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while i think it's mostly pointless to recognize that afghanistan could have been "nation built" successfully (because i don't want to encourage subsequent attempts that inevitably revolve around capital flow and force projection) i will agree it could have been accomplished but the invasion was run by people like rumsfeld. the foundations were hosed from the beginning and the human cost was going to be insane anyway
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 00:19 |
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 07:25 |
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Mooseontheloose posted:So here is my mostly unpopular opinion. I think you could of had a better outcome in Afghanistan IF the United States hadn't done the whole go it alone shtick. For as much grief as we should give HW Bush, he did understand international relations better than anyone since I think. Get Russia involved, get the UN involved, have it be some joint peace keeping mission. Don't let it be YEE HAW COWBOY AMERICANS and a smattering of Europe to come in and do the work. Afghanistan was never going to be a joint peacekeeping mission because we were not there for humanitarian reasons, we were there to create a favorable geopolitical outcome for the United States, which is not something Russia and China would be signing on to. This is how it worked for every post-Cold War conflict the US has sent troops into except for Bosnia. Like, yeah, we could have had a better outcome if our strategic objectives and approach towards swinging our dicks around in the world were completely different from what they are.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 00:20 |
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On reasons the Taliban may be trying to be nicer now. Thinking from their perspective I doubt they enjoyed the 20 years of war very much, they were probably hit harder overall then the US. A lot of the bigger bastards in the group were also wiped out early on. So the group currently may just want to take it easy and not worry about a war which could restart more easily if they start abusing the population.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 00:29 |
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Its worth noting that Iran was discretely helping with intel and rounding up AQ dudes fleeing westward until the 'axis of evil' speech which basically poisoned the well with them. Again.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 00:29 |
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MonsterEnvy posted:On reasons the Taliban may be trying to be nicer now. Thinking from their perspective I doubt they enjoyed the 20 years of war very much, they were probably hit harder overall then the US. A lot of the bigger bastards in the group were also wiped out early on. So the group currently may just want to take it easy and not worry about a war which could restart more easily if they start abusing the population. No probably about it, the war was obviously brutal for the Taliban, and the fastest way for them to ensure that the US can't just start bombing again at will is to gain international recognition by at least initially playing nice with the world. They don't have the deterrence capabilities or Chinese protection that North Korea does, so being hermits just makes them vulnerable.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 00:33 |
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Staluigi posted:while i think it's mostly pointless to recognize that afghanistan could have been "nation built" successfully (because i don't want to encourage subsequent attempts that inevitably revolve around capital flow and force projection) i will agree it could have been accomplished yeah and not that I would say that the us hugely learned from the blunders of the 2000s, but when you go back and read about how us development efforts were undertaken by the constantly rotating series of local american military commanders it's staggering just how much waste there was and, even moreso, how utterly the system as it existed then had literally zero chance of succeeding at even minor undertakings. the tldr of the 2000s is a given unit would get assigned to an area, they would start from scratch at talking/working with the locals and building relations from the ground up. They'd identify some of the local issues, find out they couldn't do much about most of it, but maybe find one or two civic projects to dump resources into as an ~investment into the future~. Sounds alright, right? Well the projects would never finish and 12-18 months later the american unit would rotate out to be replaced by a new unit who would start from the beginning once again. What about the projects the first unit had started? They'd get abandoned because the next unit commander wanted to be have on their service record that they had started and finished xyz project during their tour. Ironically, incredibly few of these projects were ever actually completed. In the off chance that something was actually accomplished and people did feel more favorably towards US or regime forces, it was just a matter of time before ana/anp/ussof or an american drone or some other armed group would come through and brutalize some civilians and undo any tentative progress. And this poo poo went on continuously unabated for over a decade. Even once that cycle was formally identified, it still persisted. The same thing was happening in Iraq. One of the major case studies for this was a single water purification plant in Iraq that american forces spent over a decade promising to build at a cost of millions of dollars a year yet only a few afternoons of work were ever done on it over an entire decade. It's stunning just how wildly ineffectual these efforts were. I'm sure in some hypothetical world nation building could've been done and been maybe successful, but the way the US was doing things was not going to be it. Proud Christian Mom posted:Its worth noting that Iran was discretely helping with intel and rounding up AQ dudes fleeing westward until the 'axis of evil' speech which basically poisoned the well with them. Again. The Iranians were basically the big bridge between american total ignorance of the languages and region so of course we just had to alienate them despite iran being genuinely quite genuinely sympathetic to the US at the time. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Aug 18, 2021 |
