It’s entirely too much to quote fucking white mans burden
It’s twenty times entirely too much to quote it directly at a person who fled Mogadishu
I mean, its only been, what 150ish years? But No No, this time it'll work. WE HAVE TO DO IT!
America only cares about Africa when they can blame the problem on colonization and absolve themselves of white guilt.
Your words prove it
You can not remake other countries society/religion/culture/government at the point of a gun. It does not work, not now. Not back when Kipling wrote that in 1900, hell it didn't even work a lot of the time when "put every adult male to the sword" was the default.
So why the fuck should we send thousands of soldiers to die while killing hundreds of thousands in a doomed effort.
Dumping blame on the Afghan government seems like a smart move politically.
I think for all the hubbub in the news right now, ending the war will end up being better for him in the end.
He's taking an enormous amount of heat for it right now though, from all directions.
Americans in general don't seem to give two shits about international stuff, but they will remember "Biden's Saigon" even if they are happy that the war is over.
Ford got exactly no heat outside of the protoneocons for leaving Vietnam the way we did. People did not give a fuck. Outside the Fox News expanded universe, Biden won't either.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
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No-QuarterNothing To FearBut Fear ItselfRegistered Userregular
I'll be blunt. The vast majority of Americans won't give a flying fuck about this in 2 months let alone 2 years.
I'm not saying that's good, I'm saying that that's *what will happen*, and the public apathy is a part of why this is currently occurring.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Dumping blame on the Afghan government seems like a smart move politically.
I think for all the hubbub in the news right now, ending the war will end up being better for him in the end.
He's taking an enormous amount of heat for it right now though, from all directions.
Americans in general don't seem to give two shits about international stuff, but they will remember "Biden's Saigon" even if they are happy that the war is over.
We care about international stuff when we lose. No one in the US really gave a shit about Afghanistan for the last 10 years, it basically wasn't in the news except as a political football. There was still some print media talking about it, and the money black hole it was, but for the most part no one gave a shit.
Now it can be used as political tool again so everyone "cares" now.
Dumping blame on the Afghan government seems like a smart move politically.
I think for all the hubbub in the news right now, ending the war will end up being better for him in the end.
I think the U.S. gov probably thought the Afghan forces could fight on for three or six months, by which time they could safely say it wasn’t their problem anymore.
That they were still so desperately wrong tells you everything you need to know about our effort there, really
Yeah.
It says something that the Taliban took every City in Afghanistan in less time that it would probably take someone to drive to every city in Afghanistan.
The freaking Blitzkreig of France in WW2 took six weeks, and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq took four.
I have every idea that the US fully expected there to be a months long war of attrition beginning with the more rural cities, taking a few weeks at least for bigger historically anti-Taliban cities like Herat and Mazar-i-sharif and then another couple of months for Kabul to fall.
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
I think that those of us who are fortunate have a moral responsibility to help the less fortunate. The sticking point is that I fundamentally believe that the United States Military is a tool that literally cannot due that due to the interests it serves, and any benefits it grants are accidental at best.
The US military also isn't designed as a peacekeeping or occupation force. John Q Public demanded that square pegs fit round holes.
Note that the "war" for Iraq lasted about a month and US troops fucking steamrolled the Saddam's military. After that, though...?
the moral obligation to rebuild a country that we glassed for the alleged purpose of removing their brutal dictator and improving the lives of its citizens is obvious. it's not incorrect for the public to have wanted that, if indeed they did, and I doubt anybody actually gave a shit whether it was the US military specifically who performed that necessary work.
It’s entirely too much to quote fucking white mans burden
It’s twenty times entirely too much to quote it directly at a person who fled Mogadishu
I mean, its only been, what 150ish years? But No No, this time it'll work. WE HAVE TO DO IT!
America only cares about Africa when they can blame the problem on colonization and absolve themselves of white guilt.
Your words prove it
You can not remake other countries society/religion/culture/government at the point of a gun. It does not work, not now. Not back when Kipling wrote that in 1900, hell it didn't even work a lot of the time when "put every adult male to the sword" was the default.
So why the fuck should we send thousands of soldiers to die while killing hundreds of thousands in a doomed effort.
The question remains and I'm genuinely not sure about this: what did we do right in Japan?
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
There is enough sin in this world to justify 200,000 lives as collateral damage if you can change things for the better. No one blinks at the German or Japanese construction crews getting blown up by ww2 bombs.
But as I said in the BLM thread, people like Lindsey Graham and mitch McConnell will sabotage any effort made for the greater good, resulting in America's forces arriving a day late and a billion short.
"strategic bombing" has been widely admonish by historian both military and otherwise, it's pretty much agreed upon it was criminal.
Were we at war with the nation of Afghanistan?
I'm saying this as a snide comment, but I literally can't remember our process anymore. As far as I remember, we went there to kill a saudi terrorist in retribution who ended up being in Pakistan the whole time and also we killed him like 10 years ago.
Bin Laden was in Afghanistan when we invaded and we almost captured / killed him at Tora Bora.
I wonder how different things would have gone if we got him there and were able to pull Mission Accomplished and fuck off out of Afghanistan.
Given they literally pulled the Iraq War out of their asses and then just stopped caring about the search for Bin Laden, I don't think it would have gone terribly different.
Probably not, but confirming Bin Laden (and some of the others who escaped) dead in 2001 may have dampened some of America's desire for revenge.
I guess things probably would have gone the same way though.
If the US wanted to use its power to help people in war-torn and/or oppressive countries, it could offer a no-questions-asked asylum program, complete with a free ride from wherever you are.
Available even if your local government doesn't want to let you leave, even if you're transferring from a prison there to a US prison because you really did commit a crime.
It’s entirely too much to quote fucking white mans burden
It’s twenty times entirely too much to quote it directly at a person who fled Mogadishu
I mean, its only been, what 150ish years? But No No, this time it'll work. WE HAVE TO DO IT!
America only cares about Africa when they can blame the problem on colonization and absolve themselves of white guilt.
Your words prove it
You can not remake other countries society/religion/culture/government at the point of a gun. It does not work, not now. Not back when Kipling wrote that in 1900, hell it didn't even work a lot of the time when "put every adult male to the sword" was the default.
So why the fuck should we send thousands of soldiers to die while killing hundreds of thousands in a doomed effort.
