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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

> The war had no clear objectives.

True for the US side, and thus was unwinnable.

Not true for the Afghan side. Their goal was to expel the invaders. Their goal accomplished, the only possible conclusion is they won the war.

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Not at all. It was our choice to withdraw and we did. That's not winning the war, that's our interests aligning.

Again, Afghanistan didn't force the US to withdraw - they survived because we chose to let them. We decided to withdraw not because of fierce Afghanistan resistance, more military personal committed suicide than were killed by enemy action, but instead because we elected a politician who thought the war was a waste of time.

This is not a time to lament with absurd claims like "Afghanistan won the war". Instead, we should be happy that a needless war is coming to an end.

"There is no doubt we have won the war. This is why they are signing a peace treaty." - Chief Taliban negotiator Abbas Stanikzai

Well, they disagree with you.

They disagree with simple reality. As I laid out before, they won no significant battles, killed a relatively small amount of our people (relative to the number of theirs we killed, but also to something like the regular suicide rate). The damage they did, as you alluded to earlier, was almost entirely in the form of making us detonate expensive ordinance on them and pay people to occupy their country for decades. At every moment it was US decision makers deciding what would happen, from deciding that the invasion would start, that the occupation would continue, until the US decided the occupation would cease.

The Taliban may say whatever they like, but that doesn't make it so. It's simply wrong to claim they won or the US lost. It is good that our interests have aligned and the war will stop.

The Taliban quite likely will be back to their goal quite quickly: the ruling power of an islamist state Afghanistan. If that's the "aligned interest" the US fought for, it could have had that a lot cheaper.

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