What are you talking about? I was not attacking a poster. I was suggesting the military may have taken its eye off the ball.
I doubt it. If the other side is going to say “Well, here ya go” and hand over their guns and walk away (or join you) as soon as you show up, you can run that offensive equally well no matter what month it is. There’s no logistics or strategy involved beyond how much gas you need to drive to the next town and watch them surrender as well.
They could have saved themselves the expense of fuel with some Zoom calls. It seemed most cities and villages surrendered faster than the Taliban could drive there.
@iiandyiiii Operation Cyclone 1979 under Reagan ring any bells? Then Al-Qaeda evolved out of the CIA funded mujahedeen militia. They came if I remember correctly, from different areas, Pakistan, Afghanistan and somewhere else. George W Bush’s daddy was the director of the CIA.
Later I think it came it was about an oil or gas pipeline.
Afghanistan kicked Russia’s ass too.
Cite?
It’s bullshit. I work for the Navy as a civilian, and that “stand down” consisted of a single 2-3 hour meeting/discussion and then maybe three 1-hour meetings over the next month.
I think the reality is that from a practical standpoint, the latter pretty much always trumps the former. I think for most people, very few situations justify the invasion and occupation of a foreign country for humanitarian reasons. Even genocides rarely prompt foreign military intervention. For Afghanistan, since the primary reason for the invasion was a response to 9/11, the occupation and subsequent improvement in humanitarian condition for many people was a side effect, not the original reason for being there. It may have become one of the reasons for staying (though I’m sure there were other foreign policy reasons for staying as well, possibly more important), but it doesn’t seem like a strong enough reason to continue to incur the human and financial costs of staying there. Sadly, for many Afgans.
That’s what makes this situation so tragic - that some Afghans have experienced some time away from Taliban rule, and will now have that brutally taken away from them. But that temporary improvement to some Afghan lives came at exceptional cost, and there was no clear path to sustainment. It is like prolonging the life of a some terminal patients using dialysis - if the dialysis cost billions and also the lives of the very doctors treating the patients. It seems like many people were sold a story of a cure when temporary treatment was the only thing actually achievable.
Yes, it will be painful to rip off the bandaid now, but there is no timing that would have been ideal. It’s one of those “the best time to do this was 20 years ago, the next best time is now” sort of things.
At the end of the day, what is the best way to address humanitarian atrocities around the world? I think ultimately very few people have enough conviction about them to believe war and occupation are appropriate responses. Economic sanctions or attempts to improve poorer countries’ standards of living are about as much as most countries can and will do. A grim thought crossed my mind - if Germany hadn’t invaded other countries leading up to World War II, and simply carried out the Holocaust within its own borders, and it somehow became widely publicized across the globe, would any countries have declared war against Germany to stop it? It pains me to think that nobody would have intervened, but I’m not sure who would have led the charge.
Yeah. Tom Hanks starred in a great movie about it, called, “Charlie Wilson’s War”. But what does George H.W. Bush have to do with this. He was the CIA director to Gerald Ford in 1975-1976. He returned back to Texas when Carter was elected in 1976. So no idea what that has to do with your first point.
This was literally a pipe dream. It never going to happen and was not the reason for the invasion of Afghanistan by the US.
True.
None would have. All of the countries that eventually declared war on Germany were extremely reluctant to do so - WWI saw to that.
Modnote: Both of you, stop attacking other posters. Both of these posts are pushing it.
This sure looks like a snide swipe at iiandyiiii.
And this is a snide swipe at Sam.
It is hard to read as you explain it.
This is just a guidance, not a warning. Nothing on your permanent record.
I honestly didn’t mean that to be personal, but if anyone took it that way I apologize.
Part of the problem is that the Afghan people themselves don’t care about women’s rights. Much has been said about the Taliban taking away from the rights of women, but many general Afghans feel the same way. Such as in this article:
It’s one thing if the US was keeping the country stable by ensuring the Taliban weren’t in power, but it’s a much more difficult situation when the citizens themselves have many of the same morals as the Taliban. I’m not sure it really matters all that much if men on the street treat the women this way.
@QuickSilver @iiandyiiii
It was about the poppies and drug the trade somehow … first off. I’m going by memory… Richard Secord had ties in the Vietnam drug trade, arms, and some kind of fraud…
I was told Secord was a senior or high ranking official in Vietnam.
(A friend of mine was a war correspondent in Vietnam Nam [journalism].
I was at his house in Mexico in 2000-2004. We drinking beer, talking politics and Viet Nam. We were still drinking when the sun rose.)
He wrote several books that were published, he quit writing he became blind.
I found an article that can explain so much better than I can.
Since the Roman days it’s been known that one of the best ways to set up a tin-pot regime that’s entirely dependent on a distant empire is to install a government that doesn’t align with local power structures and doesn’t have regional allies outside of your imperial stooges. What happens is that the utter lack of legitimacy forces the regime you install to stay dependent on you, and only ever has just barely enough power to keep the power structures that existed prior to imperial control and/or exist outside of imperial control from threatening their position. Then a vicious cycle continues where the regime you prop up gets steadily more dependent on you as it keeps using you to bail it out of its many crises, it’s legitimacy declines more and more and it becomes more and more insular.
The US set up exactly that in Afghanistan and then acted surprised that the regime we set up was dependent on a distant empire.
Remember, after 911, tht all the conspiracy theory types said the only reason we were in Afghanistan was to build a pipeline for Big Oil?
Wonder when that’s going to get done? “Two weeks”? And, do they still believe that?
Haven’t read the whole thread, so maybe this has been addressed, but I’m curious what Pete Buttigieg has to say about all this. He served there, and before that worked for an international corporation that did business there, something he barely glossed over in his autobiography and hasn’t discussed much elsewhere, possibly because that information itself was classified.
And Richard Engel from NBC News should get the Pulitzer for sticking around and reporting directly from Kabul.
I’ve heard that untapped veins of rare earth metals, useful in the computer industry, exist in Afghanistan, and that’s part of the reason “we” have had an interest there.
The ones I’ve heard most references to are lithium and vanadium.
@Just_Asking_Questions here’s your answer. Note the Iranian connection.
The pipeline was agreed between Iran and the Soviet Union in 1965.[1] It was inaugurated in October 1970 in Astara by Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi and Nikolai Podgorny, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.[2] In 1971–1979, Southern Caucasus republics of the Soviet Union were supplied through this pipeline by natural gas from Iran.[3] After Iranian Revolution Iranian supplies were cut off.[4]
In 2006, Azerbaijan began a swap deal with Iran, providing gas through the Baku-Astara line to Iran; while Iran supplies Nakhchivan. On 11 November 2009, the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) and National Iranian Gas Company signed a memorandum according to which Azerbaijani will supply starting from 2010 500 million cubic meters of natural gas per year.[5]
Nice cut-n-paste. And by nice, I mean useless.
How, and why, were we invading Afghanistan in 2002, using 911 as an excuse, to build a pipeline that was already built in 1971? Think, McFly!
Polls showed over and over that Taliban values are unpopular in Afghanistan.
The Taliban are international drug lords. Saying that people in Afghanistan want the Taliban – in post after post showing no polling evidence – is similar to saying that people in high-crime U.S. neighborhoods favor the moral system of drug lords.
Why isn’t this happening in Iraq? It has nothing to do with a difference in public opinion concerning whether women should be locked in the house. Instead, the answer is: Production of drugs illegal in export markets is a much smaller portion of Iraq’s economy. So the government military there can out-pay rebels.
When the U.S. war against drugs failed, we failed Afghanistan. Whether it was a moral failure is a matter of verbiage.