The question remains and I'm genuinely not sure about this: what did we do right in Japan?
My two cents:
Rebuffed their own imperial goals, nuked them twice, wrote their constitution and had a pre-existing trade relationship.
The last one is actually the only important one. It's why we're closer partners with the UK than France, even though that make no sense historically.
I kind of feel that any "explanation" for this that isn't multi-tiered and nuanced is being simplified.
We're seeing what one can only hope is the endcap of a multi-decadal, multi-national fuckup of historic proportions, ending the only way it could.
This doesn't absolve anyone, whether it be military planners, the American people, Trump, Biden, the Afghan government, Pakistan, or the Taliban, because they're all culpable.
It could take years of hindsight to begin to make sense of this mess that is still playing out. This is absolutely one of those situations where anyone giving you a simple target for blame is either ignorant or trying to sell you something.
All we can do is recognise the complexity of the situation and attempt to understand it.
I agree that it will take years to truly document the details, but the broad narrative has been known for a while.
This is Vietnam 2.0. Always has been. Bush, and his ilk, used the attack on 9/11 opportunistically to try and demonstrate how much better they could do compared to their fathers.
From the US-funded puppet government, on down, a lot of the highlights are the same.
There is enough sin in this world to justify 200,000 lives as collateral damage if you can change things for the better. No one blinks at the German or Japanese construction crews getting blown up by ww2 bombs.
But as I said in the BLM thread, people like Lindsey Graham and mitch McConnell will sabotage any effort made for the greater good, resulting in America's forces arriving a day late and a billion short.
"strategic bombing" has been widely admonish by historian both military and otherwise, it's pretty much agreed upon it was criminal.
Were we at war with the nation of Afghanistan?
I'm saying this as a snide comment, but I literally can't remember our process anymore. As far as I remember, we went there to kill a saudi terrorist in retribution who ended up being in Pakistan the whole time and also we killed him like 10 years ago.
Bin Laden was in Afghanistan when we invaded and we almost captured / killed him at Tora Bora.
I wonder how different things would have gone if we got him there and were able to pull Mission Accomplished and fuck off out of Afghanistan.
Even if Bin Laden was successfully intercepted in the early days, the US military would have remained because the mandate/resolution wasn't just Bin Laden it was to stop the spread of terrorism (2.0, the 1.0 version was communism).
If the US wanted to use its power to help people in war-torn and/or oppressive countries, it could offer a no-questions-asked asylum program, complete with a free ride from wherever you are.
Available even if your local government doesn't want to let you leave, even if you're transferring from a prison there to a US prison because you really did commit a crime.
If in some parallel universe the U.S. was able to get the political will to bring in vastly larger numbers of people as refugees than it does now, I wonder how long it would be able to get away with that before the people in charge of these oppressive countries started using force to keep people from leaving.
It’s entirely too much to quote fucking white mans burden
It’s twenty times entirely too much to quote it directly at a person who fled Mogadishu
I mean, its only been, what 150ish years? But No No, this time it'll work. WE HAVE TO DO IT!
America only cares about Africa when they can blame the problem on colonization and absolve themselves of white guilt.
Your words prove it
You can not remake other countries society/religion/culture/government at the point of a gun. It does not work, not now. Not back when Kipling wrote that in 1900, hell it didn't even work a lot of the time when "put every adult male to the sword" was the default.
So why the fuck should we send thousands of soldiers to die while killing hundreds of thousands in a doomed effort.
The question remains and I'm genuinely not sure about this: what did we do right in Japan?
Japan already wanted to join the community of western nations and be a power player internationally, WW2 just showed them one pathway to that was futile and the post ww2 occupation nudged them onto a different one.
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
It’s entirely too much to quote fucking white mans burden
It’s twenty times entirely too much to quote it directly at a person who fled Mogadishu
I mean, its only been, what 150ish years? But No No, this time it'll work. WE HAVE TO DO IT!
America only cares about Africa when they can blame the problem on colonization and absolve themselves of white guilt.
Your words prove it
You can not remake other countries society/religion/culture/government at the point of a gun. It does not work, not now. Not back when Kipling wrote that in 1900, hell it didn't even work a lot of the time when "put every adult male to the sword" was the default.
So why the fuck should we send thousands of soldiers to die while killing hundreds of thousands in a doomed effort.
The question remains and I'm genuinely not sure about this: what did we do right in Japan?
My two cents:
Rebuffed their own imperial goals, nuked them twice, wrote their constitution and had a pre-existing trade relationship.
The last one is actually the only important one. It's why we're closer partners with the UK than France, even though that make no sense historically.
no, I don't think nuking japan was good or had a whole lot to do with their postwar success.
Well pandemic is still going on and republicans are still stupid, incompetent, psychopathic pieces of shit. So I wouldn't be surprised if this ceases to be news a week from now. I'm not sure the GOP will get much hay out of it for the midterms either. Sure there are people that care about this stuff, sadly many that only view this as score keeping because they are used to just having others die for their dumbass games, but that base is kind of dying off.
Really the vulture shit is annoying because their are lessons to be learned that could be put into current and future humanitarian efforts. Also I do think we need to stop looking at Afghanistan as a singular nation, it's probably one of many failed states that exists because some asshole wanted the map to look a certain way. Like you can't blame the Afghan people for the state of Afghanistan failing, when it only really exists on paper and all efforts to make it a thing, just ensures you get a ton of wasted effort.
It’s entirely too much to quote fucking white mans burden
It’s twenty times entirely too much to quote it directly at a person who fled Mogadishu
I mean, its only been, what 150ish years? But No No, this time it'll work. WE HAVE TO DO IT!
America only cares about Africa when they can blame the problem on colonization and absolve themselves of white guilt.
Your words prove it
You can not remake other countries society/religion/culture/government at the point of a gun. It does not work, not now. Not back when Kipling wrote that in 1900, hell it didn't even work a lot of the time when "put every adult male to the sword" was the default.
So why the fuck should we send thousands of soldiers to die while killing hundreds of thousands in a doomed effort.
The question remains and I'm genuinely not sure about this: what did we do right in Japan?
My two cents:
Rebuffed their own imperial goals, nuked them twice, wrote their constitution and had a pre-existing trade relationship.
The last one is actually the only important one. It's why we're closer partners with the UK than France, even though that make no sense historically.
