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MikeC posted:It is not cognitive dissonance to simultaneously hold the idea that the US had ulterior motives for toppling the Taliban *AND* that they genuinely tried to improve things for the population while they were there. Yeah but how many Afghans hated their bride's family enough that they rate taking out her side of the wedding with a drone strike as an improvement.
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Aug 17, 2021 02:57
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punk rebel ecks posted:I know I'll get made fun of for this, but how does a force that consists of .002% the population take over the entire country? By building up support, running competent or at least much less corrupt local administrations than the puppet government, promising to kick out the guys whose drones made your kids fear sunny days, etc. Oh and by fighting a foreign enemy so hated that they couldn't control any territory for longer than it takes to drive back to base to smoke pot and play video games. (E: this is not a dig on the troops, smoking pot and playing video games rules and is a better use of time than canoeing the heads of local villagers. probably better for the war effort to since it wasn't time spent driving the population into the arms of the Taliban) VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Aug 17, 2021 |
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Aug 17, 2021 03:02
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VitalSigns posted:Yeah but how many Afghans hated their bride's family enough that they rate taking out her side of the wedding with a drone strike as an improvement. Irrelevant to the original point being made. Which is you can have good intentions with an action that is naively destructive in practice at the same time. Jaxyon posted:The war was about enriching the US military complex. And that's what it did. That's what we spend money on. Everything else was lip service to "doing the right thing". Only if you take the most ungenerous interpretation of events and believe everyone in 3 Administrations is literally an evil mustache-twirling villain with no soul. This is your prerogative but if you believe that then it is clear that nothing will ever dissuade you otherwise because anything to the contrary is just 'lip service' or 'a conspiracy to fool the sheep'.
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Aug 17, 2021 03:05
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MikeC posted:Irrelevant to the original point being made. Which is you can have good intentions with an action that is naively destructive in practice at the same time. Did Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have good intentions E: well technically you are right that they "can" have had good intentions, which I guess is more important than whether they actually did? E2: Actually I'm not 100% sure that Dick Cheney can actually have good intentions toward another human being VVV lol there it is VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Aug 17, 2021 |
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Aug 17, 2021 03:07
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VitalSigns posted:Did Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have good intentions Yep. Everyone who ends up does bad things has good intentions from their perspective.
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Aug 17, 2021 03:09
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MikeC posted:Yep. Everyone who ends up does bad things has good intentions from their perspective. This perspective is worthless for actually discussing anything then.
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Aug 17, 2021 03:22
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MikeC posted:Yep. Everyone who ends up does bad things has good intentions from their perspective. I think I just lost significant grey matter by reading this argument.
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Aug 17, 2021 03:24
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Seriously, "there is no such thing as a bad actor" is a meaningless sophomoric aphorism that just terminates debate, even if it were remotely true.
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Aug 17, 2021 03:29
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Anyway dumb moral relativism 'don't judge because everyone is good in their own eyes' argument that if taken straight would apply to the Taliban as well aside, I'm skeptical that the very same people who funded and armed the Mujahedeen and other religious extremists to destroy the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan cared all that much about "women's rights" besides as hastily invented war PR after they realized oops the guy who was their original casus belli wasn't even there.
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Aug 17, 2021 03:30
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The disgusting "we had good intentions" rhetoric has pivoted seamlessly into the even more disgusting "well the Afghans were too dumb and backwards and cowardly and ungrateful to realize how awesome our intentions were so it's all their fault, actually" garbage that now seems to be the dominant narrative
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Aug 17, 2021 03:37
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Yeah I mean that's the other thing, Biden just straight up said nation building was never the mission (what was the mission then??? who knows???) and he stopped even pretending to care about defending human rights the second we lost and just went all in calling the Afghans pathetic losers who aren't good enough for freedom anyway. So uh I don't know why anyone is even still trying to push that angle when the president and one of the original war boosters has already come out and said "nah gently caress them". Like yeah I read the New York Times too but at some point you have to call it and when the guy in charge says he never gave a poo poo I think he means it.
