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Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

No, I made a specific argument that the people of Afghanistan defeated the US military.

This absolutely did happen and their long fought victory has saddled the US with an tremendous monetary debt and social debt in the form of a fractured American society the consequences of which are an increasingly authoritarian America that is brutishly lashing out at their allies in that conflict.

America's loss in that conflict has cost America far more than we can imagine right now and the cost is only increasing by the day.

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No, that never happened. The US was in control and then voluntarily left.

so it won some battles but lost the war?

I mean, they came in, held dominion, and just didn't proceed to fully transform the country as they should have.

It's kind of like a UFC fighter pinning his opponent for 90% of the match and then suddenly forfeiting. I wouldn't call it fleeing or losing.

We may be arguing semantics, but a UFC fighter forfeiting is the definition of losing, no matter how much his win was apparent beforehand.

I think you're taking the analogy too far with that, although it's my fault for using an analogy that makes it so easy.

My point was simply that the US had complete dominion over the area for 20 years and left voluntarily, not due to any pressure from the enemy. If you don't want to call that a victory, fine, whatever, but it doesn't seem like a surrender or loss to me.

> My point was simply that the US had complete dominion over the area for 20 years and left voluntarily, not due to any pressure from the enemy.

Losing money, troops and public support in the field and back at home is a very real definition of losing.

It sure as hell wasn’t winning.

This is such a silly argument. They held the place for 20 years uncontested.

Retreating voluntarily because of nothing to do with their opposition, sure as hell isn't losing.

Instead of going back and forth constantly with this semantic bullshit, can we just agree at the least the US didn't retreat because the taliban forced and pressured them to?

I think you’re right about that and the semantics of it and that’s exactly the problem. The US approached Afghanistan as a battlefield, and a purely military problem. It was irregular warfare and a political problem that ground the US down.

https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/learning-from-failure-...

Exhausting the enemy’s desire to continue a fight is not only a way of winning a war militarily, most military victories are achieved that way; the surrender to the Taliban was not unusual in that regard.

That isn't what happened and there was no surrender. The commander in chief made primarily a political decision, and politics was the only motivation for the withdrawal.

> That isn't what happened

Yes, it is.

> and there was no surrender.

Yes, Trump’s release of Taliban priosners and subsequent surrender of Afghanistan to them was a surrender.

> The commander in chief made primarily a political decision

Yes, the decision to abandon a war is always a political decision. It is, in fact, the political decision that every act in war is directed at getting the enemy to make.

There's this weird and frankly dolschtosslegende-ish trend in America post-Vietnam to characterize American victories in war as military and American losses as “political” as if the two were orthogonal categories, but the only military victory is achieving the desired political end, and if you feel like you were “winning militarily” and didn’t do that, then you just didn’t understand the context of the war and your sense of victory was misplaced.

> Yes, it is.

No, it isn't. Wow, that was easy!

> Yes, Trump’s release of Taliban priosners and subsequent surrender of Afghanistan to them was a surrender.

No, it was a retreat. For it to be a surrender, the Taliban would have had to be in a position of power. They were not.

> Yes, the decision to abandon a war is always a political decision.

Except for the times it is solely a military position.

> Taliban would have had to be in a position of power.

They control the territory. The Taliban is in fact in a position of power. Doubly so now that it forced the US to retreat.

It is a weird definition of "victory", when the end of the war was a hasty and poorly executed retreat.

> They control the territory.

Only after a voluntary retreat, so that is irrelevant since they didn't have power at the time of the treat, and were not a factor in the decision to retreat.

> It is a weird definition of "victory", when the end of the war was a hasty and poorly executed retreat.

Of course it was a victory. The Taliban were ousted within weeks and then the place was under US control for 20 years. If it wasn't a victory, the last 20 years would have been like the last year instead of what they were like.

> Only after a voluntary retreat

A voluntary retreat is not a victory. You are arguing it is, which is extremely odd.

> Of course it was a victory. The Taliban were ousted within weeks and then the place was under US control for 20 years.

If the victory conditions were to be bogged down for 20 years wasting resources in an occupation that netted no benefits, only to have your enemy be back in the following day when you do your voluntary retreat, those are the most retarded victory conditions ever spelled out.

It would be like claiming victory against the Nazis if after some years both the US and USSR left Germany, and in the following day the Nazis were setting up concentration camps again.

> A voluntary retreat is not a victory. You are arguing it is, which is extremely odd.

If I come in to your country, invade it, and have complete dominion for 20 years, than I've successfully invaded your country. Victoriously.

If I then change my mind and decide to leave, after 20 years of having a provisional government because I got bored, then yeah, my victory still stands, and the rest is details and semantics.

> It would be like claiming victory against the Nazis if after some years both the US and USSR left Germany, and in the following day the Nazis were setting up concentration camps again.

If they had held dominion over the Nazis for the entire time they were there and left voluntarily because they felt all of a sudden it wasn't there fight, it wouldn't be wrong to do so.

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