Geopolitics and 9/11 vengeance aside, have we failed our own sense of freedom and democracy?
We are walking away from a 20 year war, leaving the Afghani’s to the Taliban. The Taliban that stands against everything we as Americans, left or right, hold dear.
What is your solution? The US could not defeat the Taliban. They already fought against them for most of a generation.
The US failed, by taking on impossible tasks and putting their (few) supporters in Afghanistan in dangers. I worry about all those soon-to-be-dead interpreters.
I don’t know about; aside from the particulary version of the Judeo-Christian god they worship and some of their dietary habits, they’d fight right in with what has become of the Tea Party: anti-vaccination, against modern science, for extreme misogyny and repressing women, loudly screaming about how everyone is repressing their culture while actively repressing everyone else and occasionally lynching/beheading them. Really, these guys are one moderately-clean bedsheet away from being accepted into the Ku Klux Klan.
Occupying Afghanistan, of course, had nothing whatsoever to do with “freedom and democracy”, and even little enough to do with national security. The idea that we are somehow obligated to continue such occupation indefinitely on such ostensible principles is, as George Carlin would say, like fucking for virginity.
Stranger
We set out with a goal in mind. It morphed into a regional conflict through lies and deceit, and we allowed ourselves to be sucked into the morass that has destroyed other world powers before us. Billions of dollars later, we finally woke up to the fact that we were being had as a cash cow yet again and now we are abandoning a ship that was never meant to float. In that part of the world, throwing down your weapons and running away in the face of a determined enemy is a time-honored activity. It’s now clear that all of the training and equipment dumped into that money pit was in vain. Biden has done the right thing by extracting us from an unending and unwinnable situation.
We failed them, but they are governed by corrupt folks who view governing as a way to make money.
Their army can’t fight despite twenty years of our training and weapons.
We could defeat the taliban, but we would have to kill many, many people.
The downside of leaving Afghanistan is that many people will be killed, and with governing comes an income, and they can finance screwing with other countries as well as theri own.
Answer: Yes.
What to do about it, other than a generous immigration policy, beats me. EDITED: I’d also send whomever is in charge there millions of vaccine doses. Much better idea than decision to allow Americans a third dose without their doctor’s prescription!
The Trump administration, as I understand it, made an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw our forces by May 1, 2021. The elected Afghan government was not part of that agreement. It is hard not to see that negotiation as a moral failure, whatever came afterwards.
Billions of words have been spilled on the internet about the moral failure in the justification for the Iraq invasion. But in human terms, this failure is probably the worst.
You do mean “Have we morally failed Afghanistan again?”
'Cause using generations of Afghans as pawns in our cold and hot war games is one of our bad habits.
Did we use Afghanistan as a staking goat?
Oh, I guess we did. Our bad.
Stranger
There were problems even before that, as seen in Operation Cyclone and others.
This was inevitable.
There is no Afghanistan.
The people there think of themselves in terms of Tribes, of Clans, of Religion.
But not as a Nation. Not as Afghans.
And, as usual, the people we elect cannot grasp non-Western societies.
So, our assumptions fail, the plans we base them on fail, & the War fails.
Oh yeah, we failed Afghanistan. There’s the old saying… if you’re going to shoot the elephant, don’t miss. We missed.
We went in with the old bullshit neoliberal idea that if we get rid of the baddies and set up a democratic government, then the flower of liberal democracy will take root and bloom in the rubble.
We didn’t get rid of the baddies. And liberal democracy needs all sorts of other precursors that we failed to set up. The result was entirely predictable.
Things might have gone differently if the US, instead of pursuing a farce of democracy, simply set up an illiberal client state and closely directed the development of institutions that might have eventually had a shot at becoming a democracy. No guarantee that this would have worked, but it would have been better than our stupid habit of recreating the American Revolution in every strife-torn country that poses some sort of inconvenience for us.
For the US military in Asia, yes.
If that characterization is appropriate for anyone at all, it’s us.
The failure goes all the way back to 2001, when Bush and Co advertised that a war could be fought and won with no significant sacrifice for most Americans. If we had mobilized the entire country, plus NATO, just like WWII, we could have occupied and transformed both Afghanistan and Iraq by now. Or at least real long term success could have been a possibility, rather than no chance.
Not sure if it would have been worth it, but the lesson I’ve taken from both wars is that every war should be “total war”, or else shouldn’t be fought at all. Which, hopefully, would mean war would be very rare, since total war is so costly.
I don’t think that is in any way an accurate characterization of America’s military actions in these conflicts.