# ? Aug 18, 2021 00:53 |
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https://twitter.com/ragipsoylu/status/1427735360633716741
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 02:42 |
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-Blackadder- posted:One topic it would be interesting to hear more about is not just the specific strategic reasons for why we failed, which have been covered to some degree (too focused on Iraq and failed to deliver the killing blow when we had them on the ropes, failed to cut off their resupply from Pakistan, failed to build real organizations within the Afghan government, etc) but also why those things blindsided a Post-Vietnam U.S. Military and Department of Defense, and the implications of that for future conflict? Here is the latest report from SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) that lays out a lot of the problems.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 02:46 |
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Dapper_Swindler posted:I am curious what the military says about the vietnam fuckup? what did the lessons say? George C. Herring was the historian who literally wrote the book West Point (and a bunch of other colleges) used, and I think still use, and he was the visiting professor when I was there. You can get a sample of his take on things here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlh3b2xX_A8 The lecture proper starts around the 8:00 mark but the stuff before that is still interesting. I'd mostly sum it up as the "uncontroversial take on the war if you're not a dickhead." This is in 2009 and while he doesn't make the lecture *about* the Global War on Terror, he pretty clearly looks at it with a big A big emphasis of his is that if you just look at it from an American point of view of "why did we lose?" you'll never figure it out, because that myopia is itself part of why we lost. His biggest thing is probably the primacy of local circumstances, and how they can render vast power essentially pointless in the long run. Of course he harps on how ignorant we were of said circumstances, the experience of the French trying to do the same basic thing and eating poo poo over and over, and so on all being contributors. "The circumstances of the war, then, posed a dilemma I think we never really understood, much less resolved" sean10mm fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Aug 18, 2021 |
# ? Aug 18, 2021 02:49 |
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So effectively, every officer has some basic understanding of how stupid and ill-advised our adventures are before we ever dive in, but the system encourages everyone to just ignore that knowledge and just go l m a o gently caress it YOLO neat
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 02:57 |
trucutru posted:The only thing I remember about Tora Bora was the Taliban's secret underground base Oh, hey, I think I had that micromachine playset as a kid!
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 02:57 |
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BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:So effectively, every officer has some basic understanding of how stupid and ill-advised our adventures are before we ever dive in, but the system encourages everyone to just ignore that knowledge and just go l m a o gently caress it YOLO Basically the higher the rank the more the system favors backstabbing political shitfucks over professional competence. Selling out your troops for a promotion is a longstanding tradition in the higher ranks.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 03:02 |
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10,000 soldiers huh? I doubt it.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 03:10 |
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https://twitter.com/rebeccaballhaus/status/1427743755453542409 Seems like Biden kinda called it though he messed up how fast it would be.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 03:15 |
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SourKraut posted:Personally, I get the point that he is making and I don't disagree with the underlying issues most of the time, but I also think he needs to tone down the inhumane comparative language being used at times to describe individuals who may or may not have happily involved themselves in the occupation, especially when I constantly see and hear the term "collaborator" being used to describe pretty much anyone who ever had any involvement with non-Afghan forces (that janitor cleaning up American piss and poo poo in the bathroom? Collaborator!), as well as terms like "masters", etc., it's seemingly making a not-so-subtle reference to slavery, etc. I'm not exactly sure if you're referring to me or if you were trying to draw a distinction for other people who are working with a 1-bit color palette but I didn't say "anyone who ever had any involvement", I said the opposite: VitalSigns posted:depending on what you did for the Americans -Blackadder- posted:One topic it would be interesting to hear more about is not just the specific strategic reasons for why we failed, which have been covered to some degree (too focused on Iraq and failed to deliver the killing blow when we had them on the ropes, failed to cut off their resupply from Pakistan, failed to build real organizations within the Afghan government, etc) but also why those things blindsided a Post-Vietnam U.S. Military and Department of Defense, and the implications of that for future conflict? You might be interested in the Post's Afghanistan Papers from a couple years ago. The government and military did a bunch of independent inquiries over the years and when people were allowed to be honest they knew exactly how the war was hosed up and said so. The problem is the conclusions were ones that policy makers didn't want to hear or act on anyway. Nobody wanted to be in Biden's shoes now, collapsing the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan's morale by pulling out and having to preside over a humiliating defeat, but nobody wanted to try anything different either, so the political path of least resistance was to double down on the sunk cost fallacy and hope the inevitable collapse is the next guy's problem. quote:“They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live,” an unnamed former adviser to an Army Special Forces team told government interviewers in 2017. “It took several conversations for them to understand that I did not have that information in my hands. At first, they just kept asking: ‘But who are the bad guys, where are they?’ ” Same thing happened with Iraq, when Bush went to the joint chiefs they said "ok yeah we can do this it will take 300,000 troops to stabilize the country and maintain order and a functioning society after we decapitate the leadership" and whoa Cheney and Rumsfeld did not want to hear that, there's an election next year, we can't have a draft, how much would it take just to guard the oil, the rest will work itself out because freedom right? And welp, you either tell the boss what he wants to hear or you take your early retirement like Gen Shinseki. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Aug 18, 2021 |