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Aug 17, 2021 03:44
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I mean, ultimately it's true that Afghans clearly had little interest in what the US was selling, it's just Biden and the US in general aren't being truthful about what they were selling, which was permanent status as a client state.
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Aug 17, 2021 03:47
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gazza posted:The disgusting "we had good intentions" rhetoric has pivoted seamlessly into the even more disgusting "well the Afghans were too dumb and backwards and cowardly and ungrateful to realize how awesome our intentions were so it's all their fault, actually" garbage that now seems to be the dominant narrative When the President of the United States says it, you can expect his drones to repeat it.
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Aug 17, 2021 03:49
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fool of sound posted:This perspective is worthless for actually discussing anything then. As is the perspective that any definitively argues that someone is evil regardless of their intentions since an absolute position offers no room for discussion at all, only circle jerking in an echo chamber. Relativism is what allows grounds for discussion. VitalSigns posted:Anyway dumb moral relativism 'don't judge because everyone is good in their own eyes' argument that if taken straight would apply to the Taliban as well aside, I'm skeptical that the very same people who funded and armed the Mujahedeen and other religious extremists to destroy the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan cared all that much about "women's rights" besides as hastily invented war PR after they realized oops the guy who was their original casus belli wasn't even there. It would. You can be skeptical all you want but life improved during the US occupation for a large segment of the population. The US didn't have to put up with all the bullshit that a democratically elected government with the nominal freedoms that they enjoyed. They didn't need Karzai scolding them everytime they missed on an airstrike and killed civilians. They could have just handed the keys to an autocratic warlord, gave *him* the billions of dollars to let their war machine run amok for 20 years. They didn't. As I told the other guy, you can choose to interpret every single act of attempted benevolence as simply PR and propaganda if you want. That doesn't lead you anywhere except concluding cartoon villains are in every seat of power. Or you can give them some credit in thinking they can get what they want, make some money out of it, and maybe come out looking like decent people at the end. Not everyone is necessarily either an angel or a devil. I think human beings are a bit more complicated that that.
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Aug 17, 2021 03:49
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Putting in a dictator would have undermined the diplomatic case for war And also they already tried putting US-aligned brutal warlords in charge (because the US didn't like the very pro-women Democratic Republic of Afghanistan), those guys lost to the Taliban in the 90s, and the US still allied with those guys again anyway in 2001 and didn't really give a poo poo about their record on women's rights (or children's rights considering all the boy rape that the US officially tolerated for the sake of the alliance). We don't have to invent fanciful morality-based intentions behind Dick "shot a guy in the face" Cheney when ample practical and material reasons exist for him to do what he did regardless of what he felt about it in his artificial heart of heats. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Aug 17, 2021 |
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Aug 17, 2021 03:55
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MikeC posted:They could have just handed the keys to an autocratic warlord, gave *him* the billions of dollars to let their war machine run amok for 20 years. They didn't. As a matter of fact we just saw what that looked like and it turned out that no they couldn't.
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Aug 17, 2021 03:56
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generic one posted:How are you landing on that conclusion? I can use my jump to conclusions mat and assume you’re saying that because they don’t appear to be folks originally from the region, but thought it would be worthwhile letting you explain. Hey man what the gently caress this might be d&d but it sure as poo poo isn’t reddit
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Aug 17, 2021 03:59
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Just realized there's an Afghanistan thread. I'm gonna copy and paste the figures of how the US improved the situation in Afghanistan since I've seen a lot of people posting "what did [the US] accomplish?" sentiment. Official counts of total military expenditure in Afghanistan by the US Department of Defense totaled $824bn, while spending on reconstruction by various agencies including the state department came to $131bn. Source As of 2021, Brown University estimates that the war in Afghanistan has already cost $2.261 trillion. Source The Brown University info above also states that 71,344 civilians were killed due to the war. In regards to the question "the gently caress did we accomplish, again?" here are the measurable improvements that were achieved due to US influence in the region. Since 2001, life expectancy has increased from 56 to 64 years and the maternal mortality rate has reduced by half. 89% of residents living in cities have access to clean water, up from 16% in 2001. The rate of child marriage has been reduced by 17% As of 2013, 8.2 million Afghans attended school, up from 1.2 million in 2001. The literacy rate has risen from 8% to 43% since 2001. As of 2013, 3.2 million girls attended school, up fewer than 50,000 in 2001. 39% of girls were attending school in 2017 compared to 6% in 2003. It's important to note that the Taliban was in control of the country from 1996 to 2001 when the US invaded, and, they were behaving much the same way when it came to human rights and women's rights back then too. They refused international aid, and chose to let people starve. The Afghanistan war was a really stupid pride war without any meaningful nation building plans. It miraculously lead to surprisingly strong improvements in basic civil rights and access to basic needs such as fresh water and healthcare. It's really dumb that there was no coherent plan to set up a functioning government and the people in charge of building infrastructure and government orgs had no idea how to deal with the bottomless pit of corruption that is Afghanistan politics. Source for all the other figures. Before anyone goes "HURR DURR WIKI" I checked the sources they referenced and they looked good, AP and such. EDIT: My links were hosed, I fixed them.
