Afghanistan Meant Nothing: A Veteran Reflects on 20 Wasted Years
laurajedeed.medium.com
laurajedeed.medium.com
All for the sake of lining the pockets of some billionaires, companies and politicians. Politicians who stays there for 40 years and tell us they’re fighting for us and this time will be different.
What that is going to mean for the rest of the world, I don't know. Vacuum of power never lasted too long, and will last even shorter with 8 billion people competing for resources, water and arable land.
I think we will see more conflict in the future, but with fewer American dead. Perhaps the U.S. will end up where Germany and Sweden currently are: an ostensibly peace-loving nation that just really likes to sell hi-tech weapons, ehm.
Vacuum of power in the seas means severe commerce disruption, which means isolation and autocracy for many countries. And war. The US is big in terms of land, water, and people. Not so much many other countries, including European ones.
I wonder if the Germans ever came to terms with their WWII shame? Hard to tell. From my encounters with them, it always seems like a burden carried in perpetuity, generation to generation. Who knows.
When I visited Denmark and talked to Danish people, I was surprised how much the Danish and the Czech perspective on German politics overlaps.
The German right: "We are a superior nation due to our precision, organization, engineering and business skills. Everyone should, naturally, emulate us, or fall behind."
The German left: "Morality is the measure of all things and there are no compromises possible. Everyone should follow us to salvation, because we have been through hell and, as a consequence, we know best."
Sorry for having offended anyone :) The common thread seems to be the conviction that Germany is a Vorreiter (leader) of Europe, which, frankly, it isn't anymore. Europe has weaker and stronger countries, but no clear leaders.
"Your son died so we could steal your money, but you must pitch in and share the burden of the consequences of the war we started in Afghanistan."
No I'm sorry, Americans are among the victims of these maniacs. It's not "Americans" who are collectively responsible for these atrocities, it is the profiteers themselves. And I don't intend to lessen the suffering of the Afghani (or Libyans, Syrians, Iraqi, etc).
You just watch, in the coming months, years, these same shysters will solemnly come to you, cap in hand, telling you how you have to pony up more money, or send your children to more conflicts, or learn to live with more terrorist attacks in your country -- because you are somehow responsible for their war.
The system they have set up to protect themselves from the people does not allow them to be prosecuted. Anybody who tries would be attacked, bullied, censored, deplatformed, branded a conspiracy theorist or Russian traitor or communist, the "experts" would all be wheeled out to "debunk" them, etc.
I too would like to see stronger anti war sentiment and protests, but the system has become so much stronger and more resilient against those since Vietnam.
I'm seriously curious about what made this work out so well, compared to Afghanistan or Vietnam.
Is it because there was no big difference in religion? Because there was more mutual respect? Because there was a common enemy in the East? Or because the US _really_ made a giant effort to rebuild the German economy (The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan is still remembered fondly by especially older Germans and to this day is a core reason for friendly sentiment towards the US despite the anti-foreign sentiment into the other direction lately)
Like, maybe I'm dumb, but the US went into Afghanistan and theoretically gave "them" weapons and training to defend themselves, but apparently the big majority was either not interested or too scared to defend the country against the Taliban. I'm stumped on the big difference.
Afghanistan was pretty much always a poorly governed country rife with corruption. The US went in to stop it being taken over by something even worse. Stopping the Taliban didn't do anything about a corrupt government that does a poor job of governing. It would either eventually end up a dictatorship from someone within the government seizing permanent power, or someone would topple the government because the government is too corrupt and ineffective to organize a good defense.
Really all the US could hope for as long as that government remained in control was to delay the Taliban long enough for it to be someone else who toppled the government and then hope that the new government was sufficiently more competent to handle holding off the Taliban.
To really address the Afghanistan problem probably requires someone to go in, smash the Taliban and kick out the current government (as of last night--haven't seen the news today so am not if they are still current), then oversee something like a constitutional convention for all Afghanis to develop a new more democratic government with sufficient safeguards to keep the corruption down somewhat.
That's hard to do while trying to stay on the right side of the line between empire building and truly helping a people develop a good stable non-corrupt independent representative government.