However, we also only had a relationship with Japan because the U.S. had went their long ago to end its isolationist period through threat of force, with Commodore Matthew Perry demonstrating that he meant to follow through with that threat by using his cannons to damage several buildings as a warning. Though they eventually agreed to trade with the U.S., many in Japan at the time (the emperor included) wanted to go to war against the United States rather than end its isolationist period.
It’s entirely too much to quote fucking white mans burden
It’s twenty times entirely too much to quote it directly at a person who fled Mogadishu
I mean, its only been, what 150ish years? But No No, this time it'll work. WE HAVE TO DO IT!
America only cares about Africa when they can blame the problem on colonization and absolve themselves of white guilt.
Your words prove it
You can not remake other countries society/religion/culture/government at the point of a gun. It does not work, not now. Not back when Kipling wrote that in 1900, hell it didn't even work a lot of the time when "put every adult male to the sword" was the default.
So why the fuck should we send thousands of soldiers to die while killing hundreds of thousands in a doomed effort.
The question remains and I'm genuinely not sure about this: what did we do right in Japan?
My two cents:
Rebuffed their own imperial goals, nuked them twice, wrote their constitution and had a pre-existing trade relationship.
The last one is actually the only important one. It's why we're closer partners with the UK than France, even though that make no sense historically.
This is an entire field of study.
But basics are:
1)Maintained the already existing governmental bureaucracy after the war even with the new constitution.
2)Maintained the monarchy and used its influence as a cudgel.
3) An extremely heavy handed occupation that last 7 years and was set to last more that dismantled parts of society we disliked but really ran the country top to bottom.
4)Japan had a fully functioning Prussian style government well before we arrived with a centralized system, a modern nation state mentality and unification, and a developed infrastructure that we bombed but we could rebuild.
Afghanistan didn't have the last one at all. We never did 3. It didn't have 2. And well 4 and 1 are related.
There are a lot more things. If you interested Embracing Defeat is an excellent introduction to post war Japan and the US occupation.
It’s entirely too much to quote fucking white mans burden
It’s twenty times entirely too much to quote it directly at a person who fled Mogadishu
I mean, its only been, what 150ish years? But No No, this time it'll work. WE HAVE TO DO IT!
America only cares about Africa when they can blame the problem on colonization and absolve themselves of white guilt.
Your words prove it
You can not remake other countries society/religion/culture/government at the point of a gun. It does not work, not now. Not back when Kipling wrote that in 1900, hell it didn't even work a lot of the time when "put every adult male to the sword" was the default.
So why the fuck should we send thousands of soldiers to die while killing hundreds of thousands in a doomed effort.
The question remains and I'm genuinely not sure about this: what did we do right in Japan?
My two cents:
Rebuffed their own imperial goals, nuked them twice, wrote their constitution and had a pre-existing trade relationship.
The last one is actually the only important one. It's why we're closer partners with the UK than France, even though that make no sense historically.
However, we also only had a relationship with Japan because the U.S. had went their long ago to end its isolationist period through threat of force, with Commodore Matthew Perry demonstrating that he meant to follow through with that threat by using his cannons to damage several buildings as a warning.
Ehhh...Perry was the actual shot over the bow but Japan even though "isolated" still actually had relations with Asian countries in that period and knew what happened to China and the Opium Wars. Perry knocking on the door just accelerated an already unstable environment that was shifting to try and make sure what happened to China didn't happen to them.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited August 2021
I don't think it can be overstated how important it is that Japan was already a functioning nation-state, with a government and bureaucracies in place. Yes by wars end a lot of it was in a shambles, and there was a lot of coup activity and such, but when the US occupied they had something to build on.
Afghanistan, to my knowledge, has never been a fulling functioning nation-state. It's basically lines on the map where a bunch of tribal states live in close proximity.
It’s entirely too much to quote fucking white mans burden
It’s twenty times entirely too much to quote it directly at a person who fled Mogadishu
I mean, its only been, what 150ish years? But No No, this time it'll work. WE HAVE TO DO IT!
America only cares about Africa when they can blame the problem on colonization and absolve themselves of white guilt.
Your words prove it
You can not remake other countries society/religion/culture/government at the point of a gun. It does not work, not now. Not back when Kipling wrote that in 1900, hell it didn't even work a lot of the time when "put every adult male to the sword" was the default.
So why the fuck should we send thousands of soldiers to die while killing hundreds of thousands in a doomed effort.
The question remains and I'm genuinely not sure about this: what did we do right in Japan?
My two cents:
Rebuffed their own imperial goals, nuked them twice, wrote their constitution and had a pre-existing trade relationship.
The last one is actually the only important one. It's why we're closer partners with the UK than France, even though that make no sense historically.
However, we also only had a relationship with Japan because the U.S. had went their long ago to end its isolationist period through threat of force, with Commodore Matthew Perry demonstrating that he meant to follow through with that threat by using his cannons to damage several buildings as a warning.
Ehhh...Perry was the actual shot over the bow but Japan even though "isolated" still actually had relations with Asian countries in that period and knew what happened to China and the Opium Wars. Perry knocking on the door just accelerated an already unstable environment that was shifting to try and make sure what happened to China didn't happen to them.
Still, isn't it the case that the relationship the U.S. has with Japan today started with "trade with us or else"? If a pre-existing trade was one of the reasons why relations between the U.S. and Japan improved following WWII, isn't it true that this initial aggressive, interventionist act was ultimately for the greater good?
I don’t agree with putting any blame on Afghan soldiers, and Afghans in general. I found that highly inappropriate (when it’s not directly about government officials). Biden similarly doesn’t have a satisfying answer on the question of refugees because there isn’t one. Or on how the pullout itself went.
On the question of the war itself, which was the largest portion of his speech, he was appropriately honest and non-apologetic about the decision to end the war, and more or less invited anyone who disagreed to come out and say that they’d send troops to Afghanistan again.
Yeah, I thought he made his overall case well, but the repeated statements to the effect that the failure is all on the Afghan government and military and not at all on the US were... annoying.
personally I think if we're gonna play the Shoulda Coulda Woulda game, it's weird to pick the Bush invasion as your starting point, and weirder still, if you're talking about the welfare of Afghanis, to stand at that moment in history and present it as a choice between war and nothing.
during the Carter years, Brzezinski should have been told to shut the fuck up when he floated the idea of destabilizing the duly elected Afghani government. if you must start in 2001, they should have set up an apparatus to allow anyone who could get into a neighboring country to immigrate to the US.