# ? Aug 18, 2021 03:22 |
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NORTHERN ALLIANCE HOOOOAHHHH The northern alliance is basically the dad in your friend group thats always talking about how big his gun, dick, truck, trump hat or otherwise is.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 04:14 |
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sean10mm posted:George C. Herring was the historian who literally wrote the book West Point (and a bunch of other colleges) used, and I think still use, and he was the visiting professor when I was there. You can get a sample of his take on things here: It's interesting how much the lesson of 'the us has no good self-review process for learning from and then integrating lessons from mistakes' that very definitely was taken away from Vietnam still only partially took root. Like clearly that lesson hit home somewhat and it undeniably shaped academy curriculums, but it also seems like the prevailing institutional sense of american exceptionalism was never meaningfully uprooted and indeed all those narratives of 'they didn't let us win' or 'we were undermined by the antiwar movement' etc. just let that same sense of superiority persist. On a somewhat related note, it's also striking how much american unit quality actually varies. Good units really are quite exceptional. The bad ones are really bad and often incredibly counter-productive. Given how the us military filters information out, the impression comes across that the good units are everywhere and the lovely units barely even exist because their failures often get minimized barely make it out in any potentially career harming form in the short term. Lowkey I also think that a ton of relevant info gets lost when speaking about the american military in generalities, but also it's kinda inevitable because the military is so vast. If one breaks successes or failures down into the specific units and the actual personalities involved in any given action, the outcomes tend to be pretty proportional to the competence and ability and planning of everyone involved.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 04:20 |
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VitalSigns posted:And welp, you either tell the boss what he wants to hear or you take your early retirement like Gen Shinseki. Sounds like one of the problems is it’s too much of a corporate career for too many people. They should just get rid of the pentagon and have the high ranking officers lead from the field.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 04:43 |
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nelson posted:Sounds like one of the problems is it’s too much of a corporate career for too many people. They should just get rid of the pentagon and have the high ranking officers lead from the field. ok just make sure you get them all to promise never to bring their troops with them to cross the Potomac
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 04:59 |
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-Blackadder- posted:One topic it would be interesting to hear more about is not just the specific strategic reasons for why we failed, which have been covered to some degree (too focused on Iraq and failed to deliver the killing blow when we had them on the ropes, failed to cut off their resupply from Pakistan, failed to build real organizations within the Afghan government, etc) but also why those things blindsided a Post-Vietnam U.S. Military and Department of Defense, and the implications of that for future conflict? Well, there's two problems. The first problem is that understanding how insurgencies work isn't the same as being able to actually defeat them. No amount of military science is going to overcome "the well-armed locals don't want your imperial expeditionary force here" in a place with crappy terrain for military operations. Besides, the Afghanistan occupation was fundamentally different from the Vietnam War, involving a lot more essentially-policing functions that the military was totally unprepared for. Even if the military had learned from Vietnam, which I kinda find doubtful given how poorly the early parts of the occupation were carried out, Afghanistan wasn't quite the same thing. The second problem is that in both Vietnam and Afghanistan, high-level war policy was decided by politicians according to domestic political considerations, with little respect for the actual conditions on the ground. Whatever lessons the military might have learned in Vietnam, they certainly weren't retained on Capitol Hill, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union ushered in a new generation of "end of history" thinktanker idiots convinced that American power was now absolutely supreme and unstoppable. If the Commander in Chief and Sec of Defense order the troops to go in, they can't just say "no". In general, the people running the military and DOD are pointing the finger at politicians, as loudly as they can reasonably get away with. Rather too loudly, I think, because there was a whole bunch of absolutely hosed-up stuff that happened on the military side too. The politicians were incompetent but that doesn't mean the generals can't take some blame for all the war crimes and poo poo committed by troops on the ground. The report MH Knights linked here is a good read that goes into a lot of specifics about this stuff... MH Knights posted:Here is the latest report from SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) that lays out a lot of the problems. ...though set aside some time if you're going to read more than the summary, because it's over a hundred pages long.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 05:13 |
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:NORTHERN ALLIANCE HOOOOAHHHH Is that more preferable than the Taliban?
