What are we doing in Afghanistan and Iraq? Shouldn’t we save ourselves huge amounts of money and bring the troops home? I think we’re just propping up the usual collection of Middle East scumbags (in Afghanistan, especially) and we should stop pouring good US dollars into Middle Eastern treasuries where they’ll disappear. There’s no advantage to staying in the Middle East any longer.
Not sure how this is different from the other thread we have going. I can pretty much agree with the OP, though. At least in Iraq, we’re not involved much in active combat missions, so maybe not as big a deal.
Just note that Afghanistan isn’t really the Middle East.
I agree, we’ve got bin Laden, so it’s time to end the Afghanistan war.
But the Iraq War has been over for almost a year now.
I don’t think that’s the gauge. We had ObL pretty much neutralized for a long time now. The key thing we wanted to do in Afghanistan was make sure it couldn’t become a failed state and a haven for al Qaeda once again.
But frankly, I don’t think we’re going to be able to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a failed state. Not unless we keep a lot of troops there pretty much forever. Still, we can take out any training camps AQ sets up there without having our military practically running the place. At this point, I worry more about Yemen than I do Afghanistan. Hell, I worry more about Pakistan (as should Europe, esp Britain), and we ain’t gonna invade that country.
Which is why I think we need to end it. We accomplished a major victory there (taking out OBL) and now it’s time to hand the reins over to the Afghani people. We should keep a presence in the country (like we have in Iraq), but combat needs to end.
Yea, we’ve been there ten years. Its pretty hard to see what a second decade will accomplish that the first didn’t. I don’t have any problem keeping troops there for targeted strikes against terrorists or continuing air support for the Afghan gov’t troops, but it seems as good a time as any to pull the bulk of combat troops out.
IIRC, the latest increase in troops was supposed to end in July of this year. I suspect it won’t be renewed but will instead lead to the beginning of our withdrawal.
But here’s the thing: I believe that Afghanistan will go rapidly downhill when we leave, and we have to be willing to accept that. It may very well look like we "lost’ that war, but that’s OK with me. Afghanistan has never been governable, and we’re not going to change that. We’ve significantly weekend AQ, and kicked them out of Afghanistan. They would be pretty stupid to try and set up camp there again. Besides, they have better places to play around in now, like Yemen. Let’s just hope we don’t hand them another failed state in Libya.
I dunno. The central gov’t has an army with ten years worth of US training. With a couple billion dollars a year of walking around money from the US plus air support, I imagine they’ll be able to hold together the more peaceful parts of the country. The Taliban and warlords and the like will control the more restive parts, but then that seems to be the case now.
According to NPR, the Taliban has something like 40,000 men, many of whom are jyhadists from other countries who came to fight the US. In a country of 30 million, its pretty hard to believe thats enough to take the place over, especially since some of those jyhadists will hopefully loose interest once the US leaves.
I don’t think it will revert back to what it was before we got there, anyways. At least not quickly.
Like I said in the other thread on this same subject, I agree we should bring the troops home. I don’t believe that we WILL, however, at least not right away. The reasons are political…Afghanistan is not stable and there has been no serious progress on some sort of peace with the Taliban. Until one of those things happens, I don’t see the US being able to, politically, cut and run. Especially since I agree with John Mace…if we bolt I see the whole place going up in civil war, which would be a political black eye to Obama if he ordered it.
What we need to do is, to paraphrase from Avatar, ‘force their cooperation or hammer them hard if they won’t’. 
Naw, just kidding…but we seriously need to have the Taliban willing to seriously come to the negotiations table. If they don’t, and if things stay the way they are, I don’t see us realistically leaving. I could be wrong, and personally I wouldn’t have any major problem with the US pulling out and letting the whole place sink back into the same kind of civil war they had in the post invasion era, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
As for Iraq, as has been pointed out, we’ve pretty much been out of there for a year. Obama withdrew the majority of US combat troops from that country already. He was able to do so because the country was relatively stable after the surge, and it allowed the US to pull out without any major political repercussions. If Iraq goes tits up now or in the future it won’t come down on Obama.