Every failure was a result of unrealistic objectives, bad foreign policy and failed diplomacy. I don’t know of any instance in which cowardice or reluctance to fight on behalf of the troops was a contributing factor. What the Afghani standing army is doing in the face of Taliban is quantifiably different. One can argue that it isn’t cowardice but rather treason/complicity - not wishing to kill those they ostensibly agree with - that is compelling them to lay down their arms. But you cannot characterize the US military as having failed in the face of the enemy.
There is ample evidence that military occupation of Afghanistan is costly and futile. Had we instead, 20 years ago, subsidized 100 Walmart Super Stores throughout the country we would, by now, have made significant social and political progress.
It is no less fair than how you and others would seek to characterize the actions of Afghans making life or death decisions under circumstances that we all have not and (hopefully) never will face.
Every failure was a result of unrealistic objectives, bad foreign policy and failed diplomacy.
Okay.
I don’t know of any instance in which cowardice or reluctance to fight on behalf of the troops was a contributing factor.
Okay.
What the Afghani standing army is doing in the face of Taliban is quantifiably different.
Okay
One can argue that it isn’t cowardice but rather treason/complicity - not wishing to kill those they ostensibly agree with - that is compelling them to lay down their arms.
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Nope. Not gonna cede that. How about just rational self-interest? Why does rational self-interest all of the sudden get discounted in circumstances like this? Honestly, at an individual level, it might even be downright humanitarian to just stop fighting, particularly if one considers that local conditions in disparate areas may have little or nothing to do with who holds power in Kabul, and the only question in the minds of people under such conditions are whether or not it’s worth dying to end up with the same local warlord or chieftain in command of that particular valley.
That’s just one alternative possibility. I would encourage you and others to exercise a little more imagination, empathy, and maybe even compassion to consider whether there might be yet more alternatives that don’t amount to treason/complicity or cowardice. And then consider that whatever you or I might come up with as possible explanations, it we cannot possibly know what is actually going through the minds of people directly confronted with this unfolding tragedy.
But you cannot characterize the US military as having failed in the face of the enemy.
Can’t I?
Was there not an enemy in Afghanistan? Did that enemy not manage to hold out until the US was sufficiently exhausted with the situation as to abandon the entire country? Did the US military not fail to effectively transition from combat operations, to stability operations, to peace?
Anyway, I quite honestly don’t understand what makes self-preservative action “in the face of the enemy” somehow more reprehensible/blameworthy than actions taken with calculation from perfect safety.
It’s easy to say “Gosh, look at all those guys who don’t want to die. What a bunch of cowards/traitors/co-conspirators/take-your-pick!” on the one hand and, “Hey, we only invaded their country. We don’t owe them anything. So let’s all go home, have a nice steak dinner, and talk about how backward and cowardly those Afghanis are.”
We chose to be in Afghanistan, and we chose to leave it as we did. They were born there and for the most part do not have that option to put distance between themselves and the threat.
The original moral failure was going in in the first place. Live by the moral failure, die by the moral failure.
They did not fail in most of these respects. “Peace” is a matter for diplomacy and politics, not military. I don’t believe it was ever part of the military mission in Afghanistan to change hearts and minds. Which isn’t to say they didn’t try. Just that it was a fool’s errand.
As mentioned by others in this thread, most Afghanis don’t look at Taliban as the enemy. Certainly not an enemy worth killing and dying for. To that extent, self-preservation is a no-brainer. Life under the Taliban is not a disinsentive to the majority of the Afghani US-trained army. It was naive of politicians and diplomats to think hearts and minds would be changed by Western presence and influence. I doubt very much most thinking Western military personnel labored under such delusion.
IMHO we have not morally failed Afghanistan. The Taliban isn’t a bunch of heavily armed outsiders invading a peace loving people who lack the capacity to defend themselves without the US military being present. They ARE Afghanistan, like it or not.
The worst fighting was over. All we had to do was maintain a stabilizing force. Let the Afghan army do most of the work. Air support was a big deterrent.
The strategy was working when we kept enough troops in the region. It wasn’t that much different from the forces we have in Germany and Korea.
Things started going bad when troop levels were cut. We couldn’t stabilize the entire region. We allowed the Taliban to seize terrority. Every cut in troop levels made it worse. Trump reduced levels to a dangerous point. The Taliban could have overrun our bases.
Everyone knew it would take several generations to make a lasting change. Make sure the young girls could attend school and employment. The attitudes of the men would gradually change. It’s a slow process that would have taken at least another 30 years. (2 more generations).
We’ve betrayed the young people. The girls are being rounded up and forced into marriage. Young men that don’t embrace hard-line Islam will be killed. All the social advances made are being wiped out.
Our impatience and expectations for immediate results will drastically endanger the US. The training camps and support for terrorism will flourish in Afghanistan.