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 05:15 |
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how the gently caress is dostum still alive (for those who don't know about him): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/22/world/asia/afghanistan-general-abdul-rashid-dostum-rape.html
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 05:16 |
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Zotix posted:Is that more preferable than the Taliban? Fall of Afghanistan - Actually, Both Sides are Bad
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 05:22 |
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US literally kept hiring and paying Taliban who stole from themquote:One unidentified U.S. soldier said Special Forces teams “hated” the Afghan police whom they trained and worked with, calling them “awful — the bottom of the barrel in the country that is already at the bottom of the barrel.” One of the other problems was that regardless of whether the military learned anything from Vietnam, the neocons learned exactly the wrong things. Rumsfeld was convinced that we only lost in Vietnam because so much bad news eroded public support and made us give up too soon. How could a bunch of rice farmers defeat the world's most feared military, no it was all the drat hippies and defeatists and journalists who weakened us from within. Therefore he was more concerned about massaging opinion and handling the press and misleading the public than he was about what was actually happening on the ground. quote:Two months later, Marin Strmecki, a civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, gave the Pentagon chief a classified, 40-page report loaded with more bad news. It said “enormous popular discontent is building” against the Afghan government because of its corruption and incompetence. It also said that the Taliban was growing stronger, thanks to support from Pakistan, a U.S. ally. and their neolib successors weren't any better quote:One year later, during a visit to Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stuck to the same script — even though he had just personally dodged a suicide attack. quote:During Vietnam, U.S. military commanders relied on dubious measurements to persuade Americans that they were winning. quote:Even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the senior NSC official said, the White House and Pentagon would spin them to the point of absurdity. Suicide bombings in Kabul were portrayed as a sign of the Taliban’s desperation, that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat. Meanwhile, a rise in U.S. troop deaths was cited as proof that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 05:52 |
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VitalSigns posted:I'm not exactly sure if you're referring to me or if you were trying to draw a distinction for other people who are working with a 1-bit color palette but I didn't say "anyone who ever had any involvement", I said the opposite: there's a tendency ive seen in modern history where limitations presented by experts are spun into features by people that wanted to hear something different. we'll outrun our supply lines and stall in six months unless we win, you say? hmm hmmmm well the soviets whole rotten structure will collapse after we kick in the door, and this will happen in, ohhh, six months.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 06:26 |
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https://twitter.com/natsecjeff/status/1427880974101123072?s=21
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 07:37 |
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Tiler Kiwi posted:we'll outrun our supply lines and stall in six months unless we win, you say? hmm hmmmm well the soviets whole rotten structure will collapse after we kick in the door, and this will happen in, ohhh, six months. Double the manpower and we'll have it in half the time! Look how many of their soldiers we're killing, yes yes we're losing a lot more tanks but that's just proof they're afraid of German steel! Gosh it's cold Sedisp fucked around with this message at 09:52 on Aug 18, 2021 |
# ? Aug 18, 2021 09:49 |
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Herstory Begins Now posted:It's interesting how much the lesson of 'the us has no good self-review process for learning from and then integrating lessons from mistakes' that very definitely was taken away from Vietnam still only partially took root. Like clearly that lesson hit home somewhat and it undeniably shaped academy curriculums, but it also seems like the prevailing institutional sense of american exceptionalism was never meaningfully uprooted and indeed all those narratives of 'they didn't let us win' or 'we were undermined by the antiwar movement' etc. just let that same sense of superiority persist. I think something was probably lost over time as the generation of officers who actually saw the Vietnam War and did not like it aged out and the only ones left were a smattering of old generals who almost by definition rose by excelling at being self serving politicians. On the other hand every imperial power seems to have made Vietnam War-adjacemt mistakes, so the basic hubris from being an empire might just be a large part of it. Sometimes it seems like even criticisms of America implicitly accept American Excepionalism and just frame it negatively instead of positively. poo poo, in the case of France it was literally IN Vietnam and they sure as gently caress didn't come off any better there. As for the variability in unit quality, historically all militaries of any size have suffered from that, and it's always a dilemma where everyone likes having elite units, but they tend to drain quality people from everywhere else. I don't know if the US is better or worse than "normal" in that regard nowadays to be honest, I just have no sense for it either way. It was probably better in the 1990s simply because recruiting was good and standards could be kept relatively high since there was no forever war scaring people off. But that’s just off the top of my head.