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Aug 17, 2021 04:09
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Rather than trying to argue Dick Cheney had good intentions or really any human emotion other than a greed so pure and untainted with human weakness it would seem like an incomprehensible ecstasy if our minds were capable of apprehending it, it seems like the argument for the war that you should be making is that the US's (very obviously evil) intentions didn't matter as long as the occupation had a side-effect of improving life somewhat for some people and that we should myopically focus on that and only that and not on all the lives destroyed. It's not a great argument but it's at least not obviously factually incorrect, it only relies on the very American assumption that foreign lives don't matter unless they can justify something we want, so as far as pro-war arguments go it's at least going to be successful at convincing a lot of people.
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Aug 17, 2021 04:09
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MikeC posted:As I told the other guy, you can choose to interpret every single act of attempted benevolence as simply PR and propaganda if you want. That doesn't lead you anywhere except concluding cartoon villains are in every seat of power. Or you can give them some credit in thinking they can get what they want, make some money out of it, and maybe come out looking like decent people at the end. Not everyone is necessarily either an angel or a devil. I think human beings are a bit more complicated that that. Starting a war that kills 200,000+ people, making some money, and maybe coming out looking like a decent person at the end.
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Aug 17, 2021 04:15
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VitalSigns posted:Rather than trying to argue Dick Cheney had good intentions or really any human emotion other than a greed so pure and untainted with human weakness it would seem like an incomprehensible ecstasy if our minds were capable of apprehending it, it seems like the argument for the war that you should be making is that the US's (very obviously evil) intentions didn't matter as long as the occupation had a side-effect of improving life somewhat for some people and that we should myopically focus on that and only that and not on all the lives destroyed. I hope no one's arguing that Dick Cheney had good intentions, cause that guy is clearly the personification of self interest. I also hope no one's looking at this from the automatic US BAD lense without actually evaluating the results on the ground. The numbers I posted above make the US look like stellar overlords compared to the Taliban. They led to vast improvements in basic rights and access to basic resources. It's really dumb that they started this war because US pride was hurt by the 9/11 attacks, but they at least paid lip service to basic western freedoms. As for foreign lives not mattering, I'm not sure how that's the conclusion of the US occupation since they reduced the maternal mortality rate by half and fresh water access in urban areas went from 16% to 89%. I think your kneejerk hate for all things US is blinding you to the actual good that was done on the ground to improve the lives of regular Afghanis.
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Aug 17, 2021 04:18
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MikeC posted:As is the perspective that any definitively argues that someone is evil regardless of their intentions since an absolute position offers no room for discussion at all, only circle jerking in an echo chamber. Relativism is what allows grounds for discussion. Intent is codified into US criminal law because it's important to ethics. Assuming good or bad intentions a priori isn't great for discussion, but accepting stated intentions at face value is just as bad and ignoring them is far worse.
