remains in Afghanistan, the war never ended with al-Queda and the Taliban. It's difficult to leave because the US leaving might make things worse in that region. There are no easy answers to what to do with Afghanistan, there are a lot of parties involved in this and the US is merely one faction.
... except then the Taliban just stayed in Pakistan.
The Taliban were in charge of Afghanistan during that period, and are still there today.
Like, the thing about afghanistan is that there is no winning move; This is already the longest hot war the US has been involved in, theres no real sign that the taliban is getting any closer to cracking, and pulling out means the local government will get whooped in about 3 months flat.
I can understand not wanting to give up, I didn't want to accept defeat when canada began pulling out years ago, but the simple fact is that their isn't any way to bring a satisfactory close to the conflict and barring a mass influx of international cash and troops combined with pakistan cleaning house on their end I don't see any ways to break the death march the conflict is locked into.
Well, we could conquer Pakistan. That'd resolve at least some of the issues.
Maybe we could talk Iran into going in and taking our place. “Hey guys, we’ve got this great land for you, lots of mountains, a lot of the people there even speak Farsi, nothing could possibly go wrong.”
Actually I was talking about the government the Soviets overthrew before we then backed the overthrow of the Khalqist government. You seem to be under the misapprehension that Afghan instability tracks back solely to American imperial scheming when the CIA station in Kabul was almost totally indifferent to Afghan politics before the Soviets plunged them into civil war.
Granted we should have backed Massoud instead of Hekmatyar but that was mostly due to ISI fuckery.
I figured you were talking about the prior government and not just one that you want to make your point.
I am not under the illusion that America is the sole cause of trouble. I do know that the Taliban were helped to power by the USA, so pointing to the time before the Taliban as some sort of justification for occupation is incredibly silly. again, why trust the guys who broke it a couple of times already to fix it now?
You were misinformed, I'm afraid. The timeline goes like this:
1979: Soviet invasion
80s: Soviet occupation, US funding of mujihadeen, with Saudi cash, via Pakistan's ISI.
89: Soviets withdraw, mujihadeen continues to fight communist government under Najibullah, US loses interest
92: Najibullah government falls, fighting continues between various factions and now splintered mujihadeen
96: Taliban, backed by Pakistan, seize Kabul and most of the country.
01: We know what happens here
The US did not back the Taliban. The Taliban is not synonymous with mujihadeen who fought the Soviets in the 80s. Both were backed by Pakistan's ISI, it is true. But the Taliban were able to gain support by fighting against the old mujiadeen groups which had long since turned into mere bandits; the Taliban represented a return to order, an extremely harsh order though it was. The US hadn't been caring about Afghanistan since the Soviets withdrew.
You can say the US contributed to instability in Afghanistan by funding rebel/jihadist groups, and you'd be right. You could say the US failed to support/rebuild the country after the Soviets left, and you'd be right (though also remember the government was still communist for several years). And you can say the resulting power vacuum led to the Taliban's rise, and you'd be right. But saying the US helped the Taliban to power, that's not right, that's wrong, and I wish I didn't have to state this every 6 month or so on these boards.
Mohammed Omar was trained by an organization directly funded by the CIA. I get that you want to deny responsibility by pointing out that the US stopped caring pretty early, but I'm confused as to why I should care.
The Taliban would not have been able to seize power without the US giving them that option. That it could have been any other group of religious fundamentalists founded by mujihadeen is irrelevant.
(I suppose it is relevant to distinguish them from the groups that the US directly helped to power. But these subtle differences are besides the point.)
Using this reasoning you could say the US helped the Soviet Union crush the Hungarian revolution. After all, the US had been supplying the USSR with arms only a decade before! But that's absurd, of course. Working together doesn't make one party responsible for the other's actions later on. Responsibility is a big word, you need to actually demonstrate that instead of making vague linkages and hand-waving away the details.
bro I'm saying that supporting a bunch of religious fundamentalists to take over a country and then abandoning the whole thing does not absolve you from responsibility if one of them starts a repressive regime. just because they didn't start a repressive regime together doesn't mean that them fighting it out suddenly makes you not responsible. Every faction would have done a similar thing!