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 11:34 |
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VitalSigns posted:US literally kept hiring and paying Taliban who stole from them Dapper_Swindler fucked around with this message at 11:55 on Aug 18, 2021 |
# ? Aug 18, 2021 11:41 |
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The Powell Doctrine was basically a bullet list of "How Not to Vietnam War Again" written by General Colin Powell, who then worked for George W. Bush as Secretary of State to do everything on his own personal "do not do these dumb things" list. I don't have anything else to add, that's just what literally happened. That's not even irony, that's just... what is loving wrong with you?
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 12:14 |
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Hekmatyar, Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah having a nice chat with the Taliban to decide future government, I’m honestly loving shocked that Karzai might actually manage to keep a decent political future in afghanistan:- https://twitter.com/natsecjeff/status/1427949301754380296?s=21
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 12:17 |
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sean10mm posted:The Powell Doctrine was basically a bullet list of "How Not to Vietnam War Again" written by General Colin Powell, who then worked for George W. Bush as Secretary of State to do everything on his own personal "do not do these dumb things" list. did he ever write a memoir or some poo poo. i am sure its glowy bullshit but i am curious if Powell ever said anything on that.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 12:21 |
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Dapper_Swindler posted:Biden get in and says “it’s hosed anyway, let’s just pullout” and then 20 years of poo poo collapse. Which is really dumb and is going to help your country go full fash beginning in 2022.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 12:21 |
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Regarde Aduck posted:Which is really dumb and is going to help your country go full fash beginning in 2022. how? the war never polled well and people want us to leave. the news will probably switch once covid starts killing even more southerners or some hosed up kid starts killing his classmates in some high school. plus the polls mostly agree with "leaving is good".
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 12:29 |
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Dapper_Swindler posted:how? the war never polled well and people want us to leave. the news will probably switch once covid starts killing even more southerners or some hosed up kid starts killing his classmates in some high school. plus the polls mostly agree with "leaving is good". Because the Dems will always find a way to shoot themselves in the foot: https://twitter.com/AndrewDesiderio/status/1427769427215454208?s=19 A Cadaver Synod with Rumsfeld's corpse would be more useful and a better look than this.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 12:41 |
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CommieGIR posted:Oh good there's a defense chart for this This entire corner of that chart is a war crime
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 12:49 |
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J.A.B.C. posted:Because the Dems will always find a way to shoot themselves in the foot: i mean its politico. my guess is at least one will be about the quick collapse and the others will be about other topics with the "why did it fail?" and "who to blame?" its dumb but id rather have the dems start it then have it become a chud led bengazi investigation.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 12:52 |
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as if the american people could be fickle about their stated desires
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 12:55 |
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Tiler Kiwi posted:as if the american people could be fickle about their stated desires Issue polling is amazing. https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1427775092713394176
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 13:15 |
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 07:25 |
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Sinteres posted:Issue polling is amazing. And the one really likes the speedo guy.
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# ? Aug 18, 2021 13:23 |