Just for historical accuracy's sake, I'd like to note that the government Brzezinski sought to destabilize was in no way duly elected. The Saur Revolution in the previous year (1978) was a coup d'etat by communist army officers. And the situation was already becoming quite unstable before the Soviets or the mujahidin parties; multiple uprisings were violently quelled in 1979, prior to the US's arming of the mujahidin parties or the Soviet invasion.
It’s entirely too much to quote fucking white mans burden
It’s twenty times entirely too much to quote it directly at a person who fled Mogadishu
I mean, its only been, what 150ish years? But No No, this time it'll work. WE HAVE TO DO IT!
America only cares about Africa when they can blame the problem on colonization and absolve themselves of white guilt.
Your words prove it
You can not remake other countries society/religion/culture/government at the point of a gun. It does not work, not now. Not back when Kipling wrote that in 1900, hell it didn't even work a lot of the time when "put every adult male to the sword" was the default.
So why the fuck should we send thousands of soldiers to die while killing hundreds of thousands in a doomed effort.
The question remains and I'm genuinely not sure about this: what did we do right in Japan?
My two cents:
Rebuffed their own imperial goals, nuked them twice, wrote their constitution and had a pre-existing trade relationship.
The last one is actually the only important one. It's why we're closer partners with the UK than France, even though that make no sense historically.
However, we also only had a relationship with Japan because the U.S. had went their long ago to end its isolationist period through threat of force, with Commodore Matthew Perry demonstrating that he meant to follow through with that threat by using his cannons to damage several buildings as a warning.
Ehhh...Perry was the actual shot over the bow but Japan even though "isolated" still actually had relations with Asian countries in that period and knew what happened to China and the Opium Wars. Perry knocking on the door just accelerated an already unstable environment that was shifting to try and make sure what happened to China didn't happen to them.
Still, isn't it the case that the relationship the U.S. has with Japan today started with "trade with us or else"?
So did Britain and most colonial powers. That broke down by the 1870's, the shift to the Meiji government where it was more Americans and Europeans were imported to help build a new government. Japan is as much a victim of colonialism as it was a perpetrator. But this isn't the thread to talk about that. Because that is a thread alone on how events like Perry set up the ripples that led to WW2 and so on.
There is enough sin in this world to justify 200,000 lives as collateral damage if you can change things for the better. No one blinks at the German or Japanese construction crews getting blown up by ww2 bombs.
But as I said in the BLM thread, people like Lindsey Graham and mitch McConnell will sabotage any effort made for the greater good, resulting in America's forces arriving a day late and a billion short.
"strategic bombing" has been widely admonish by historian both military and otherwise, it's pretty much agreed upon it was criminal.
Were we at war with the nation of Afghanistan?
I'm saying this as a snide comment, but I literally can't remember our process anymore. As far as I remember, we went there to kill a saudi terrorist in retribution who ended up being in Pakistan the whole time and also we killed him like 10 years ago.
Bin Laden was in Afghanistan when we invaded and we almost captured / killed him at Tora Bora.
I wonder how different things would have gone if we got him there and were able to pull Mission Accomplished and fuck off out of Afghanistan.
Given they literally pulled the Iraq War out of their asses and then just stopped caring about the search for Bin Laden, I don't think it would have gone terribly different.
They never really did care in the first place.
The main geopolitical goal of Bush and his cabinet was conquering Iraq (as a start), and they were trying to figure out how to aim the 9/11 response at Iraq almost before the towers had finished collapsing. They "had" to go into Afghanistan because, unlike Iraq, the Taliban actually were sheltering people who'd organized an attack on the United States, but that was always a while-we're-on-the-way to Baghdad.
+13
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
There is enough sin in this world to justify 200,000 lives as collateral damage if you can change things for the better. No one blinks at the German or Japanese construction crews getting blown up by ww2 bombs.
But as I said in the BLM thread, people like Lindsey Graham and mitch McConnell will sabotage any effort made for the greater good, resulting in America's forces arriving a day late and a billion short.
"strategic bombing" has been widely admonish by historian both military and otherwise, it's pretty much agreed upon it was criminal.
Were we at war with the nation of Afghanistan?
I'm saying this as a snide comment, but I literally can't remember our process anymore. As far as I remember, we went there to kill a saudi terrorist in retribution who ended up being in Pakistan the whole time and also we killed him like 10 years ago.
Bin Laden was in Afghanistan when we invaded and we almost captured / killed him at Tora Bora.
I wonder how different things would have gone if we got him there and were able to pull Mission Accomplished and fuck off out of Afghanistan.
Given they literally pulled the Iraq War out of their asses and then just stopped caring about the search for Bin Laden, I don't think it would have gone terribly different.
They never really did care in the first place.
The main geopolitical goal of Bush and his cabinet was conquering Iraq (as a start), and they were trying to figure out how to aim the 9/11 response at Iraq almost before the towers had finished collapsing. They "had" to go into Afghanistan because, unlike Iraq, the Taliban actually were sheltering people who'd organized an attack on the United States, but that was always a while-we're-on-the-way to Baghdad.
yep. iraq was about preserving US economic hegemony in the region and funneling DoD contract dollars to people in the administration and their friends. they would have invented a casus belli no matter what.
There is enough sin in this world to justify 200,000 lives as collateral damage if you can change things for the better. No one blinks at the German or Japanese construction crews getting blown up by ww2 bombs.
But as I said in the BLM thread, people like Lindsey Graham and mitch McConnell will sabotage any effort made for the greater good, resulting in America's forces arriving a day late and a billion short.
"strategic bombing" has been widely admonish by historian both military and otherwise, it's pretty much agreed upon it was criminal.
Were we at war with the nation of Afghanistan?
I'm saying this as a snide comment, but I literally can't remember our process anymore. As far as I remember, we went there to kill a saudi terrorist in retribution who ended up being in Pakistan the whole time and also we killed him like 10 years ago.
Bin Laden was in Afghanistan when we invaded and we almost captured / killed him at Tora Bora.