My analogy stands. The US does share some responsibility for the 90s civil war but so do a host of other actors. It's not equivalent to backing the Taliban.
you can't go "Oh WOW! Who would have ever thought that that one guy specifically would grab power and start his own regime?!", because you literally left no other option than such a regime. The US didn't fund various ideologically different groups, it funded jihadists who fell out over the exact way to run an Islamic sharia based country. And, you know, if you claim that the US needs to stay in Afghanistan to stop the Taliban from regaining power you already cede the validity of this argument. You can't be both responsible for what happens after you leave but also not.
Well good thing I've never argued the US should stay in Afghanistan. I argued it was futile just a few pages back.
You did jump in a conversation with someone who very much argued the US should stay in Afghanistan. Also, the point is not about the futility but about responsibility for consequences.
But whatever man. You can't just ignore my argument. I'm saying your example is not analogous, the Taliban were a direct result of the situation the US helped bring about. They were backed until they won. That they themselves are also responsible is irrelevant. You can't egg people on to do a war and then act innocent of the logical and predictable follow up.
Something like the Taliban was guaranteed to rise from the victors of the war. You literally trained the dude who founded it. ISI never stopped funding. It's likely that the US government at the time actually wanted this. They would never go communist, and they were never likely to establish a genuine military threat.
like, are you saying that the US stopped supporting ISI a couple of years before the end of the cold war? not monitarily, but also just diplomatically? shit even if they did they could have told them to stop supporting the Taliban, or not fund war in Afghanistan in the first place.
maybe we're just talking past each other though. I am saying that the guy selling the gun carries an important sort of responsibility, and selling guns to some weird guys who you are pretty sure are going to do some fucked up shit is wrong. sure they and perhaps others also have some responsibility, but you are giving them guns. Those things you kill other people with.
You won't get disagreement from me that the CIA is shit and US foreign policy is awful: go to the ME threads to see me saying exactly this since forever. I can imagine people I don't like doing bad things until the cows come home; instead, I try to find out what actually happens. So go ahead with your sources.
I realize it's an illogical rule, but I propose we just assume that the CIA does all the shady shit unless proven otherwise. It saves us the bother of listening to the CIA deny everything and all the info on what they do is secret for years. And eventually you find that they were totally behind that shit but it was years ago so who cares.
Yeah I have one of Rashid's books and have read some of his other stuff. He was one of the main guys who pointed out the Taliban was an ISI creation. Go ahead and point out the part where he says the US trained Mullah Omar.
One could argue that the refusal of the US to accept the offer by the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden to a third country was due to a desire to control Afghanistan, but that would be obviously crazy and out of line.
There is no good reason to occupy Afghanistan, so the US doing that for nearly 17 years is just a mystery. Just finding it hard to leave like I do at a party.
The Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden to the US,
And said they would hand him over to a neutral third party.
Which I think is a totally reasonable idea.
In response the USA invaded Afghanistan and occupied it for over 17 years.
The offer came with so many caveats that it was completely meaningless. Ya guys you can have Bin Laden as soon as you find the jade monkey before the next full moon and also I want a pony, but it's gotta be the right pony.
Like, the thing about afghanistan is that there is no winning move; This is already the longest hot war the US has been involved in, theres no real sign that the taliban is getting any closer to cracking, and pulling out means the local government will get whooped in about 3 months flat.
I can understand not wanting to give up, I didn't want to accept defeat when canada began pulling out years ago, but the simple fact is that their isn't any way to bring a satisfactory close to the conflict and barring a mass influx of international cash and troops combined with pakistan cleaning house on their end I don't see any ways to break the death march the conflict is locked into.
Well, we could conquer Pakistan. That'd resolve at least some of the issues.
Maybe we could talk Iran into going in and taking our place. “Hey guys, we’ve got this great land for you, lots of mountains, a lot of the people there even speak Farsi, nothing could possibly go wrong.”
Fun fact: Iran wanted to help back in 2001 since they have no love for the taliban but that offer evaporated after Bush consigned them to the axis of evil.
Imperialism and colonialism differ in what the superior seeks, not in the implied equality or inequality with conqueror and conquered. Colonialism, the superior seeks economic benefit from the inferior. Imperialism, the superior seeks political or military benefit from the inferior.
