Tactical question: How hard would it be to just limit U.S. involvement in Afghanistan to just a single airbase in or around Kabul with airpower (i.e., AC-130s, Apaches, Reapers etc.) alone for keeping the Taliban ducking?
Cost would be relatively minimal; surely couldn’t exceed more than, say, a billion dollars a year. Manpower might just be a thousand or couple thousand.
But then it gives the Afghan government a reason to keep on fighting instead of just flat-out surrendering, and makes the Taliban hesitant to advance openly in full view of the cross-hairs.
You do realize that none of the September 11 hijackers were Afghani, were not funded by the Taliban, and Salafist jihadists would be extremely unwelcome given all the trouble they’ve brought to Afghanistan and the Taliban regime, right?
I mean, I’m totally game. If you would like to give a five-paragraph exposition on why Velocity’s idea is dumb and ignorant AF and the worst thing the Dope has seen in 3.26 weeks, I’m all ears. Fight the ignorance; do not go easy on me. Let the truth hose rip. Blast those misconceptions.
Well, let’s start with your notion of maintaining:
A single outpost which can be surrounded by all sides by the enemy is what is colloquially known as a “kill box”. Given that all supplies, including fuel, consumables, ammunition, materiel, and everything else necessary to maintain the facility would have to continuously be brought in by airlift from Saudi Arabia, the cost of maintaining such a facility would be way more than your casual estimate of “say, a billion dollars a year”, and would take more than the troop level of “might just be a thousand or a couple thousand” just to secure the facility, much less support continuous flight operations.
As far as the effort “keeping the Taliban ducking”, this is an insurgent force that is quite good at blending into the civilian population. They know the terrain, the weather, the unmarked routes and cave systems, and have a very decentralized command structure that is quite resilient to singular attacks. I guess we could just level every village where there is some rumor of Taliban presence (although without on the ground HUMINT, how we would distinguish between a legitimate target and somebody who is just the victim of an informant’s grudge is anyone’s guess) but that strategy didn’t play out well for us in Southeast Asia, and the Viet Cong and NVA weren’t even religious fanatics.
The notion that this harassment campaign which would do little to suppress Taliban control of outlying districts and attacks on Kabul would somehow sustain “the Afghan government” and enable it to maintain an effective military force is given lie by the last few years where every time the United States has drawn down troops with the hope that the Afghan Army would step up, the Taliban-backed forces have made advances. In fact, the entire notion comes off as the US maintaining a military base from which to strike at protected by the local forces because brown people are expendable mooks who will be happy to act as meat shields, notwithstanding the constant threat of “green on blue” attacks and the potential for such an outpost to be cut off should some other competing power provide the Taliban with SAM capability.
If the desire is just “for keeping the Taliban ducking”, it would be far easier, cheaper, and more secure to just do so (if indeed that was a feasible strategy, idem) from Saudi Arabia, where at least the local government mostly keeps the fundamentalists under control. Of course, if our desire is to put US airbases into as many countries as possible to maintain a global reach without having to negotiate with a powerful local government, then I suppose it makes sense to spend more tens of billions of dollars and the lives of American servicepeople and contractors in furtherance of that goal, although what that does for “stopping airplanes from flying into our cities” is questionable at best.
the desire was to help the people in Afghanistan gain enough of a social foothold that they could grow as a nation. The Taliban was just sitting in Pakistan waiting for the US to leave.
Basically the Stranger Doctrine just killed any chance of that happening. 20 years of progress butchered (literally) in the space of a month.
Instead of a base strategically located in an unstable region we now have a long distance trek from Saudi Arabia that is as we are seeing, useless.
Didn’t mean to suggest China would invade Afghanistan; I meant that if Afghanistan hosted terrorists who attempted to destabilize China, they wouldn’t waste their time with nation-building; they’d get right down to business and knock the shit out of their enemies. We may be a few years away before China has that kind of extraterritorial reach, but I was just hypothesizing about potential conflicts a decade or so down the road.
