lol, right.
Wait, don’t this godless former commies put odorants in their gas? Figures!
No conspiracy theory. Direct engergy extraction
(DLE) and Direct energy mining.
What is that you ask? Green technology and jobs.
Eldorado Arkansas open Standard Mining last year. My spidy sense tells me we’ll be busy. —
a technology that extracts lithium ions from tail brine that is a by-product of existing bromine production facilities run by LANXESS in south Arkansas.
An emerging geothermal technology the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is researching is direct lithium extraction (DLE), which extracts lithium from underground brine. DLE could be a game-changing extraction method, potentially delivering 10 times the current U.S. lithium demand from California’s Salton Sea known geothermal area alone.
Average lithium supply from underneath this salt lake is estimated at more than 24,000 metric tons annually, according to a 2021 NREL report, “Techno-Economic Analysis of Lithium Extraction from Geothermal Brines,” authored by Ian Warren, senior geoscientist at NREL.
Moderating:
None of this has anything to do with the subject of this thread, which is whether we morally failed Afghanistan.
Please drop the thread derailment. If you want to carry on your discussion about geothermal lithium extraction, please do it in a thread dedicated to this topic.
No warning, just a note.
Well speculating here. The new technology methods could be sold to make extraction and processing lithium to other countries. Afghanistan, and Australia. Canada has their company NRG so it’s entirely possible the US, Canada and others will benefit from this.
Moderating:
This is a formal Warning for failing to comply with the moderator instructions posted directly before this post. I reiterate: Drop the thread hijack, or you will be banned from participating in this thread.
Ok… will do. My apologies.
Thanks.
I kind of wonder if part of our problem was that we tried to reform Afghanistan into a somewhat Western nation in terms of governance, institutions, etc… and in particular, tried to build up a Western-style military.
Instead, maybe we should have just concentrated on making whoever we installed as the “ruler” of Afghanistan the best shady, corrupt and janky warlord he could be, and making his fighters the best Afghan style fighters we could. Like marksmanship training and concepts, armorer training, better ammo, weaponry, etc…
At worst we might have ended up with some sort of local strongman with control around Kabul that would be unchallenged.
At worst we might have created a competent enemy who, while not able to “take over” the US, might have been able to cause a lot of trouble.
After all, we supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and that’s how we got Osama bin Laden.
We used to do that sort of thing. But that requires the local strongman be, y’know, strong (and none of the former Mujahideen groups was strong enough to really take on the Taliban w/o intervention, the first time around). Plus as Just_Asking_Questions put it, you always run the risk of later needing to dispose of him.
Our first moral failure was to ourselves. As is too common we fooled ourselves to think this time, it will be different, and we let ourselves and others infer promises of things that we could not guarantee.
I believe those responsible had realized years ago that all the signs pointed to: “there’s no way to really get out completely without the whole thing falling apart”, but no one had the guts to say, “then that is it, isn’t it, better begin the planning for the alternatives, Operation We’re Out But Not Really, and Operation Whole Thing Falls Apart, then.”
I will say that, having been in the Navy for 14 out of the last 20 years, having known many people who served in Afghanistan in various roles, at various times, and at various levels, and having had similar *experiences in Iraq, part of what made it difficult for me to sift through what was a solid hot take versus what was just smoke and bluster (in assessing the capability of local forces) was the problem that a lot of members of the US military are just straight up racist/bigoted a-holes. So it’s hard to tell if someone’s assessment that the situation as “hopeless” is because it really is hopeless, or if it’s because they’re the kind of person who goes around shit-talking and referring to the people they are supposed to be advising/training/mentoring by racial slurs, perhaps even to their face.
There’s a lot of nuance, and it can be difficult to distinguish the very well practiced “I’m not a racist, but…” types from even the most thoughtful/well-considered “It’s a tragedy what is happening here, but we’re only making the situation worse…” folks.
*I mean experiences where I was in a position to observe and assess the performance of members of the Iraqi military in my role as an adviser, and then having a chance to hear how other people, likewise serving in an advisory role, put their own, perhaps less nuanced spin, in relating their impressions of the same event. Sometimes overly rosy. Sometimes just straight up racist.
It takes years to create a friend but only minutes to create a life-long enemy.
Even a ratio of 15% racist/bigoted soldiers would poison any relationship with occupied brown muslim people, regardless of how much money you throw in the air. Especially after 9/11.
In addition, despite inferior tech and no airforce, Taliban and AQ have a much, MUCH higher tolerance for risk and death within their ranks. Suicide missions in particular are loathsome to us but fine for people with 100% certainty of going to heaven.