In both cases, the conqueror generally prescribes and supports the development and government is of the conquered in terms of what is demanded of them.
ok whatever dude but my definition is just as valid, and also highlighting the specific issue I had a problem with. But you could also of course make it about distance, centrality or even just the practice of settling. I found the term fitting for describing the assumption of the moral rightness of occupation of others. Though I must say I am now more interested in the fact people here are very concerned with which term is the right one. (also what is with superior and inferior?)
also, your definition is dumb as shit because what if I seek economic, political and military benefit? Does it even make sense to separate these? Is it only imperialism when you take barren pieces of rock for strategic purposes? Is it only colonialism if you take fertile lands with zero ability to defend it?
They are not my definitions, but the ones used by historians, sociologists, and political scientist since the distinction was first made in the early 20th Century when empires started taking on new forms than they had for the previous several thousand years.
As I said, both rarely exist in pure form. However, some of the purist examples you can take are this:
Colonialism: What Europe did to Africa in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Many territories remained nominally independent and self governing, foreign military presence was primarily for occupation, conflicts between colonial powers were rare. The territories existed to meet production quotas.
Imperialism: What the US did to Native Americans. There were no economic expectations on the conquered, plans to enslave the natives died in the Pre-Columbian Plague, and the US has enjoyed a resource surplus, particularly in food, for most of it's existence. The entire purpose was to remove political autonomy from regions and to solidify military dominance over the continent*.
So which one did you say implied equality between the boot and the ant?
*Americans did settle conquered lands later, but colonization and colonialism are also separate things, frequently happening together but neither actually requiring he other.
I think Afghanistan is pretty strategically useful if you are into smuggling dope and the revenue thus generated
It's a nice place for military force projection if your country has a war boner for, say, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq, some of the former SSRs.
It really isn't great as a staging area because it's remote, has a ton of difficult terrain and very little infrastructure. Its also nowhere close to Iraq or Syria.
It's a nice place to have some measure of control over if you are, or are bitter arch-rivals with, Pakistan or Iran.
Oh, hey, there's Pakistan's name again.
One could argue that the refusal of the US to accept the offer by the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden to a third country was due to a desire to control Afghanistan, but that would be obviously crazy and out of line.
There is no good reason to occupy Afghanistan, so the US doing that for nearly 17 years is just a mystery. Just finding it hard to leave like I do at a party.
One could argue that past actions were mistakes; that doesn't change the present situation.
The present situation is that hostile foreign powers will topple the current government and move right back in if the US pulls out before the current regeime can defend itself.
This is why I feel any withdrawal needs to be paired with a generous refugee program. However, the necessary scope and politics of that effort make it no more likely to sucessfully shield Afghans from another round of brutal oppression than our current course of action; which is trying to bolster their ability to secure their own country from invasion by foreign proxies like the Taliban and IS-K.
Like, the thing about afghanistan is that there is no winning move; This is already the longest hot war the US has been involved in, theres no real sign that the taliban is getting any closer to cracking, and pulling out means the local government will get whooped in about 3 months flat.
I can understand not wanting to give up, I didn't want to accept defeat when canada began pulling out years ago, but the simple fact is that their isn't any way to bring a satisfactory close to the conflict and barring a mass influx of international cash and troops combined with pakistan cleaning house on their end I don't see any ways to break the death march the conflict is locked into.
Well, we could conquer Pakistan. That'd resolve at least some of the issues.
Maybe we could talk Iran into going in and taking our place. “Hey guys, we’ve got this great land for you, lots of mountains, a lot of the people there even speak Farsi, nothing could possibly go wrong.”
Fun fact: Iran wanted to help back in 2001 since they have no love for the taliban but that offer evaporated after Bush consigned them to the axis of evil.
The continuing American hate-boner for Iran has caused some very poor strategic choices.
"Oh well they do bad things" yeah so do the Saudis but nobody in DC cares about that.
Like, the thing about afghanistan is that there is no winning move; This is already the longest hot war the US has been involved in, theres no real sign that the taliban is getting any closer to cracking, and pulling out means the local government will get whooped in about 3 months flat.