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Aug 17, 2021 04:24
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Considering the US helped wreck the country by funding the mujahedeen and contributing to the deplorable conditions that lead to the Taliban, it doesn't seem like the US throwing a bunch of money at the country (most of which was grifted away by contractors anyway) and managing to eke out some improvements over the previous condition of the aftermath of complete collapse that they helped cause is really being a "stellar overlord" Probably could have done more good with less money if doing good had been the goal, especially if they didn't do the whole droning weddings, canoeing villagers, pissing on corpses, covering the country with mines and depleted uranium, canoeing villagers parts. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Aug 17, 2021 |
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Aug 17, 2021 04:26
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Terebus posted:I hope no one's arguing that Dick Cheney had good intentions, cause that guy is clearly the personification of self interest. I also hope no one's looking at this from the automatic US BAD lense without actually evaluating the results on the ground. I would rather drink my own piss under the Taliban than drink water under US imperialism (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Aug 17, 2021 04:37
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Terebus posted:The literacy rate has risen from 8% to 43% since 2001. This is just an idle thought rather than a specific response to you but I wonder how many people joined the taliban in part because of the increased awareness of the national situation instead of just their local tribe's situation brought on by the increase in literacy
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Aug 17, 2021 04:41
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There's also the fact that now that we've lost the war, not only does the "generous" aid stop, but we're stealing Afghanistan's money as well and talking about murderous sanctions of the style we use on other defiant former client states. If the intention was to improve the quality of life for the Afghan people, these actions are counterproductive and make no sense. Unless the intent is something else. Ultimately these just sound like the same justifications of European colonialism. Don't look at all the people we killed or the resources we looted, look at how we built some roads and improved sanitation. See it's all in their best interests, unless they don't want to be our client state and can actually make us go home, then we'll make them pay. So much for altruistic benevolent motivations.
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Aug 17, 2021 04:57
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Terebus posted:-Since 2001, life expectancy has increased from 56 to 64 years and the maternal mortality rate has reduced by half. 89% of residents living in cities have access to clean water, up from 16% in 2001. The rate of child marriage has been reduced by 17% Specifically, I don't doubt that the rate of children going to school increased under the US occupation (especially for girls), but the education sector of the country became as notorious as the ANA for having 'ghost teachers' and abandoned schools that were still raking in money from charitable institutions. I would assume that also involves the creation of 'ghost students', or the listing of children as being students when there's not actually a functional school within 100 miles of them. But just in general, I don't know how much confidence anybody can have in metrics that come from a country where bureaucracy is synonymous with grift.
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Aug 17, 2021 04:58
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VitalSigns posted:Considering the US helped wreck the country by funding the mujahedeen and contributing to the deplorable conditions that lead to the Taliban, it doesn't seem like the US throwing a bunch of money at the country (most of which was grifted away by contractors anyway) and managing to eke out some improvements over the previous condition of the aftermath of complete collapse that they helped cause is really being a "stellar overlord" Your framing of this is lovingly one sided, but I'll try to flesh it out a bit more. There was cold war going on between two colonial super powers, the US and the USSR, starting in the middle of the 20th century. During the start and the middle of the cold war Afghanistan managed to play both sides really well, receiving funding from both US and USSR, and on a per capita basis, Afghanistan received more Soviet development aid than any other country. The politics of Afghanistan were turbofucked, and a communist regime was sort of supported by the USSR, which by 1979, was failing, so the USSR put on their colonialist pants and invaded and installed a puppet dictator. The US was super jealous that the USSR was colonizing and they weren't so they decided to fund the mujahidin to fight the USSR for them with the help of the Pakistan intelligence services. The mujahidin were also heavily financed by China and the Arab monarchies in the Persian Gulf. It's really just a clusterfuck of arms money being throw from everyone everywhere. In 1989 he Soviets couldn't hold the region and left with their tails tucked between their legs. Their puppet government lasted until 1992, which shows they're better at installing puppet governments in Afghanistan. The Taliban became a significant player in Afghanistan in 1994, with some members being from mujahidin ranks. Pakistan was still inserting itself in there since they wanted a friendly ruling power in the region. In 1996 the Taliban gained control of 