Someone who was on the ground there should know better than to confuse the Taliban with irreligious tribal warlords. The Taliban completely banned the old Afghan practice of "bucha bazi" or pedophilia. They hang pedophiles, they do not "do things to little boys". Of course, things may have happened in the fog of war, but the official Taliban policy - and they do have a policy - they are organized and disciplined, as the author admitted - is to punish pedophilia.
> We called them Hajjis and worse and they were better than we were, braver and stronger and smarter.
That is why they won. They are a strong and proud and incredibly resilient people that represent the Afghan majority and deserve to have sovereignty over their own country.
It comes at the cost of stoning women, tagging minorities(if they even exist) and taking the country back to medieval age.
And having a rulebook and following it are two different things.
Few understand that the Taliban while mostly all the things we associate with a terror group, it was also a successful political party that began taking power through democratic elections, this was actually in the Clinton years (Taliban founded in 1994). Since then the military wanted to intervene, but Clinton ignored it because the embarrassing failure in Mogadishu (the Black Hawk Down incident in 1993) and reluctance to suffer another failed military campaign in his first term.
When Bush took office he was surprisingly intent on use of force in Afghanistan against the Taliban, but it was politically and legally non-viable…then 9/11 happened and the administration had the pretext it needed, it just had to move quick before anyone could question the relationship between Taliban and 9/11. But in either case the US intelligence was always ready and willing to say that OBL was operating remotely from the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan as a legal justification to use armed force in Afghanistan against a non state actor because the state was failing to bring him to justice.
Whether you are for or against the US spreading democracy around the world and their willingness to use armed force to achieve its ends…Afghanistan was not about spreading democracy, rather Afghanistan was about the US not approving of a particular democratically elected party.
Of course there is a much deeper history of US funding/training of groups to fight soviets in the 70’s in Afghanistan and these groups ultimately lead to the foundation of Taliban, but for the most part it has little to do with the US use of military force in Afghanistan post 9/11.
I believe pretty much everyone stopped buying that by the time this happened: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...
Let's also not forget that Saudi Arabia was never bombed or invaded in retaliation.
Honestly, this should be enough to soft-ban anyone who was in the US Congress in the last 20 years from running again. It is quite hard to describe the scale of this disaster without seeming wild-eyed.
Wanna blame someone? Look around. HN is chock full of exactly the kind of people who cause this outcome (albeit many of them are too young to bear any responsibility). Upper middle class types, the kind of people who vote, write the occasional blog, people who's voices are heard politically and who generally will not tolerate violence without some pretext of necessity. They're why we got stuck in Afghanistan. Lower class voters would have mostly been fine with "bomb them back to the stone age and go home". We had to spend 20yr pretending we were actually going to fix things so that educated voters could feel good about themselves. It's like the nation state equivalent of not wanting to sell a project car you'll inevitably never get around to and then finally selling it because you're moving and the prospect of incurring a bunch of cost hanging onto it finally forces you to deal with reality.
But nobody knew what they wanted Afghanistan to be and allowed themselves to be engaged in a war of attrition.
We did have a goal. The building of the nation of Afghanistan into a functioning liberal democracy. Of course Afghanistan barely qualifies as a nation and many (most?) have no desire to live in anything resembling a Western nation-state. Short of a truly brutal, imperialist takeover or the installing of a strongman puppet to do the dirty work for the next 50 years, there's no real chance of transitioning the peoples and their cultures over to our way of things. Americans likely have no stomach for such things, and the state of realpolitik is such that this would be truly untenable on the world stage.
Come on. You can't build a functioning liberal democracy in a place like that while doing zilch to promote even the basics of civil society and liberal norms. (And no, elections and ballot boxes are quite irrelevant; they're simply a red herring. Electoral processes have zero legitimacy to begin with in a non-liberal society.) The whole idea is quite simply preposterous.
Invade a country, throw bombs, and try to control the population, all you get is a bigger mess than they were in to begin with. All these countries have nothing to do in there, they aren't welcome and only trigger more hate towards the west at large.