-XT
I don’ think the Taliban is necessarily going to take over. But the central government is not well regarded (and that’s an understatement), and there could be any number of factions that want to fight for local control.
I’d like to see some kind of metric of what we’ve accomplished in the last, say, 5 years. I could be wrong, but I don’t see any improvement at all from what I read in the papers.
I’ve been opposed to the level of involvement we’ve had in Afghanistan for a very long time. I’m a die hard member of the realist school of international relations and there is absolutely no national interest in our continued presence in Afghanistan.
When it came to Iraq, I did feel it was in our national interest to remove Saddam Hussein from power. When it came to Afghanistan I did feel it was in our interest to attack al-Qaeda there and remove it as a safe haven for them. However in Afghanistan I did not see a really good reason to rebuild the place. For one, the “you break it, you fix it” rule doesn’t apply in Afghanistan. Afghanistan has been broken since time immemorial. I think it was the Persian Empire that first marched north and basically massacred the people living in Afghanistan because that region was home to countless brigand/marauder people whose only goal in life seemed to be raiding trade routes and cities of more civilized folk. Basically Afghanistan has always been a bad, unruly place. The only people who have really successful subjugated it have been the ones who haven’t tried to govern it internally, and the ones like the Persians who just go up there and tear the whole region a new asshole so they fuck off for a few generations.
It’s not in our national interest to try and make Afghanistan a modern state. In Iraq, it was debatable. My personal moral convictions said that we took a stable (yet repressive) country and turned it into anarchy, we had a moral obligation to help Iraq recover from what we had done to it. At the same time, I did not feel certain it was in our national interest to help rebuild Iraq. What finally convinced me that it was in our national interest is just the blow I think it would have done to American prestige and relationships with other powers if we had just left Iraq as a smoking ruin in 2003 and never looked back. Additionally I think it would have made Iraq even more violent then it actually became during the insurrection/civil war, and lead to it destabilizing the rest of the Middle East. So in Iraq ultimately, whether you think going in to topple Saddam was moral or immoral, or whether you think it was to our benefit, I do think it was a moral imperative to fix what we had broken and in our national interest not to just leave it a smoking ruin (most people back when Iraq was the hot button issue were still obsessed with the decision to invade c. 2007, I always say that once something has happened it’s time to decide on the next step, not continue debating a step already taken.)
Saddam provided a service to the world. Iraq was a stable government. We would have better off leaving him alone. He was no threat to America.They were a sovereign country . Their government was their business.
Afghanistan is a big country that is beyond our power to modernize. They are a country of warlords and fiefdoms. The national government is corrupt and the people are disgusted with it. Paying off bureaucrats gets old and depressing. Again it is their business.
Like Egypt showed, when the people get sick of their government, even in a repressed state, they can do something about it. They do not require American nation building, nor should they be subservient to our corporations.
If that is true, it was doubly true for Rhodesia.
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Except as seen in Iran they are often liable to be taken over by fanatics from the eighth century. If nothing’s wrong with Hussein why not Mubarak (he wasn’t militarily aggressive) or the Shah?
We didn’t invade Rhodesia.
Iran was taken over by fanatics from the eighth century mostly because we toppled its democratically elected government and reinstalled a puppet Shah. The people we got rid of were fairly nice, as such things go. They just had a nasty habit of nationalizing their own oil industry, and we couldn’t have that.
My feeling is that historically, there is just not much to be gained from messing around in Afghanistan. the place is not much good for anything but growing opium poppies, apparently, and corruption is endemic to their society. Keep some air bases so we can fly drones around and blow shit up on behalf of the Afghan government so long as it remains … hell, I dunno, SOMETHING resembling a government … it’s not much even with our troops there, with the corrupt government in place. But get our troops out, why spend the money, let the Afghans figure out whether or not they want to be heroin bandits while the rest of the world passes them by.
As for Iraq, they are about as useless as Afghanistan. Leave 'em and let them keep playing their little games until the oil money runs out. They’ll keep playing their games after that, but no one else will care.