I can understand not wanting to give up, I didn't want to accept defeat when canada began pulling out years ago, but the simple fact is that their isn't any way to bring a satisfactory close to the conflict and barring a mass influx of international cash and troops combined with pakistan cleaning house on their end I don't see any ways to break the death march the conflict is locked into.
Well, we could conquer Pakistan. That'd resolve at least some of the issues.
Maybe we could talk Iran into going in and taking our place. “Hey guys, we’ve got this great land for you, lots of mountains, a lot of the people there even speak Farsi, nothing could possibly go wrong.”
Fun fact: Iran wanted to help back in 2001 since they have no love for the taliban but that offer evaporated after Bush consigned them to the axis of evil.
The continuing American hate-boner for Iran has caused some very poor strategic choices.
"Oh well they do bad things" yeah so do the Saudis but nobody in DC cares about that.
Case in point: kidnapping a foreign leader and dismembering a reporter who was critical of them that they lured to their death.
That being said, we may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They have been a great ally in our very important fight against Iran. The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region. It is our paramount goal to fully eliminate the threat of terrorism throughout the world!
That being said, we may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They have been a great ally in our very important fight against Iran. The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region. It is our paramount goal to fully eliminate the threat of terrorism throughout the world!
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Then 9/11 happened - one of those seismic shocks that occasionally jar Americans out of our secure isolationist complacency and into full-bore interventionism.
It's a nice place for military force projection if your contry has a war boner for, say, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq, some of the former SSRs.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
It really isn't great as a staging area because it's remote, has a ton of difficult terrain and very little infrastructure. Its also nowhere close to Iraq or Syria.
It's a nice place to have some measure of control over if you are, or are bitter arch-rivals with, Pakistan or Iran.
Oh, hey, there's Pakistan's name again.
Brzezinski is just one guy, not the US government, but he was a hugely influential foreign policy schemer for decades. He unofficially advised Obama as well, and Obama has acknowledged Brzezinski as influential on his own foreign policy views. In his book "The Grand Chessboard," Brzezinski argues for US dominance of Eurasia in order to prevent the rise of any challengers to American hegemony (Russia and China being the obvious examples). He focuses heavily on Central Asia and Afghanistan, regarding that region as being central to US power in Eurasia generally (IIRC he called it "the world-pivot").
And if you look at a map, it's easy to see why he feels this way. Iran is on Afghanistan's west, and given the US's hostility toward the former it makes sense that they'd want a military presence in the latter (as with Iraq). It also borders China (yes, a very small border, but a border nonetheless). If you look at maps of China's New Silk Road strategy you see that Afghanistan is basically right in the middle of it, making the country a powerful position from which to threaten Chinese trade. And the policy he takes credit for - arming the Mujahidin - is an example of what he's talking about: the USSR, through dominance in much of Eurasia, was able to threaten US hegemony, and the US indirectly engaged them in Central Asia to weaken their strength on the continent.
Is Brzezinski's argument, or similar thinking, a factor in US policy? Is this why the US is in Afghanistan? I don't know. My guess would be "not the only reason, but at the very least one reason, and probably a major one." 9/11 is obviously another (at least for the initial invasion), and if you're more charitable to Washington than I am, you might accept humanitarianism as a plausible motivation (i.e. not wanting the Taliban to reinstate a brutal theocracy). But I find the idea that the US would engage in a 17-year occupation of a Central Asian state with no geopolitical motivation hard to swallow. Brzezinski's argument seems sound from an imperialist perspective, and given the publicly acknowledged influence his views have had on multiple US administrations I would not dismiss his views as irrelevant.
edit- additionally, when I think of China's relationship to Pakistan and Pakistan's relationship to Afghanistan, I sometimes wonder what Beijing really thinks about Afghanistan and the war there. Although I can think of some strong reasons that China would not want a Taliban victory or even a destabilizing conflict in the country.
I had a dumb idea a few days ago and I'm going to share it with you guys: Afghanistan is valuable because it's not valuable. Yeah, bear with me.