Congress approved a lengthy occupation costing over 2 trillion dollars on tax payers money, all to feed an industry that murders and benefits a small number of crooks.
Democracy at its best.
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/04/973604904/trumps-deal-to-end-...
Entirely predictable and I wanted to say that the Taliban misogyny is bit unfair. Offer free quality education for their sons and daughters and you'll see real change, I promise you.
Not like this https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58219114
But this, and hindsight, aside, is there another take on this? That there was a hope in the US political circles that, although the war perhaps should not have been started, or that post 9/11 there was no choice but to start one, but once it was going there was a hope for a better, new Afghanistan? That yea, it’s a slog, many will die and much money will be spent, but the end looks better than the start?
Maybe I’m naive but I’d like to think it was naive idealism that propelled the war (maybe not started) rather than outright cynical Machiavellism.
From today’s perspective, clearly we know the war was an expensive failure. But hindsight is everything. And the lucid impressions of a soldier on the ground may not be a complete picture.
There was a decent (but one I still disagree with) argument made once for bringing back the draft, as a way to make the actual bloody practical cost of perpetual war felt by the average person, perhaps in the hopes that they would become less frequent. Slavery is slavery though and it's only a thought experiment.
Say no to war, and say it loudly. Don't work for or with people who support or supply wars.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
The aftermath is where the popularity dwindled. Wars are easy, occupations are hard. And after dismantling the Afghanistan Taliban regime we thought we could be rebuild a better Afghanistan built on western standards. This was never going to happen.
Iraq was also popular. 80% of Republicans supported the incursion wholeheartedly. Slightly over 50% of Democrats supported the incursion, if WMDs could be found. Once Americans realized WMDs weren't going to be found support for the war in Iraq dropped stupendously. But support for the occupation was relatively high (for a while) because most Americans realized you break something you have to fix it.
For most Americans, war is hugely popular. But just the 1-2 months of actually fighting. The decades long nation building is what generals try and talk politicians out of.
That's simply not true; that was the narrative that was pushed. The military is adept at both manufacturing consent, as well as making anyone that does not consent feel as if they are in a minority.
The vast majority are opposed to war, even after attacks.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/4966/public-overwhelmingly-back...
How quickly a generation forgets the horrors of 9/11.
All we learned from the whole thing is that if you want to attack the USA, terrorism is the most effective way. A tiny investment will cause the entity to respond by working hard to abandon its own principles destroying itself, destroying thousands of others, and wasting unfathomable amounts of money.
This is as true now as ever.
Not to mention the tens of thousands of illegally detained, usually on fake or wrong pretenses, and the many of them tortured. Every one of them, and everyone that knows them, has every reason to hate the guts of everything remotely American.
(Edit: please observe all the downvotes, implicitly claiming that lives of Americans are somehow more valuable.)
Both are tragedies but both are different.
Low estimates of the cost of the Iraq war put it at 185k dead iraqi civilians.
I believe that it is much more likely that the US military simply doesn't care much about civilian deaths incurred whilst it seeks useless vengeance. This satisfies Occam's Razor, too.
Didnt Americans want some kind of war after 9/11
https://archive.org/details/theafghanistanpapers_202001
That appears to be audio—I've only read the transcript, personally—but the text is hard to find a direct link to. A search can probably dredge up pages that'll eventually lead to the text.
- Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the Vietnam War throughout 1964 and the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was passed just before his re-election in November 1964. There's a book, Dereliction of Duty, about how Johnson did this for the popularity it would earn him.
- Nixon didn't start any wars and he was re-elected.
- Jimmy Carter didn't start any wars, and the Iran hostage crisis had the opposite affect: it made him appear weak. He only served one term.
- Ronald Reagan got involved in Grenada and Lebanon in 1983. Both conflicts were relatively small and the U.S. withdrew pretty soon afterwards. His re-election was in November 1984.
- Bush Sr. started the Gulf War in January 1991. His re-election would have been in November 1992.
- Clinton got heavily involved in Bosnia in 1995. His re-election would have been in November 1996.
- Bush Jr. started the Iraq War in 2003. His re-election was in November 2004.