I wonder how different things would have gone if we got him there and were able to pull Mission Accomplished and fuck off out of Afghanistan.
Given they literally pulled the Iraq War out of their asses and then just stopped caring about the search for Bin Laden, I don't think it would have gone terribly different.
They never really did care in the first place.
The main geopolitical goal of Bush and his cabinet was conquering Iraq (as a start), and they were trying to figure out how to aim the 9/11 response at Iraq almost before the towers had finished collapsing. They "had" to go into Afghanistan because, unlike Iraq, the Taliban actually were sheltering people who'd organized an attack on the United States, but that was always a while-we're-on-the-way to Baghdad.
yep. iraq was about preserving US hegemony in the region and funneling DoD contract dollars to people in the administration and their friends. they would have invented a casus belli no matter what.
Man one of the worst things about Trump is that his presidency drew attention away from how big of a piece of shit George W Bush was.
How much better off would the world be right now if Gore had pulled it out?
It’s entirely too much to quote fucking white mans burden
It’s twenty times entirely too much to quote it directly at a person who fled Mogadishu
I mean, its only been, what 150ish years? But No No, this time it'll work. WE HAVE TO DO IT!
America only cares about Africa when they can blame the problem on colonization and absolve themselves of white guilt.
Your words prove it
You can not remake other countries society/religion/culture/government at the point of a gun. It does not work, not now. Not back when Kipling wrote that in 1900, hell it didn't even work a lot of the time when "put every adult male to the sword" was the default.
So why the fuck should we send thousands of soldiers to die while killing hundreds of thousands in a doomed effort.
The question remains and I'm genuinely not sure about this: what did we do right in Japan?
We basically let the people who were in charge of the bureaucracy take back over, same with West Germany.
That’s one of the basic things just about every history course most people will ever have in their lives skims over: we just let former Imperial bureaucrats and former Nazis just go back to their jobs in large numbers because they were the people who knew how to run shit. The Germans faster than the Japanese, I think it was a process that went into the early fifties for their bureaucracy
+7
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No-QuarterNothing To FearBut Fear ItselfRegistered Userregular
I think that those of us who are fortunate have a moral responsibility to help the less fortunate. The sticking point is that I fundamentally believe that the United States Military is a tool that literally cannot due that due to the interests it serves, and any benefits it grants are accidental at best.
The US military also isn't designed as a peacekeeping or occupation force. John Q Public demanded that square pegs fit round holes.
Note that the "war" for Iraq lasted about a month and US troops fucking steamrolled the Saddam's military. After that, though...?
the moral obligation to rebuild a country that we glassed for the alleged purpose of removing their brutal dictator and improving the lives of its citizens is obvious. it's not incorrect for the public to have wanted that, if indeed they did, and I doubt anybody actually gave a shit whether it was the US military specifically who performed that necessary work.
Americans weren't sold on that with regards to Afghanistan. We were going there to get revenge for 9/11. Few if anyone thought any further than that.
+14
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Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
so Biden just said that the optimal solution that he was hoping for was that after the US left there would be an increasingly bloody civil war, with Afghans murdering Afghans for years to come. And he was shocked, surprised and saddened when the war came to an end peacefully, before the US imposed time table of a withdrawal by (initially) September 11th, 2021, when he was still planning on having an America First anniversary. What a trash speech, victim blaming alongside vague promises of refugee support which ultimately will be more of the same current bloody chaos with even more US troops arriving to 'help' the situation
so Biden just said that the optimal solution that he was hoping for was that after the US left there would be an increasingly bloody civil war, with Afghans murdering Afghans for years to come. And he was shocked, surprised and saddened when the war came to an end peacefully, before the US imposed time table of a withdrawal by (initially) September 11th, 2021, when he was still planning on having an America First anniversary. What a trash speech, victim blaming alongside vague promises of refugee support which ultimately will be more of the same current bloody chaos with even more US troops arriving to 'help' the situation
so Biden just said that the optimal solution that he was hoping for was that after the US left there would be an increasingly bloody civil war, with Afghans murdering Afghans for years to come. And he was shocked, surprised and saddened when the war came to an end peacefully, before the US imposed time table of a withdrawal by (initially) September 11th, 2021, when he was still planning on having an America First anniversary. What a trash speech, victim blaming alongside vague promises of refugee support which ultimately will be more of the same current bloody chaos with even more US troops arriving to 'help' the situation
so Biden just said that the optimal solution that he was hoping for was that after the US left there would be an increasingly bloody civil war, with Afghans murdering Afghans for years to come. And he was shocked, surprised and saddened when the war came to an end peacefully, before the US imposed time table of a withdrawal by (initially) September 11th, 2021, when he was still planning on having an America First anniversary. What a trash speech, victim blaming alongside vague promises of refugee support which ultimately will be more of the same current bloody chaos with even more US troops arriving to 'help' the situation
so Biden just said that the optimal solution that he was hoping for was that after the US left there would be an increasingly bloody civil war, with Afghans murdering Afghans for years to come. And he was shocked, surprised and saddened when the war came to an end peacefully, before the US imposed time table of a withdrawal by (initially) September 11th, 2021, when he was still planning on having an America First anniversary. What a trash speech, victim blaming alongside vague promises of refugee support which ultimately will be more of the same current bloody chaos with even more US troops arriving to 'help' the situation
...
Holy fucking shit, man! In what possible world could you get that read out of his speech? I recognize that there are people on this forum that believe Biden to be a literal war criminal with more blood on his hands than those who really were tried for war criminals, and would like nothing more for him to be in the hague and for [insert politician here] to be in charge instead. But how the fuck can you equate what you just said to what he actually delivered in his speech?
This is not an idle question. This thread and the sniping in it has made me almost to the point of suicidal today and yet I've been fighting back exploding about the hot takes I see posted on here, mostly out of helplessness. So I would appreciate it, for my mental health and the health of others following along, if you would post exact quotes of Biden and how they translate into what you just said.
You don't have to, of course. This is the internet, no one is beholden to anyone else. You owe me nothing. But for fuck's sake. Come down off your high horse for one fucking day and try to be empathetic to others who don't see eye to eye with you, you silly fucking goose.
Dumping blame on the Afghan government seems like a smart move politically.
I think for all the hubbub in the news right now, ending the war will end up being better for him in the end.