90% of Afghanistan and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, they imposed harsh rules on women, stopped the flow of international aid into starving regions and were generally terrible people. That lasted until 2001, when the US decided it was time to flex again because they got poked in the eye. Afghanistan as it stands today is a product of superpowers using it as its proxy battleground, and no one involved in the situation is innocent. Choosing to frame it as purely a US issue ignores entire portions of history. It's also utterly useless if you're actually trying to understand what's going on in the region. It is tragic that the only good things coming out of this situation are just afterthoughts of a poorly planned US invasion, but the region was hosed from way before that. The best way to move forward is to recognize the good aspects of US occupation and try to place pressure from an international scale to bring them back. For all the bad, basic human rights and living standards filtered into Afghanistan, and those efforts should be praised and continued. Typo posted:I would rather drink my own piss under the Taliban than drink water under US imperialism I'm glad you're going mask off and siding with the guys who murder people for adultery on the street and kidnap children to be sex slaves. Interesting moral position you're choosing here. reignonyourparade posted:This is just an idle thought rather than a specific response to you but I wonder how many people joined the taliban in part because of the increased awareness of the national situation instead of just their local tribe's situation brought on by the increase in literacy More information is always going to cause distrust of the ruling powers. But I think a bigger contributing factor is that the US was actively occupying Afghani territory and killing people there. You can build as much water infrastructure if you want, but if you kill a child in a neighborhood no one's going to be on your side. It's just too bad that the leadership that got the US into the war couldn't see the amount of good that was actively being done by spending on basic services.
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Aug 17, 2021 05:05
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VitalSigns posted:There's also the fact that now that we've lost the war, not only does the "generous" aid stop, but we're stealing Afghanistan's money as well and talking about murderous sanctions of the style we use on other defiant former client states. If the intention was to improve the quality of life for the Afghan people, these actions are counterproductive and make no sense. Unless the intent is something else. First, I'm gonna go with a big [CITATION NEEDED] for all the bolded claims in the quote, cause all of them are either on their face made up, or speculation at best. I'm not sure what money the US is stealing since the US dumped 1-2 trillion in the Afghanistan clusterfuck and came out with nothing at all. The Taliban is going to do a great job of sanctioning itself, in the 90s the Taliban was preventing international food shipments from reaching starving populations under their control, which, unsurprisingly, led to starvation. If you think the international community should just let the Taliban do their thing then that's on you, but if we want the world to improve the UN and other international orgs need to step up and take action to improve the situation. I don't think anyone's been justifying the situation, I'm just pointing out that the US occupation tangentially achieved good things, and the situation was better under US occupation than it will be under Taliban rule. It was really stupid that this whole clusterfuck started with the cold war and the USSR and US trying to do dumb imperialist poo poo, but we're here now and the best thing to do is look at the good things and keep those going. I literally posted the civilian casualties and the cost before the statistics that improved, so you either missed that or you intentionally ignored it. The US invasion of Afghanistan was really dumb, but it did measurably improve the day to day life of countless Afghanis. I like how you minimize it with "look at how we built some roads and improved sanitation", when most people living in cities didn't have access to running water, but I think it was a pretty big deal for them to be able to get drinking water every day. I'm impressed that someone can look at the population of educated women going from 50k to 3.2 mil and decide that it's nothing. That level of blind privilege and ignorance is staggering. Terebus fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Aug 17, 2021 |
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Aug 17, 2021 05:22
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Discospawn posted:The stats come from the AP, who cite respectable sources, but I'm still skeptical of any data that came out of the country from the past 20 years. Every element of the country suffered from severe corruption, and the US government apparently genuinely believed they had data showing that the ANA & American-backed government had achieved some level of independence/competence. If you have sources with better numbers then I'd love to check them out.
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Aug 17, 2021 05:25
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Terebus posted:First, I'm gonna go with a big [CITATION NEEDED] for all the bolded claims in the quote, cause all of them are either on their face made up, or speculation at best. The US has straight up said the Taliban isn't getting afghanistan's reserves held in the US. Regardless of whether we wasted a bunch of money in afghanistan that is in fact afghanistan's money, and we are in fact stealing it from what is now the government of afghanistan.
