If the US occupied Afghanistan for another hundred years the end result would be the same.
Unlikely. Over that timeframe generations come and go and attitudes shift. How do you think Islam spread in Afghanistan? But there had to be the will to do the job which there wasnt.
There was not actually a coherent objective. Osama bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan, we tried to negotiate a deal with the Taliban to turn him over. That fell through, we started airstrikes and the Northern Alliance started to make inroads against Taliban strongholds. We then landed a bunch of troops there to “punish” the Taliban, arguably looking for a nail to hammer after 9/11, and Bush had yet to build up his case for invading Iraq so we couldn’t go after Saddam yet. If our main goal was just going after ObL the reality is we’d have tried harder at the negotiating table, there are reports we weren’t all that far away from a deal to get him turned over. Barring that, finding ObL did not actually require a large scale military invasion, it required heavy investment in intelligence and special forces operations in eastern Afghanistan, up until whenever he moved to Pakistan, which is believed to have been a few years after we invaded.
The nationbuilding stuff obviously became a publicly stated goal/objective. Saying it wasn’t an “actual objective” is kinda nonsensical. We were there, politicians felt we should nationbuild and appropriated money for it, various military assessments agreed. It was an objective. It was a post-hoc objective that was never fully thought out, but an objective, sure.
China is very unlikely to ever face serious issue from Islamic insurgencies. Much like Malaysia they know what measures are necessary to seriously prevent such things. The only measures we’ve ever found to stop such things are genocidal acts. There’s a reason the West doesn’t do stuff like this, the moral and societal cost is too high. This is something the Empires of old knew, and why areas that acted badly had huge portions (sometimes 50%+) of their population, including sometimes virtually all adult males, massacred, and a large portion of the survivors turned into slaves. There’s no stomach for America doing that, and nor should there be.
Right, to me a key issue here is the Taliban isn’t even “defeating” the government in battles. In city after city, large, entrenched Afghan National Army units are simply giving up. Provincial political leadership is either switching allegiance to the Taliban or fleeing. While there are reportedly “ghost soldiers” on the 180,000 man roster of the national army, the simple math is we’ve trained something like half a million or more mlitary-age Afghan men. We’ve funneled hundreds of billions of dollars in equipment to them. They could fight the Taliban, could they decisively defeat them? Probably not, but they have the manpower and physical resources that they could fight savagely and likely keep the Taliban limited to rural Pashtun areas and caves. They are simply deciding it is not worth it to fight. A major reason for this is because many of the people deciding not to fight are Pashtun, and they simply aren’t opposed enough to the Pashtun Taliban to resist them for the sake of an Afghanistan they simply don’t believe in. Aside from some sort of mass brain-altering device there’s no real fixing that.
Interesting take. I guess it will be back to never-ending civil war. We have forgotten the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud In Afghanistan, A Rebel Leader's Legacy : NPR that was the first act of Al Quedas offensive on 9/8/01.
Means vs. ends. I do not for a minute believe that Bush II’s ‘ends’ for Afghanistan ever included nation building. I believe that was a means to his actual desired end of making it look like he hadn’t ‘lost’ the war or even merely ‘failed’ to apprehend bin Laden. Of course he had to do something to get re-elected, and for his legacy. He couldn’t just wipe the dust from his hands and say, “Well, we goofed that up, bring the troops home and let bin Laden hide until we get some good intel on his location.” American politics does not work that way. As to why Obama chose to continue in that… same political factors apply. I suspect he really did want out of Afghanistan, but then he also probably didn’t want to get labeled as having ‘lost’ the war. So, absent an actual pullout, what’s the next best thing? Nation-building!
But, again, that’s not so much an objective as a method of achieving an objective. The actual objective having much more to do (perhaps to the exclusion of all else) with political conditions in the US and the palatability of… whatever is going on right now.
The ongoing occupation of Afghanistan and ensuing nation-building exercises was nothing more than a theater of “victory within our grasps” staged by people who wanted to hold onto power in the US.