- Obama started the Libyan War in 2011. His re-election would have been in November 2012.
- Trump didn't start any wars. He wasn't re-elected, but we can be sure that he didn't start any wars to increase his popularity, like every other two-term president since 1964 except Nixon.
Uber's entire market cap would run the US military for just over a month.
The amount of money that is being wasted here is so far beyond the scale of anything we're familiar with in even the highest echelons of private wealth.
Sadly, the US is extremely loyal to its war criminals, so this can never happen.
It’s not particularly hard, you just need to stop pretending it’s any different from, say, Mussolini.
It's particularly hard when you want executions but the only one you can name is Mussolini.
It’s trivially easy to name the main perpetrators, starting with the USA president who made that decision. Sure, the further down the chain of command you go, the more diluted it is, so you need to stop somewhere - but it’s not any different from the fascist Italy case, or any other organized case of crimes against humanity.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc. These wars and genocides and destabilizing and destroying these countries didn't just organically come about through nobody's fault.
There are warmongers and war profiteers and traitors involved, and they need to be brought to justice.
Yeah, let's completely destroy the relatively stable secular state built with the help of those evil Russians (DRA was able to fight for 3 years after the Soviet army has left) using religious extremists amply supplied with western weapons and funds, and only after that we will help Afghans to built a prosperous society. Maybe. I think there are certain parallels to be found with Iran.
It wasn't a stable secular state when we started influencing things. There was a king. The commies overthrew the king, the US didn't do much of anything at this point (because we just got done with Vietnam and there was zero appetite for anything that could lead to more of that). The commies started infighting. The soviets picked favorites. The US didn't want to see the soviets build a total satellite state so we gave the other guys weapons and training via Pakistan who were the ones who fanned the extremist flames. 35yr later here we are.
What? 1978s PDPA coup has begun from assassination which was allegedly done with CIA help. USSR didn't have any reason to destabilize the relatively friendly Daoud regime. When shit hit the fan, they simply chose PDPA as an ideologically close force.
I would attribute US with intentionally destabilizing Afghanistan. They didn't want to lose ground in the region, especially after the puppet schah got overthrown in the Iran's Islamic revolution (1978-1979). After the initial Soviet intervention the country was stable for quite a while. There were insurgent pockets in the countryside and cells in Pakistan under ISI umbrella, but nothing seriously threatening.
And DRA had support of the populace (otherwise it wouldn't have lasted 3 years without Soviets), not unlike the current (fallen) Afghanistan government.
>The US didn't want to see the soviets build a total satellite state
So let's wreak total havoc in this state to promote our agenda? Who cares about democracy, prosperity, human life and other ideals which are foundation of the western society if we are to buy into its propaganda? And we certainly will not get bitten back by the created chaos...
>Pakistan who were the ones who fanned the extremist flames
Are you seriously implying that the US didn't know who are they working with in Afghanistan? FYI in 1985 Reagan's government has officially started supplying Stingers to mujahidins. And I am quite sure that CIA has closely worked with the forces on the ground far before that. Also considering that Saudis (well-known democratic states, who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11) also co-founded this campaign, I highly doubt that the US didn't know really well who exactly they support.
It's far from the first time when the US has supported really questionable forces to get an advantage in the Big Game.
Supplies are an issue, hence why you don't see the military doing much complaining about letting Bagram go.
China is exerting soft power now by buying up properties and ports in the Caribbean and Latam. Make no mistake, if a real US base had been activated in Afghanistan China, or Russia, would have planted one in Venezuela.
For example, a Slate article debunking one of the more popular specific claims of that sort, published Dec. 2001:
https://slate.com/culture/2001/12/is-the-afghan-war-about-an...
I'm not sure I find its debunking as complete or convincing as the author seems to think it is.
Taliban didn't want to turn over the people who attacked us so we wrecked their country for 20yr.
Frankly I think we should have worked harder to get them to go after OBL and Al-Qaeda for us since they could go after them in ways that we cannot and that would probably have a greater deterring effect on any future people with dreams of attacking the first world.
It's not a coincidence that the withdrawal is before the 20th anniversary.