I keep remembering all those ceremonies when a new class of cops or military were getting officially recognized and one suicide bomber takes out dozens of people that it took years to train.
There are few things that could have made this mission a success:
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A legendary man. Like a Mandela or an Ataturk. There was (maybe?) Massoud but he was killed. AQ or Taliban pretended to be a western camera crew and one was a suicide bomber. The mission required people willing to die immediately after killing Massoud.* Faith is powerful and not to be underestimated in war.
-
Jesus or Satan in charge of our military. Without a reputable and strong president who truly fights corruption without getting killed, and is truly trying to wean his people off US military airforce/intel/special forces…the only way you win this is either sacrifice U.S lives with abandon without crushing morale (Hi Jesus!) or rigging the elections to elect a really good president (without their knowledge because otherwise what kind of integrity do they have?).
*The same basic strategy was used on the US intel community to devastating effect
We failed miserably.
Just like we did with Iran, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
Without disregarding your excellent point about racism affecting such assessments, it seems reasonable to add: assessments made and presented to a President in order to help determine that President’s policy choices, are inevitably going to be distorted by the imperative to ‘not be the bearer of bad news.’
In other words, 2021 Pentagon/State Department presentations to Biden may have included:
*the Taliban is A% likely to overturn the Afghan-national forces we trained and equipped in ten years, AND
*the Taliban is B% likely to overturn the Afghan-national forces we trained and equipped in ten months, AND
*the Taliban is C% likely to overturn the Afghan-national forces we trained and equipped in ten weeks…
… but NOT
*the Taliban is D% likely to overturn the Afghan-national forces we trained and equipped in ten DAYS.
And this failure to present the D scenario follows from the fact that anyone who tells a President this is likely to get the response “YOU MEAN TO TELL ME WE SPENT 20 YEARS AND THE LIVES OF AMERICAN TROOPS AND TWO TRILLION DOLLARS IN ORDER TO SEE THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT FALL IN TEN DAYS?!?!?!?” and then “I WANT YOUR RESIGNATION ON MY DESK BY TOMORROW MORNING.”
So no one mentions possibility D.
It’s a serious problem with the military and State Department culture that is analogous to the problem with NASA culture that resulted in the destruction of space-shuttle Challenger.
And a similar level of effort to change that culture appears to be needed now, for both the Pentagon and the State Department.
I posted this in another thread, but Afghanistan was off topic for that thread so I’ll repost it here:
I don’t think we can, yet, analyze how well the withdrawal was executed. In my understanding, not a single American service person or civilian has been killed during the withdrawal. Surely that’s one of the chief concerns of a military withdrawal, if not the only one. There’s been chaos and such, and surely lots of Afghan people are suffering, but it seems like that was inevitable no matter how the withdrawal was done (and there were lots of Afghans suffering before and during this war/occupation too). So far, ISTM, the worst thing that’s happened large-scale is some chaos at and near the airport. I’m not sure how this possibly could have been avoided. We’ll see – I’m sure there will be tons of investigations into what actually happened.
…I mean, the title of the thread is “have we morally failed Afghanistan.”
I don’t really think that “not a single American service person or civilian has been killed during the withdrawal” is really relevant to the topic at hand.
The worst thing that happened wasn’t some large-scale chaos at and near the airport. It’s that the people of Afghanistan have been blind-sided by the withdrawal, the government replaced by a group of religious zealots, and the entire fabric of society has essentially shifted overnight.
I think what you said is off-topic to this thread as well. I think it’s great that the most powerful military in the world managed to get out of a country without losing any lives. But…you are the most powerful military in the world. And when you are shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without telling the base commander then getting out without losing a single American service person or civilian was probably the objective, and the objective was achieved. This says nothing about morality.
I didn’t know that. It leaves me appalled.
You treat your allies with such complete and utter contempt and arrogance… and then wonder why they give up on you?
You run away like that in the night with your tail between your legs… and then expect people to respect or trust you?
What makes it worse is that this obviously came from a very senior level. It wasn’t junior officers giving the order to vacate Bagram like that.
“In one night, they lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area.”
Parents of the most powerful military in the world love their children too. To say nothing of the husbands, wives, brothers & sisters, children… etc.
This was not a necessary war. Arguably it has never been necessary. It was always going to end. Everybody knew it was going to end, including the people of Afghanistan. They rode the gravy train until it ran out of cash and until their own government jumped from the moving train as it approached the station. It is a surprise to no one about who was waiting at the station to welcome everybody home.