I think the U.S. gov probably thought the Afghan forces could fight on for three or six months, by which time they could safely say it wasn’t their problem anymore.
That they were still so desperately wrong tells you everything you need to know about our effort there, really
Yeah.
It says something that the Taliban took every City in Afghanistan in less time that it would probably take someone to drive to every city in Afghanistan.
The freaking Blitzkreig of France in WW2 took six weeks, and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq took four.
I have every idea that the US fully expected there to be a months long war of attrition beginning with the more rural cities, taking a few weeks at least for bigger historically anti-Taliban cities like Herat and Mazar-i-sharif and then another couple of months for Kabul to fall.
I'm willing to bet a fair amount of cash if you were to measure the amount of time between one city in Afghanistan falling and the next in the line, it would bear a striking resemblance to the average amount of time it takes a Toyota Hilux pickup truck with eight guys in the back to make the journey.
It’s entirely too much to quote fucking white mans burden
It’s twenty times entirely too much to quote it directly at a person who fled Mogadishu
I mean, its only been, what 150ish years? But No No, this time it'll work. WE HAVE TO DO IT!
America only cares about Africa when they can blame the problem on colonization and absolve themselves of white guilt.
Your words prove it
You can not remake other countries society/religion/culture/government at the point of a gun. It does not work, not now. Not back when Kipling wrote that in 1900, hell it didn't even work a lot of the time when "put every adult male to the sword" was the default.
So why the fuck should we send thousands of soldiers to die while killing hundreds of thousands in a doomed effort.
The question remains and I'm genuinely not sure about this: what did we do right in Japan?
We basically let the people who were in charge of the bureaucracy take back over, same with West Germany.
That’s one of the basic things just about every history course most people will ever have in their lives skims over: we just let former Imperial bureaucrats and former Nazis just go back to their jobs in large numbers because they were the people who knew how to run shit. The Germans faster than the Japanese, I think it was a process that went into the early fifties for their bureaucracy
Shit, the sheer number of people that we legitimately could have executed for crimes against humanity that had post-war careers in West and East German government is staggering. Hell, that was a big reason the Rote Arme Fraktion(Baader-Meinhoff) was so ruthless, they saw former Nazis in leading West German positions of power. If you want to be depressed, the last survivor of the Wansee Conference died in 1987, of natural causes, without ever being formally charged for his crimes.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
+2
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ElJeffeNot actually a mod.Roaming the streets, waving his gun around.Moderator, ClubPAmod
Part of the issue is that several of you are making the arguement that the good done over the last 20 years was unsustainable without American support.
The rest of us agree.
You then follow up with words that imply it was a mistake to try from the start.
That us where we disagree.
Take up the White Man's burden—
Snip
You can make your point without just posting the entirety of a 19th century imperialist propaganda poem.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
so Biden just said that the optimal solution that he was hoping for was that after the US left there would be an increasingly bloody civil war, with Afghans murdering Afghans for years to come. And he was shocked, surprised and saddened when the war came to an end peacefully, before the US imposed time table of a withdrawal by (initially) September 11th, 2021, when he was still planning on having an America First anniversary. What a trash speech, victim blaming alongside vague promises of refugee support which ultimately will be more of the same current bloody chaos with even more US troops arriving to 'help' the situation
...
Holy fucking shit, man! In what possible world could you get that read out of his speech? I recognize that there are people on this forum that believe Biden to be a literal war criminal with more blood on his hands than those who really were tried for war criminals, and would like nothing more for him to be in the hague and for [insert politician here] to be in charge instead. But how the fuck can you equate what you just said to what he actually delivered in his speech?
This is not an idle question. This thread and the sniping in it has made me almost to the point of suicidal today and yet I've been fighting back exploding about the hot takes I see posted on here, mostly out of helplessness. So I would appreciate it, for my mental health and the health of others following along, if you would post exact quotes of Biden and how they translate into what you just said.
You don't have to, of course. This is the internet, no one is beholden to anyone else. You owe me nothing. But for fuck's sake. Come down off your high horse for one fucking day and try to be empathetic to others who don't see eye to eye with you, you silly fucking goose.
Biden expressed disappointment that the Afghan National Security Forces surrendered in most confrontations rather than continuing to fight.
Zavian's take on his meaning is... uncharitable. But there's a germ of a point in there that I agree with. Everyone was shocked and appalled at the mass surrenders and the relative lack of resistance to the Taliban conquest. But part of me felt relieved. Because I thought that we would see a much slower Taliban victory, or possibility a stalemated civil war. I feared that urban warfare and sieges and widespread destruction of the countryside might occur over another year or multiple years of civil war. Something closer to the Syrian government's grindingly slow defeat prior to the Russian intervention there.
So the war ending in a couple months with only a handful of bloody battles and most cities being spared from the fighting was not the worst outcome, in my view, even if Taliban rule is in itself a bad outcome.
Kaputa on
+5
Options
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
so Biden just said that the optimal solution that he was hoping for was that after the US left there would be an increasingly bloody civil war, with Afghans murdering Afghans for years to come. And he was shocked, surprised and saddened when the war came to an end peacefully, before the US imposed time table of a withdrawal by (initially) September 11th, 2021, when he was still planning on having an America First anniversary. What a trash speech, victim blaming alongside vague promises of refugee support which ultimately will be more of the same current bloody chaos with even more US troops arriving to 'help' the situation
...
Holy fucking shit, man! In what possible world could you get that read out of his speech? I recognize that there are people on this forum that believe Biden to be a literal war criminal with more blood on his hands than those who really were tried for war criminals, and would like nothing more for him to be in the hague and for [insert politician here] to be in charge instead. But how the fuck can you equate what you just said to what he actually delivered in his speech?
This is not an idle question. This thread and the sniping in it has made me almost to the point of suicidal today and yet I've been fighting back exploding about the hot takes I see posted on here, mostly out of helplessness. So I would appreciate it, for my mental health and the health of others following along, if you would post exact quotes of Biden and how they translate into what you just said.
You don't have to, of course. This is the internet, no one is beholden to anyone else. You owe me nothing. But for fuck's sake. Come down off your high horse for one fucking day and try to be empathetic to others who don't see eye to eye with you, you silly fucking goose.
Biden expressed disappointment that the Afghan National Security Forces surrendered in most confrontations rather than continuing to fight.
