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the thing that is strangest to untangle about this is that we've been at war in afghanistan since i was literally a child. decades of trillions of dollars pissed off to war profiteers and hegemonic examples of regulatory capture, untold deaths and misery, to accomplish nothing but the saigon-esque resurgence of the literal taliban and all the theocratic horrors they will unravel. it's a complete failure, a human atrocity from beginning to end, but also, in a measurable sense, relief
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Aug 16, 2021 00:34
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Regalingualius posted:Why were we there, again? i forgot
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Aug 16, 2021 00:35
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IT BURNS posted:Rumsfeld, mostly. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/how-donald-rumsfeld-deserves-be-remembered/619334/ quote:In 2006, soon after I returned from my fifth reporting trip to Iraq for The New Yorker, a pair of top aides in the George W. Bush White House invited me to lunch to discuss the war. This was a first; until then, no one close to the president would talk to me, probably because my writing had not been friendly and the administration listened only to what it wanted to hear. But by 2006, even the Bush White House was beginning to grasp that Iraq was closer to all-out civil war than to anything that could be called “freedom.” written before the calamitous collapse of his last little passion project but never more timely as a result!
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Aug 16, 2021 00:37
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sean10mm posted:In 2001 it was largely pitched as a mission to hunt down Bin Laden and not much else. The pretext of "spreading democracy" or whatever the poo poo came a bit later when we still didn't have Bin Laden but were still over there. ooh, even more relevance quote:within a few hours, [Rumsfeld] was already entertaining catastrophic ideas, according to notes taken by an aide: “best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].” And later: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” These fragments convey the whole of Rumsfeld: his decisiveness, his aggression, his faith in hard power, his contempt for procedure. In the end, it didn’t matter what the intelligence said. September 11 was a test of American will and a chance to show it.
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Aug 16, 2021 00:39
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Smeef posted:I'm curious if there have ever been cases where foreign powers have successfully built an effective, relatively decent, self-sustaining state out of a fragile or failed state with little institutional capacity, without resorting to wiping out the local population or other crimes against humanity. independent of the question of if it should be done, this could have worked. the US's failure in afghanistan isn't a categorical argument of finality against the possibility of it working, it's an example of an utterly and catastrophically inept occupation orchestrated by weird lunatics who were horny to engage in these decade-long, trillion dollar wars in part because they felt they had divine mandate revealed to them by prayer. everything was crucially flubbed from the onset, everything was ruled by the perverse incentives of war profiteering for insider contracting groups like Halliburton, and the occupation was critically mismanaged beyond before the first elections took place i offer this not as an argument that afghanistan should have been "liberated" by the US, but just as a way of noting it didn't necessarily have to end this badly, but the way we did things guaranteed it
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Aug 16, 2021 01:15
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i'm thankful this event is something that can be leveraged to dickstomp some of the attempted rehabilitation of the GWB administration. this is the ultimate capstone on their legacy: the taliban won, and 9/11 succeeded, it cost us trillions, nobody likes the war and everyone sees how badly it failed
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Aug 16, 2021 01:30
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Regalingualius posted:Same here. I was just eight when all of this started, and it’s still loving with me just how quickly they reasserted themselves once they had the opportunity. this downfall has actually been happening since late 2017, with large series of regional control collapses compounded by the interim government never being developed internally to a state at which it was either 1. not corrupt, 2. not incapable, 3. held in faith of governance by any minimum sustainable threshold of the national population we just managed to not hear a lot about it because the war had been on for over a decade and by that point there was no real public attention to the matter of afghanistan. we just didn't care. the entire nation hated this war
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Aug 16, 2021 01:46
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pasaluki posted:The Afghan Army is seriously f tier. Tnega posted:From the other thread, have This Is What Winning Looks Like. I personally liked the part about how the Afghan soldiers stole and sold the walls to their own base.    this whole segment where this guy was just 100% holding a drink through the whole thing, Julian-From-Trailer-Park-Boys style
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Aug 16, 2021 10:45
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Fuligin posted:alternatively you're desperate and need money, the way workers take dangerous jobs all over the world a lot of the hapless stoned-out weirdos stocking the afghani army were a collection of failsons who had, for various reasons, been banished out of their tribal enclaves
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Aug 16, 2021 18:23
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Numlock posted:Yeah this isn't going to cost Biden and the Democrats in general a single vote. you have to be almost 40 years old to not have spent the majority of your life with the afghanistan war ongoing anybody born after 1982 was a child when the war began we are so loving done that i somewhat agree with that this is not likely to hurt biden everybody was mentally checked out outside of a handful of colicky neoconservatives watching the sum total of their ideological Moment drift away like a sad fart
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Aug 16, 2021 19:45
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watch biden get halfway through this then have to evacuate because the taliban suddenly controls everything outside the presser
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Aug 16, 2021 21:10
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Gatts posted:The only thing that matters is getting the people to safety for those who need to be brought out of Afghanistan and it should have been accounted for, planned and executed better. This is what leadership should be held accountable for. except the vast majority of the time, effort, and resources that will be spent on this particular historical event will instead be "attempting to pin every historical failure that made this war unwinnable by 2013 on the current president" as opposed to refugee resettlement
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Aug 16, 2021 23:23
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yeah we decided we wanted to blow the joint with well over a thousand days left before the next presidential election the ever shortened political average attention span will have no concern for any of this by then
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Aug 17, 2021 02:16
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at least what we got from biden was the genuine article. at the end of the day, we were going to sour grapes it and blame the afghans for not perfectly adapting to our occupation and accommodating our disruptions. biden is wholly like anyone else in his mummified political caste, prone to narratives that let you start believing poo poo like "they must just not have wanted freedom enough"
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Aug 17, 2021 18:08
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OctaMurk posted:A big part of the reason the Army was starving and unpaid is because the Afghan leaders stole their money and materiel. And yes, it is our fault for enabling thieves. But the thieves are also to blame for being thieves. like i mean we set up the whole scheme, it's us at the root of it if a brazenly corrupt and inept kleptocracy exists and has not fallen solely because we're shoring up their foundation and keeping them from suffering the natural consequences of their theft of vital assets and mismanagement of critical, core functions of a nation, we're to blame for everything that we allowed to happen for the duration of time we shielded and propped them up while they did these things and we're also sorta on the hook for the consequences of the Tower of Theifification folding like a fast fashion suit the instant we aren't able to keep it propped up with trillions of dollars
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Aug 17, 2021 20:40
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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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Sir Kodiak posted:TLDR: the Northern Alliance would like guns and money from the United States to keep the civil war going. a land war, in asia? turns out we're fresh on the market for that!! where do we sign up
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Aug 18, 2021 21:10
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talked with an on-the-ground guy who dropped their strategic consulting gig in afghanistan some time ago because it was a mind-sucking hellpit of waste and imperial hubris by rights, according to them, the last time you could have had an orderly withdrawal timetable was apparently two or three years ago after that point, the taliban was enough in charge of the ground that at any time the united states would have started a full withdrawal of citizens and staff, that would have been the moment the kabul government and army would have engaged in the exact same immediate, rapid disintegration... as everyone withdrew instead of dying for a lost cause. it was gonna happen as soon as the withdrawal timetable actually started up, at any subsequent time the people in charge knew this, they just wanted to punt it to any administration that wasn't them
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Aug 21, 2021 19:06
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the failson-industrial complex
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Aug 23, 2021 22:08
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did we move to the "this is a cia psyop" phase of these things already
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Aug 26, 2021 19:50
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at least politico is offering firm dimensions of what it will lie about and in the process, letting us know what it's all about
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Aug 28, 2021 05:25
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