First off, why isn't it valuable? Well its pretty well defined by its mountains, for one. Its hard as hell to move anything anywhere, which means its always going to be complicated and expensive to invade. And if you did, what would you find? Not good farming land. No huge population. No particularly important trade routes. Yeah its got some farm land but if you wanted lush greenery you're going to need to go to Pakistan, or the Ferenga Valley, or maybe all the way to the Caspian. Yeah its got like 30 million people (the population of Canada, roughly) but it borders Pakistan of over 200 million. Yeah trade goes through Afghanistan but nothing super important, the mountains as always make transportation a challenge, and with no big rivers going through the country boats aren't an alternative. So its really not great territory to hold. Plus its got tough winters, and tough locals, who have a lot of experience at fighting foreigners.
So, why is it valuable? I think because it tends to be the last piece taken on the board. Because it's so irritating to conquer and hold, it tends to not have particularly powerful or stable governments ruling it-- it's kinda perpetual frontier. If you're a power like the Russian or British Empires, or Persia or the US or whomever, a frontier means a place not within your control-- and not within anyone else's either. While you may not want it, your rival just might. This was a central part to the Great Game in the 19th century. The British were worried about Russia expanding down to its India colony and threatening it. The Russians worried about the British colony expanding up into Central Asia, threatening its colonies. The Game resulted in the drawing of the Durand line, giving us the Afghanistan-Pakistan border we have today and almost formalizing Afghanistan's role as a buffer state between empires. The border line is disputed, of course.
In the Soviet experience, Afghanistan was at the farthest communist frontier but in danger of falling (perhaps some of these were rumours planted by Brzezinski's pals, who knows). In the American experience, Afghanistan was a loosely governed country that was hiding wanted men. As usual invading Afghanistan seems easy: it has no army to speak of, it has no allies, and what armed men are there are about 80 years out of date on military technology. Regional powers are either too savvy for the trap (unlikely) or are simply too poor to afford invasions of any kind. Pakistan's central reason for creating and backing the Afghan Taliban is to prevent India (its arch rival) setting up shop in the country. Iran had troops massed on the border in the 90s (fundamentalist sunnis v shia state) but settled for backing the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. I'd expect China to want a piece at some point in the future, and I have no reason to think they'd do better than anyone else.
Afghanistan is everyone's soft underbelly. Important because nobody wants it. Easy to invade, impossible to retreat from. To win all you need to do is give up. For prideful empires, its impossible to avoid.
Rare earth metals aren't actually that rare. China can’t control the market in rare earth elements because they aren’t all that rare
Also, at least for American companies, the rare earth metals they'd be mining in Afghanistan would basically have to go past China to get to the US, so I dunno why they'd bother doing that, even if they could somehow get the price of mining in Afghanistan down to the same as in China.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
There is value in rare earths in places that haven't had a mining industry to regulate yet.
The US has tons of rare earth minerals, but we don't mine them much because the limit that we allow companies to poison communities is too low for rare earth mining. Flammabe tap water, rampant birth defects, and stunting whole generations is on the table, but regulation is still too steep.
China's influence in that market isn't because they have more, but because they look the other way on a lot. Their dominance in solar is largely because most countries' industries spend a lot of effort and money managing toxic byproducts, while China's just dumps them in a convenient river.
To be fair, they also invested Billions where we invested tens of millions, and also some of our investments were used as a gotcha against the president.
bro I'm saying that supporting a bunch of religious fundamentalists to take over a country and then abandoning the whole thing does not absolve you from responsibility if one of them starts a repressive regime. just because they didn't start a repressive regime together doesn't mean that them fighting it out suddenly makes you not responsible. Every faction would have done a similar thing!
you can't go "Oh WOW! Who would have ever thought that that one guy specifically would grab power and start his own regime?!", because you literally left no other option than such a regime. The US didn't fund various ideologically different groups, it funded jihadists who fell out over the exact way to run an Islamic sharia based country. And, you know, if you claim that the US needs to stay in Afghanistan to stop the Taliban from regaining power you already cede the validity of this argument. You can't be both responsible for what happens after you leave but also not.