Zavian's take on his meaning is... uncharitable. But there's a germ of a point in there that I agree with. Everyone was shocked and appalled at the mass surrenders and the relative lack of resistance to the Taliban conquest. But part of me felt relieved. Because I thought that we would see a much slower Taliban victory, or possibility a stalemated civil war. I feared that urban warfare and sieges and widespread destruction of the countryside might occur over another year or multiple years of civil war.
So the war ending in a couple months with only a handful of bloody battles and most cities being spared from the fighting was not the worst outcome, in my view, even if Taliban rule is in itself a bad outcome.
So we're pissed over the US leaving the Afghanis to the Taliban but applauding the Afghan army for doing the same.
+3
Options
Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
so Biden just said that the optimal solution that he was hoping for was that after the US left there would be an increasingly bloody civil war, with Afghans murdering Afghans for years to come. And he was shocked, surprised and saddened when the war came to an end peacefully, before the US imposed time table of a withdrawal by (initially) September 11th, 2021, when he was still planning on having an America First anniversary. What a trash speech, victim blaming alongside vague promises of refugee support which ultimately will be more of the same current bloody chaos with even more US troops arriving to 'help' the situation
...
Holy fucking shit, man! In what possible world could you get that read out of his speech? I recognize that there are people on this forum that believe Biden to be a literal war criminal with more blood on his hands than those who really were tried for war criminals, and would like nothing more for him to be in the hague and for [insert politician here] to be in charge instead. But how the fuck can you equate what you just said to what he actually delivered in his speech?
This is not an idle question. This thread and the sniping in it has made me almost to the point of suicidal today and yet I've been fighting back exploding about the hot takes I see posted on here, mostly out of helplessness. So I would appreciate it, for my mental health and the health of others following along, if you would post exact quotes of Biden and how they translate into what you just said.
You don't have to, of course. This is the internet, no one is beholden to anyone else. You owe me nothing. But for fuck's sake. Come down off your high horse for one fucking day and try to be empathetic to others who don't see eye to eye with you, you silly fucking goose.
Biden expressed disappointment that the Afghan National Security Forces surrendered in most confrontations rather than continuing to fight.
Zavian's take on his meaning is... uncharitable. But there's a germ of a point in there that I agree with. Everyone was shocked and appalled at the mass surrenders and the relative lack of resistance to the Taliban conquest. But part of me felt relieved. Because I thought that we would see a much slower Taliban victory, or possibility a stalemated civil war. I feared that urban warfare and sieges and widespread destruction of the countryside might occur over another year or multiple years of civil war.
So the war ending in a couple months with only a handful of bloody battles and most cities being spared from the fighting was not the worst outcome, in my view, even if Taliban rule is in itself a bad outcome.
So we're pissed over the US leaving the Afghanis to the Taliban but applauding the Afghan army for doing the same.
surely you can understand the differences between things
Posts
You can not remake other countries society/religion/culture/government at the point of a gun. It does not work, not now. Not back when Kipling wrote that in 1900, hell it didn't even work a lot of the time when "put every adult male to the sword" was the default.
So why the fuck should we send thousands of soldiers to die while killing hundreds of thousands in a doomed effort.
Ford got exactly no heat outside of the protoneocons for leaving Vietnam the way we did. People did not give a fuck. Outside the Fox News expanded universe, Biden won't either.
I'm not saying that's good, I'm saying that that's *what will happen*, and the public apathy is a part of why this is currently occurring.
We care about international stuff when we lose. No one in the US really gave a shit about Afghanistan for the last 10 years, it basically wasn't in the news except as a political football. There was still some print media talking about it, and the money black hole it was, but for the most part no one gave a shit.
Now it can be used as political tool again so everyone "cares" now.
Yeah.
It says something that the Taliban took every City in Afghanistan in less time that it would probably take someone to drive to every city in Afghanistan.
The freaking Blitzkreig of France in WW2 took six weeks, and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq took four.
I have every idea that the US fully expected there to be a months long war of attrition beginning with the more rural cities, taking a few weeks at least for bigger historically anti-Taliban cities like Herat and Mazar-i-sharif and then another couple of months for Kabul to fall.
the moral obligation to rebuild a country that we glassed for the alleged purpose of removing their brutal dictator and improving the lives of its citizens is obvious. it's not incorrect for the public to have wanted that, if indeed they did, and I doubt anybody actually gave a shit whether it was the US military specifically who performed that necessary work.
The question remains and I'm genuinely not sure about this: what did we do right in Japan?
Probably not, but confirming Bin Laden (and some of the others who escaped) dead in 2001 may have dampened some of America's desire for revenge.
I guess things probably would have gone the same way though.
Available even if your local government doesn't want to let you leave, even if you're transferring from a prison there to a US prison because you really did commit a crime.
My two cents:
Rebuffed their own imperial goals, nuked them twice, wrote their constitution and had a pre-existing trade relationship.
The last one is actually the only important one. It's why we're closer partners with the UK than France, even though that make no sense historically.
I agree that it will take years to truly document the details, but the broad narrative has been known for a while.
This is Vietnam 2.0. Always has been. Bush, and his ilk, used the attack on 9/11 opportunistically to try and demonstrate how much better they could do compared to their fathers.
From the US-funded puppet government, on down, a lot of the highlights are the same.
Even if Bin Laden was successfully intercepted in the early days, the US military would have remained because the mandate/resolution wasn't just Bin Laden it was to stop the spread of terrorism (2.0, the 1.0 version was communism).
If in some parallel universe the U.S. was able to get the political will to bring in vastly larger numbers of people as refugees than it does now, I wonder how long it would be able to get away with that before the people in charge of these oppressive countries started using force to keep people from leaving.
Japan already wanted to join the community of western nations and be a power player internationally, WW2 just showed them one pathway to that was futile and the post ww2 occupation nudged them onto a different one.
no, I don't think nuking japan was good or had a whole lot to do with their postwar success.