What remains clear is that the intervention was essentially a great waste of money and manpower. These would seem to be sunk costs and Biden may be right not to continue this.
I have no trouble believing that making Afghanistan more democratic or with more robust institutions was a secondary or public relations goal. I think some efforts were made in this regard, and reflected an admirable but naive conception of the realpolitik. The primary goal was a bit nebulous but trying to reduce terrorism was clearly a big part of it. Since it was initially unclear how this was distributed between countries such as Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan or other countries the goalposts kept moving. In this light I think there is merit to Stranger’s analysis.
Certainly broader goals of confronting terrorism and largely avoiding repeat attacks have perhaps been achieved. Whether the best or most efficient methods were used is fairly clear.
There are two statements made by Biden that he’s probably going to have to walk back in a hurry or the R’s will pounce upon and meme against him, like Obama’s “If you like your healthcare you can keep it” ACA comment:
“It is not inevitable that the Taliban will retake Afghanistan” - July 2021
“I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, which is better trained, better equipped, and more competent in conducting war” - July 8, 2021
Agreed.
The objective was to stabilize the region and force the taliban out. Saying an unstated part of the objective doesn’t exist because it wasn’t spelled out is a poor argument to make.
There is no evidence that the taliban has ever existed beyond religious domination of a region. They do so with brute force. They represent a clear and present danger in their presence in Pakistan because of it’s nuclear arsenal and now we’ve just opened up more territory for them to expand in.
I can’t begin to imagine why you’re defending what is taking place.
Who is doing that? What are you even talking about?
The first of which could have potentially been achieved without trying to recast the country into some sort of exemplar. Heck, we support an Islamic quasitheocratic absolute monarchy for the sake of stability over in Saudi Arabia. So it was not impossible to find a way to make a deal and put in charge someone strong enough to make the deal stick and so what if it is not the Dawn Of Social Liberty for the masses, we’ve done that before. But over 20 whole years we failed to do even that. For whatever reason after tactically defeating the prior Taliban regime, not Bush and Cheney, not Obama, not Trump, none of them had someone show up with a plan that really worked for “what after we leave?”.
The second half of which, though, yes, it probably was achievable to at least leave them reduced to a contained nuisance, if those good plans-for-what-next had been made, but it’s hardly likely we could have make them disappear. Unlike Al-Q who were foreign interlopers we could seek to force out, the Taliban were endemic to the region. You’d just have something similar with a different name to keep containing.
…
I’m sorry Magiver, but what IS what you seem to be arguing? That not only should we stop the withdrawal but we should “surge” all over again and all over again tactically defeat the Taliban, and just plain and simply stick around for however long it takes, until two or three new generations of Afghans grow up being educated with different values?
People in the West were decrying the Taliban regime for years before 9/11: their opression of women, their destruction of historic heritage, their ruining of education, their undoing of modernity, their harboring of radicals. And the West was perfectly happy to just sit there wagging our fingers and passing strongly-worded resolutions until we were directly attacked in our home soil at mass scale. We really need to make up our minds what is it we want to happen and if we’re willing to pay the real price for it happening.
The Economist thinks Biden’s decision callous and something might be possible. Hard to know what.
Really? the argument is that pulling out is destroying 20 years of effort in keeping the Taliban from expanding in the region.
We’re fast approaching a point of no-return, if we’ve not already reached it. The speed of the collapse, the momentum that the Taliban has, is something that isn’t lost on the remaining hold-outs in Kabul. They have gone into capital after capital, intimidating the local forces, freeing up their prisoners from jails, and then taking over the town. The Taliban effectively control the country already; capturing Kabul is just a matter of weeks, if not days, away.
What effort?
You conquered a hostile country, and 20 years later, it’s still a hostile country.
If you don’t understand the difference between Afghanistan a month ago and what it’s turning into then why are you posting?
Is there any serious founded reason to believe, at this point, that Kabul won’t fall?
Um… you do know that the Pakistani government created, financed, armed, and trained the Taliban, and fought alongside them from the beginning?
See the wiki.
It’s exactly the same country now as it was a month ago.