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Aug 17, 2021 05:28
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reignonyourparade posted:The US has straight up said the Taliban isn't getting afghanistan's reserves held in the US. Regardless of whether we wasted a bunch of money in afghanistan that is in fact afghanistan's money, and we are in fact stealing it from what is now the government of afghanistan. I didn't know that, but I very much agree with the decision. Are you saying that the US should release the funds to an authoritarian regime that has been constantly using any resources they get to terrorize the population they're subjugating? There are posters on this very page that criticized the US for funding some of the predecessors of the Taliban, I'm not sure how continuing to do that is a good thing. Do you think anything good will come from providing more money to the Taliban?
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Aug 17, 2021 05:36
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reignonyourparade posted:The US has straight up said the Taliban isn't getting afghanistan's reserves held in the US. Regardless of whether we wasted a bunch of money in afghanistan that is in fact afghanistan's money, and we are in fact stealing it from what is now the government of afghanistan. Wait, I'm looking into this, can I get an actual source for this claim? EDIT: Found it https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210816-taliban-will-not-get-access-to-afghan-reserves-held-in-us-official The US has about $9.4 dollars of the previous government's money. I'm all for the US not giving money to a terrorist organization, nothing good will come of it. Terebus fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Aug 17, 2021 |
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Aug 17, 2021 05:38
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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/afghanistan-money-taliban-us-reserves-b1903511.html%3famp Here you are
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Aug 17, 2021 05:41
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Terebus posted:I didn't know that, but I very much agree with the decision. Are you saying that the US should release the funds to an authoritarian regime that has been constantly using any resources they get to terrorize the population they're subjugating? There are posters on this very page that criticized the US for funding some of the predecessors of the Taliban, I'm not sure how continuing to do that is a good thing. So they're not stealing it because they deserve to be stolen from???
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Aug 17, 2021 05:42
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Terebus posted:I didn't know that, but I very much agree with the decision. Are you saying that the US should release the funds to an authoritarian regime that has been constantly using any resources they get to terrorize the population they're subjugating? There are posters on this very page that criticized the US for funding some of the predecessors of the Taliban, I'm not sure how continuing to do that is a good thing. "I think America SHOULD steal Afghanistan's money" is a separate issue to whether America is stealing Afghanistan's money. That is afghanistan's money. The taliban is now the government of afghanistan. Terebus posted:Wait, I'm looking into this, can I get an actual source for this claim? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/afghanistan-money-taliban-us-reserves-b1903511.html
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Aug 17, 2021 05:42
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*glugs 1970s level lead water* yeah we should use Afghan money to distribute fundamentalist Islamic texts to aid our own Arab support. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Aug 17, 2021 05:45
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Terebus posted:It is tragic that the only good things coming out of this situation are just afterthoughts of a poorly planned US invasion, but the region was hosed from way before that. The best way to move forward is to recognize the good aspects of US occupation and try to place pressure from an international scale to bring them back. For all the bad, basic human rights and living standards filtered into Afghanistan, and those efforts should be praised and continued. You were so close to making a good post. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Aug 17, 2021 05:47
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Sedisp posted:So they're not stealing it because they deserve to be stolen from??? reignonyourparade posted:"I think America SHOULD steal Afghanistan's money" is a separate issue to whether America is stealing Afghanistan's money. That is afghanistan's money. The taliban is now the government of afghanistan. Hey I'll admit I didn't know about those funds. I think it's a good thing that the US isn't giving the Taliban the funds since they're the loving Taliban. If you disagree with this I hope you didn't complain that the Taliban got hold of ANA equipment, since that's a somewhat contradictory position there. Just so we're clear, I think it's a very good thing for the US to withhold those funds from the Taliban. Would some posters here prefer the US release more money to the Taliban?
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Aug 17, 2021 05:48
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punk rebel ecks posted:You were so close to making a good post. Nice, thanks for sniping that specific part of the post and replying with good alternatives to what I proposed.
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Aug 17, 2021 05:49
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