Really the vulture shit is annoying because their are lessons to be learned that could be put into current and future humanitarian efforts. Also I do think we need to stop looking at Afghanistan as a singular nation, it's probably one of many failed states that exists because some asshole wanted the map to look a certain way. Like you can't blame the Afghan people for the state of Afghanistan failing, when it only really exists on paper and all efforts to make it a thing, just ensures you get a ton of wasted effort.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
However, we also only had a relationship with Japan because the U.S. had went their long ago to end its isolationist period through threat of force, with Commodore Matthew Perry demonstrating that he meant to follow through with that threat by using his cannons to damage several buildings as a warning. Though they eventually agreed to trade with the U.S., many in Japan at the time (the emperor included) wanted to go to war against the United States rather than end its isolationist period.
This is an entire field of study.
But basics are:
1)Maintained the already existing governmental bureaucracy after the war even with the new constitution.
2)Maintained the monarchy and used its influence as a cudgel.
3) An extremely heavy handed occupation that last 7 years and was set to last more that dismantled parts of society we disliked but really ran the country top to bottom.
4)Japan had a fully functioning Prussian style government well before we arrived with a centralized system, a modern nation state mentality and unification, and a developed infrastructure that we bombed but we could rebuild.
Afghanistan didn't have the last one at all. We never did 3. It didn't have 2. And well 4 and 1 are related.
There are a lot more things. If you interested Embracing Defeat is an excellent introduction to post war Japan and the US occupation.
Ehhh...Perry was the actual shot over the bow but Japan even though "isolated" still actually had relations with Asian countries in that period and knew what happened to China and the Opium Wars. Perry knocking on the door just accelerated an already unstable environment that was shifting to try and make sure what happened to China didn't happen to them.
Afghanistan, to my knowledge, has never been a fulling functioning nation-state. It's basically lines on the map where a bunch of tribal states live in close proximity.
Still, isn't it the case that the relationship the U.S. has with Japan today started with "trade with us or else"? If a pre-existing trade was one of the reasons why relations between the U.S. and Japan improved following WWII, isn't it true that this initial aggressive, interventionist act was ultimately for the greater good?
Just for historical accuracy's sake, I'd like to note that the government Brzezinski sought to destabilize was in no way duly elected. The Saur Revolution in the previous year (1978) was a coup d'etat by communist army officers. And the situation was already becoming quite unstable before the Soviets or the mujahidin parties; multiple uprisings were violently quelled in 1979, prior to the US's arming of the mujahidin parties or the Soviet invasion.
So did Britain and most colonial powers. That broke down by the 1870's, the shift to the Meiji government where it was more Americans and Europeans were imported to help build a new government. Japan is as much a victim of colonialism as it was a perpetrator. But this isn't the thread to talk about that. Because that is a thread alone on how events like Perry set up the ripples that led to WW2 and so on.
They never really did care in the first place.
The main geopolitical goal of Bush and his cabinet was conquering Iraq (as a start), and they were trying to figure out how to aim the 9/11 response at Iraq almost before the towers had finished collapsing. They "had" to go into Afghanistan because, unlike Iraq, the Taliban actually were sheltering people who'd organized an attack on the United States, but that was always a while-we're-on-the-way to Baghdad.
yep. iraq was about preserving US economic hegemony in the region and funneling DoD contract dollars to people in the administration and their friends. they would have invented a casus belli no matter what.
Man one of the worst things about Trump is that his presidency drew attention away from how big of a piece of shit George W Bush was.
How much better off would the world be right now if Gore had pulled it out?
We basically let the people who were in charge of the bureaucracy take back over, same with West Germany.
That’s one of the basic things just about every history course most people will ever have in their lives skims over: we just let former Imperial bureaucrats and former Nazis just go back to their jobs in large numbers because they were the people who knew how to run shit. The Germans faster than the Japanese, I think it was a process that went into the early fifties for their bureaucracy
Americans weren't sold on that with regards to Afghanistan. We were going there to get revenge for 9/11. Few if anyone thought any further than that.
Is there a transcript yet?
Full transcript:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/us/politics/biden-taliban-afghanistan-speech.html
Google: Biden Afghanistan Speech Transcript.
First Result
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/us/politics/biden-taliban-afghanistan-speech.html
// Switch: SW-5306-0651-6424 //
...
Holy fucking shit, man! In what possible world could you get that read out of his speech? I recognize that there are people on this forum that believe Biden to be a literal war criminal with more blood on his hands than those who really were tried for war criminals, and would like nothing more for him to be in the hague and for [insert politician here] to be in charge instead. But how the fuck can you equate what you just said to what he actually delivered in his speech?
This is not an idle question. This thread and the sniping in it has made me almost to the point of suicidal today and yet I've been fighting back exploding about the hot takes I see posted on here, mostly out of helplessness. So I would appreciate it, for my mental health and the health of others following along, if you would post exact quotes of Biden and how they translate into what you just said.
You don't have to, of course. This is the internet, no one is beholden to anyone else. You owe me nothing. But for fuck's sake. Come down off your high horse for one fucking day and try to be empathetic to others who don't see eye to eye with you, you silly fucking goose.
I'm willing to bet a fair amount of cash if you were to measure the amount of time between one city in Afghanistan falling and the next in the line, it would bear a striking resemblance to the average amount of time it takes a Toyota Hilux pickup truck with eight guys in the back to make the journey.
Shit, the sheer number of people that we legitimately could have executed for crimes against humanity that had post-war careers in West and East German government is staggering. Hell, that was a big reason the Rote Arme Fraktion(Baader-Meinhoff) was so ruthless, they saw former Nazis in leading West German positions of power. If you want to be depressed, the last survivor of the Wansee Conference died in 1987, of natural causes, without ever being formally charged for his crimes.
You can make your point without just posting the entirety of a 19th century imperialist propaganda poem.
Zavian's take on his meaning is... uncharitable. But there's a germ of a point in there that I agree with. Everyone was shocked and appalled at the mass surrenders and the relative lack of resistance to the Taliban conquest. But part of me felt relieved. Because I thought that we would see a much slower Taliban victory, or possibility a stalemated civil war. I feared that urban warfare and sieges and widespread destruction of the countryside might occur over another year or multiple years of civil war. Something closer to the Syrian government's grindingly slow defeat prior to the Russian intervention there.
So the war ending in a couple months with only a handful of bloody battles and most cities being spared from the fighting was not the worst outcome, in my view, even if Taliban rule is in itself a bad outcome.
So we're pissed over the US leaving the Afghanis to the Taliban but applauding the Afghan army for doing the same.
surely you can understand the differences between things