Setting aside that you are ascribing to me a “doctrine” that I do not advocate and only introduced as a hypothetical to illustrate the futility of, we did not enter into or maintain an occupation “to help the people in Afghanistan gain enough of a social foothold that they could grow as a nation,” and this “20 years of progress” you claim had been made does not reflect the reality that any incremental gains in territory and infrastructure were regularly countered by Taliban reclamation and destruction of roads, schools, and other infrastructure. If so much progress was actually made in building a modern nation and training Afghan security forces, it wouldn’t be falling so abruptly with the withdrawal of foreign troops.
There is a failing here, but it is in the assumption that the United States and its coalition could succeed in “modernizing” (read: conquering) Afghanistan where so many have failed before. Team America: 0, History: All.
Sometimes it seems that you think your opinions are actual facts.
Its History at least 1 as Islamic forces conquered the humans who were living there and imposed a new culture.
That’s your opinion and your’s alone. I would say that we absolutely engaged in nation building as a way of separating the Taliban from a society of free people.
there is a clear distinction between Afghanistan a month ago and the clownfuck butchery that’s unfolding today.
You have elected to defend this process for reasons that defy any sense of decency.
FWIW, the issue about Uighur genocide is pushed heavily by Western media, together with tyranny committed on Hong Kongers and even Thais. It appears that the goal is to continue portraying not only China but also Russia and many other countries as evil in contrast to the U.S.
Given that, I think China is continuing soft power in contrast to U.S. hard power.
Tolerance and acceptance are two different things. There is also a tinge of colonialism and racism in imposing our cultural values on these people. By opening the country to the world and educating its people these old habits would slowly die.
Nah, this just isn’t accurate at all. We actually have access to released planning documents, biographical accounts of the decision makers etc. I don’t believe we were in Afghanistan to “check” Iran. We were already in Iraq which borders Iran and Turkey (a NATO member) which is extremely close to Iran. All of the evidence actually seems to suggest we struck at the Taliban because the administration felt it was the most direct way to strike at al-Qaeda and because of the political reasons for doing that right after 9/11.
Within a few months it was very obvious the administration had tired of even thinking about Afghanistan and the attention shifted to building up political support and staging military preparations for an unrelated and equally poorly considered invasion of Iraq. For the remainder of the Bush Administration basically every internal analysis of Afghanistan conducted was ignored by decision makers and it was quite obvious there was no actual coherent reason for anything we were doing there.
Since we were there, the natural extension of our military occupations occurred–civilian building operations, money funneling in for things of that nature, and military training and equipment transfers. Most of this done with very little cohesive planning or thought. Lots of money poured into Afghanistan with minimal controls over how it was used or where it went.
By the time the Obama Administration took over Obama wanted us out, but he oddly enough got advice from a number of people like Stanley McChrystal who told him about the humanitarian disaster if he pulled out, and actually convinced him to commit to more troops. An odd man out in those advice sessions was Joe Biden–who said Afghanistan was a non-winnable clusterfuck and we needed out ASAP, for all the insults Joe takes for being senile and stupid, he was actually the one giving Obama the correct advice.
I see little real evidence Obama stayed out of a desire to “check Iran”, and every bit of evidence like many American Presidents his generals scared him with scary talk and he didn’t want to be held responsible for the bad things they warned him about. So we continued fruitlessly nation building and military building for another 8 years.
Then Trump in one of his few intelligent policy positions stated a goal of getting us out, and took concrete actions along those lines. Trump was not at all concerned about the humanitarian issue, but he fell into the same trap Obama did–the Generals used scary words on him and while he wasn’t as duped as Obama, he was willing to slow down the withdrawal because they convinced him international terrorists could start cropping up in Afghanistan again.
The real real reason we were in Afghanistan is we made a bad decision to do a large scale ground invasion back in 2001; and then we had no plan for afterward. When the national and strategic focus shifted to Iraq, we inexplicably left tens of thousands of soldiers in Afghanistan with minimal plan for what we were doing there. We opted to just pretend we were winning for ten years or so and ignore counter assessments. The military abhors conceding any form of defeat, and the top brass were happy to keep inventing reasons to continue justifying the mission and the political leadership was willing to defer to them–until Trump and Biden, who both were more willing to resist, Biden in particular much more forcefully.