i mean, and this is taking your word for it that the US never supported the Taliban even though various sources claim they did for some time (though "support" is a vague term) because of their political stances(also ISI??). I realize the CIA is a fundamentally honest organization with a noble goal they never stray from. I am just playing devil's advocate and saying what if we imagine an US government and CIA that would support a murderous dictatorship for its own political goals?
ok whatever dude but my definition is just as valid, and also highlighting the specific issue I had a problem with. But you could also of course make it about distance, centrality or even just the practice of settling. I found the term fitting for describing the assumption of the moral rightness of occupation of others. Though I must say I am now more interested in the fact people here are very concerned with which term is the right one. (also what is with superior and inferior?)
also, your definition is dumb as shit because what if I seek economic, political and military benefit? Does it even make sense to separate these? Is it only imperialism when you take barren pieces of rock for strategic purposes? Is it only colonialism if you take fertile lands with zero ability to defend it?
I mean it is kind of insulting to suggest that Afghans need to be socialized to very easily understandable concepts like democracy and not hating other people. But the other difference with colleges is that you are dealing with, basically, kids. I just now saw (my apologies) that you pointed at a distinction between post secondary education and not in your previous post, but I don't think that is relevant. The point is that you leave the shelter of your immediate family, not that you go to a specific place for the good socialization or whatever. One can easily learn that good shit somewhere else, indeed colleges may be in some regards too conservative.
But yeah my issue wasn't solely with the US, it was with the common idea that non-western countries just need to learn/be socialize to our great western values. As if that is the issue. It is infantilizing because it assumes they just don't understand these things, instead of them simply rejecting them. You're not saying they are wrong, you are saying that they are ignorant. And I'm not attacking you so much, as pointing out that this idea is exactly what colonialists used to justify their colonialism. (Also used to deny black people the vote, for that matter.)
One could argue that the refusal of the US to accept the offer by the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden to a third country was due to a desire to control Afghanistan, but that would be obviously crazy and out of line.
There is no good reason to occupy Afghanistan, so the US doing that for nearly 17 years is just a mystery. Just finding it hard to leave like I do at a party.
The Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden to the US, al Qaeda are allies to the Taliban regime that's why they stay there. It's a safe haven for them. Nor was the 2001 Afghan war entirely about controlling Afghanistan it was going to war with a terrorist group who used that nation as a staging ground. After the 9/11 attack the US hasn't just going to let that go and unlike Iraq that was a war which didn't divide the country over whether it was legitimate reprisal.
It's not a mystery why the US remains in Afghanistan, the war never ended with al-Queda and the Taliban. It's difficult to leave because the US leaving might make things worse in that region. There are no easy answers to what to do with Afghanistan, there are a lot of parties involved in this and the US is merely one faction.
Well good thing I've never argued the US should stay in Afghanistan. I argued it was futile just a few pages back.
You won't get disagreement from me that the CIA is shit and US foreign policy is awful: go to the ME threads to see me saying exactly this since forever. I can imagine people I don't like doing bad things until the cows come home; instead, I try to find out what actually happens. So go ahead with your sources.
There would be negative political consequences to ending the war and that's really the only incentive that matters for any President. And the public cares so little about the war's proceedings that there's no pressure going the other way.
You did jump in a conversation with someone who very much argued the US should stay in Afghanistan. Also, the point is not about the futility but about responsibility for consequences.
But whatever man. You can't just ignore my argument. I'm saying your example is not analogous, the Taliban were a direct result of the situation the US helped bring about. They were backed until they won. That they themselves are also responsible is irrelevant. You can't egg people on to do a war and then act innocent of the logical and predictable follow up.
Something like the Taliban was guaranteed to rise from the victors of the war. You literally trained the dude who founded it. ISI never stopped funding. It's likely that the US government at the time actually wanted this. They would never go communist, and they were never likely to establish a genuine military threat.
like, are you saying that the US stopped supporting ISI a couple of years before the end of the cold war? not monitarily, but also just diplomatically? shit even if they did they could have told them to stop supporting the Taliban, or not fund war in Afghanistan in the first place.
maybe we're just talking past each other though. I am saying that the guy selling the gun carries an important sort of responsibility, and selling guns to some weird guys who you are pretty sure are going to do some fucked up shit is wrong. sure they and perhaps others also have some responsibility, but you are giving them guns. Those things you kill other people with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Rashid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carole_Hillenbrand
I realize it's an illogical rule, but I propose we just assume that the CIA does all the shady shit unless proven otherwise. It saves us the bother of listening to the CIA deny everything and all the info on what they do is secret for years. And eventually you find that they were totally behind that shit but it was years ago so who cares.
And said they would hand him over to a neutral third party.
Which I think is a totally reasonable idea.
In response the USA invaded Afghanistan and occupied it for over 17 years.
... except then the Taliban just stayed in Pakistan.
So, wait. Let's suppose the US is fully responsible for the rise of the Jihadists. Doesn't that mean we should assume responsibility for preventing them from taking power now?
I mean, the way your narrative runs, walking away now would be just repeating the crime we committed 30 years ago. Why should a modern US administration countenance leaving the Afghans to monsters of our own making?
Agreed, I absolutely am. There is a significant difference between being told how something is from a single perspective and experiencing how it really is and learning from multiple perspectives. There are unknown unknowns. Individuals from the region can be told, for example, what America is really like and what Americans are really like and what democracy is etc.. And many of them are told what America and western liberal democratic values are like almost exclusively through a perspective similar to Sayyid Qutb and his disciples and Ruhollah Khomeini and his disciples. And then they come to the US or work with Americans and they have a different experience. One of the most common experiences I've come to learn is holding the presupposition that Americans are largely non-religious (something which influenced Sayyid Qutb's particular distaste for the US and general dislike for western political philosophy) only to come to the US and find that Americans are much more religious and religiosity is more widespread than they were initially taught.
No one is immune from unknown unknowns or presuppositions. As a young practitioner I found myself in the same situation. In the US military, while I was in, there was a major push for "cultural sensitivity" training for all troops. Typically this instruction was low quality and given by an NCO who had him or herself just recently been given the same instruction and had no expertise outside of the given instruction. I had the benefit of having access, due to my job, to much higher quality and more intensive instruction from individuals who were actually from and/or lived in the region for long periods of time and had expertise outside of a given curriculum of instruction. I even took to learning on my own. I could tell you about the ideology of Salafism, facts about Sunnism and Shiism, the general political histories of states in the region etc. This was largely good, but my perspective as a practitioner was still largely informed by the same sources, experiences, and environment which inform the majority of Americans and the majority of practitioners from the US and the West concerning the region, the people, and the history. I wasn't aware of the things and perspectives I wasn't aware of. Once I was exposed to the region in person and perspectives that I didn't know I was missing [for example at the time I couldn't tell you who Sayyid Qutb, Ali Shariati, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Ruholla Khomeini, Abdolkarim Soroush were much less what they wrote, or what context their thoughts about Islamic modernism, Islam, and the region and its interactions with the West was I couldn't tell you in any real depth about the differences between Sunnism or Shiism or even that there were further divisions within each e.g. fiver Shia, twelver Shia, Alawi, Ismaili, Nizari Ismaili, Sufi etc., what the actual history was like, how Islam is really used politically, that Salafist's ideas about Islam are actually relatively modern despite both their and our attempts to label it otherwise etc.] following my initial time as a practitioner I found out what presuppositions I was making, what internal biases I held, and recognized that my perspective was colored heavily by my previous socialization as an American, Westerner, and my previous environments in which I was bombarded with overly simplified, heavily biased, and sometimes outright factually incorrect perspectives and environments which influenced what information and perspectives I thought were important.
Individuals from the Middle East are not immune from internal biases informed by narrow and overly simplified, heavily biased, and sometimes factually incorrect perspectives, previous socialization, and existing in an environment in which they are bombarded with the previous simply because they aren't American or Western. In the fight to point out that the Arab world or the Muslim world isn't made up of "mentally stunted savages who we need to civilize" you've gone right past this. You've seen Orientalism, said it's wrong, and over-corrected. Are there individuals, including practitioners in the West, who believe that? Absolutely, I've even met and worked with some. That doesn't negate this point.
I feel the need to point out that this argument (I recognize that you are not making it but pushing back against it) is taking away agency from actors who were involved in a movement based on issues and contexts in which the US was largely absent as an actor prior to Afghanistan in the 80's. This is presupposing that the "Afghan Arabs", the Salafists/Qutbists, Islamists, the Islamic Modernists etc. are entirely the product of US intervention in the region when these ideologies and actors were building and holding these ideologies and conducting actions based on them prior to this time period.
The corruption in the Afghan government is so deep that the Taliban is getting our military equipment and aid money from corrupt Afghan military members who would much rather pay off the Taliban than fight them.
There is no way to tell if the Afghan troops we're training are actually loyal to the Afghan state, or loyal to the Taliban, or loyal to any of the various local warlords or tribal chiefs.
We're basically fighting ourselves at this point.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Is there an extant plan for reopening peace talks with the Taliban, a structure for what an acceptable outcome would be, or a vision of what exit conditions would look like in the absence of a deal with the Taliban?
I can understand not wanting to give up, I didn't want to accept defeat when canada began pulling out years ago, but the simple fact is that their isn't any way to bring a satisfactory close to the conflict and barring a mass influx of international cash and troops combined with pakistan cleaning house on their end I don't see any ways to break the death march the conflict is locked into.
Well, we could conquer Pakistan. That'd resolve at least some of the issues.
It'd be a complete shitshow of course, but the ISI are such horrible gits that it's nice to think about every so often. Never actually do it of course, there's no way it'd not end in all the (nuclear) tears, but Christ what a bunch of assholes.
The Taliban were in charge of Afghanistan during that period, and are still there today.
Maybe we could talk Iran into going in and taking our place. “Hey guys, we’ve got this great land for you, lots of mountains, a lot of the people there even speak Farsi, nothing could possibly go wrong.”
Yeah I have one of Rashid's books and have read some of his other stuff. He was one of the main guys who pointed out the Taliban was an ISI creation. Go ahead and point out the part where he says the US trained Mullah Omar.
The offer came with so many caveats that it was completely meaningless. Ya guys you can have Bin Laden as soon as you find the jade monkey before the next full moon and also I want a pony, but it's gotta be the right pony.
Fun fact: Iran wanted to help back in 2001 since they have no love for the taliban but that offer evaporated after Bush consigned them to the axis of evil.
They are not my definitions, but the ones used by historians, sociologists, and political scientist since the distinction was first made in the early 20th Century when empires started taking on new forms than they had for the previous several thousand years.
As I said, both rarely exist in pure form. However, some of the purist examples you can take are this:
Colonialism: What Europe did to Africa in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Many territories remained nominally independent and self governing, foreign military presence was primarily for occupation, conflicts between colonial powers were rare. The territories existed to meet production quotas.
Imperialism: What the US did to Native Americans. There were no economic expectations on the conquered, plans to enslave the natives died in the Pre-Columbian Plague, and the US has enjoyed a resource surplus, particularly in food, for most of it's existence. The entire purpose was to remove political autonomy from regions and to solidify military dominance over the continent*.
So which one did you say implied equality between the boot and the ant?
*Americans did settle conquered lands later, but colonization and colonialism are also separate things, frequently happening together but neither actually requiring he other.
One could argue that past actions were mistakes; that doesn't change the present situation.
The present situation is that hostile foreign powers will topple the current government and move right back in if the US pulls out before the current regeime can defend itself.
This is why I feel any withdrawal needs to be paired with a generous refugee program. However, the necessary scope and politics of that effort make it no more likely to sucessfully shield Afghans from another round of brutal oppression than our current course of action; which is trying to bolster their ability to secure their own country from invasion by foreign proxies like the Taliban and IS-K.
The continuing American hate-boner for Iran has caused some very poor strategic choices.
"Oh well they do bad things" yeah so do the Saudis but nobody in DC cares about that.
Case in point: kidnapping a foreign leader and dismembering a reporter who was critical of them that they lured to their death.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-president-donald-j-trump-standing-saudi-arabia/
It contains 8 exclamation points! Pathetic doesn't even begin to cover this.
There are really no words that cover the breadth of how embarrassing it is to be an American right now. This statement is also fucking outrageous.
Outbarrassing? Emrageous? I just can’t with this shit.