
U.S. Signs Peace Deal with Taliban - beefman
https://www.npr.org/2020/02/29/810537586/u-s-signs-peace-deal-with-taliban-after-nearly-2-decades-of-war-in-afghanistan
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dx87
It's probably for the best now, but it shouldn't have needed to come to this.
In "Call Sign Chaos" by Jim Mattis, he talks about how the Bush and Obama
administrations both repeatedly ignored the recommendations of military and
intelligence officials. The Bush administration was too cavalier and thought
they knew best, the Obama administration was too weak and wanted to score
political points by not providing the force that was required. When I was in
the Marines, they told us that we shouldn't need to be there, but politicians
from the 80s/90s left things such a mess after trying to stop the Soviets,
that now we had to go try and clean up the mess created 20 years prior.

~~~
anm89
>When I was in the Marines, they told us that we shouldn't need to be there,
but politicians from the 80s/90s left things such a mess after trying to stop
the Soviets, that now we had to go try and clean up the mess created 20 years
prior.

This is of course true but you can play this fallacy out forever. The right
thing to do in the 80s was not to meddle. Then after that we should have cut
our losses and stopped meddling. And now 40 years later we are cleaning up
failed clean up attempts on failed clean up attempts.

At every point in this chain, the correct move is to admit you can't be world
police and stop meddling.

~~~
dx87
I don't know if it's really fair to say that after 9/11 we were playing world
police when we invaded Afghanistan. They were harboring Al Qaeda who had been
carrying out smaller scale attacks on US assets for a while, culminating with
9/11\. At that point you can't just ignore them and hope they stop; they'd
been escalating violence for years.

~~~
craftinator
We invaded Iraq because of 9/11, not Afghanistan. That came later.

~~~
aibara
What? The U.S. invaded Afghanistan first, in 2001. Iraq came in 2003.

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didericis
While poking around for information about other places I ran across a great
little documentary on Afghanistan by a guy named David Adams, who was one of
the last people to see the Buddhas before they were destroyed. It’s a
firsthand look into the history and culture of the country from a relatively
apolitical, exploration based perspective, although it’s now somewhat old.
Some people might find the whole Indiana Jones thing and the “quest” hook to
the series a bit camp, but I quite enjoyed it. Encourage people give it a
watch if they want to learn a bit more about the history of the place.

[https://youtu.be/VXXmcGirPMA](https://youtu.be/VXXmcGirPMA)

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jdkee
So the U.S. lost, like the Soviets, like the British, etc.

Graveyard of empires.

~~~
boznz
What was there ever to win?

~~~
unlinked_dll
Well that's the reason the War on Terror is such a stupid concept. There was
no win condition, because we never defined one or stuck to it.

As Kissinger pointed out in _World Order_ (love or hate the man, it's a good
read) - military force is a political tool to achieve political goals. And
just like Kissinger's abject failure to achieve any meaningful political goals
other than endless, meaningless war and death, it's because he could never
define goals that could be achieved in the first place.

And that's the story of American foreign policy in the middle east. Our
leaders and political theorists can't even agree on what goals should be or
even goals that can be reached - just meaningless diatribe about "presence"
and "if we're not there someone else will step in."

~~~
throwaway22920
Not just the middle east, but the world over. We can't have normal relations
with Cuba because they're repressive, yet we'll sell weapons to Vietnam?
Politicians get maligned for simply meeting with Bashar al-Assad, but selling
weapons to Saudi Arabia gets met with a shrug? The political establishment in
the U.S., usually backed by the media, pushes a nonsensical foreign policy
that's often against U.S. interests. Turning Iraq, Libya, and Syria into
failed states runs contrary to just about any goal you can imagine for the
U.S., but the political and media establishment decided to go at it full bore
for whatever reason.

~~~
pjc50
The US can't have normal relations with Cuba because the families of those who
fled are swing voters in Florida. Whereas nobody cares about Vietnam and
they're now a fairly normal far east state (effectively one-party, but so is
Singapore) and communist in name only like China.

> Turning Iraq, Libya, and Syria into failed states runs contrary to just
> about any goal you can imagine for the U.S

All of them had publicly defied the US at some point. It's the insult that
matters to the establishment.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
How much profit did some major USA companies make out of Iraq? Are you sure
it's "for honor"?

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grizzles
Something that came up in lots of Congressional hearings on the war, no one in
the U.S. military knew what the goal was in Afghanistan. For 19 years.

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yhoiseth
Care to share a source?

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grizzles
Some recent hearings were a consequence of this reporting:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-
papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/)

~~~
yhoiseth
Thanks! That’s a great read. And very disappointing.

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animalnewbie
Here's something that political (either way) Americans will understand but not
accept.

If your neighborhood has termites, sooner or later they will destroy your
property too. It wouldn't matter if they started from the house of your friend
or your enemy. If you have a neighbor who is deliberately raising termites,
you forget about termites and neutralize that neighbor first.

America, both parties really, deliberately side with the bad guys and later
give excuses when things work out against them.

I wouldn't name names but it's not hard to guess who in this particular
context is the neighbor raising termites.

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chriselles
Having been there for 3 short tours, it’s time to get out.

If only, the US had destroyed Pakistan’s air bridge out of Kunduz in 2001
allowing thousands to escape by air to Pakistani safe areas.

If only, the US had kept the mission to light footprint special operations
only, a la the very successful Central America model in the 80’s/90’s.

If only, Pakistan couldn’t guarantee the perpetual failure of Afghanistan.

There was a need to intervene 19.5 years ago like there was a need for Iran to
intervene 20.5 years ago(Taliban liquidated Iranian Shi’a diplomats).

Few know US and Iranian forces actually worked together briefly capturing
Herat in 2001.

I once had the chance to grill a former US ambassador to Afghanistan from
2009-2011, unfortunately I handled it poorly.

Time to decisively end the sunk cost fallacy bias.

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causality0
You can't save a people from themselves. I don't know how many times the US is
going to have to learn this lesson.

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dntbnmpls
Do you really believe we invaded afghanistan to save these people? You think
we invaded iraq to bring freedom and democracy to the iraqis? Was turning
libya and syria into rubble part of our campaign to bring happiness to these
people? I guess propaganda does work. "Mission Accomplished".

~~~
pjc50
I assumed he meant you can't save America from the Americans.

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LatteLazy
It was a bad idea to go in. Having done so, killed so many people, made
promises to so many more, pulling out is frankly disgraceful. America and the
other countries involved have set that country back at least 100 years
socially and ruined millions of lives.

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erentz
Over 20,000 US servicemen and women killed and wounded. Countless Afghans
killed and wounded. And $2 trillion in lost opportunities for the USA.

~~~
hrdwdmrbl
Not to mention the reputational damage around the world and the lasting legacy
of hatred that will be felt for generations of Afghan people towards the US.
That kind of thing can take more than century to forget. The Chinese still
hate the Japanese for the Rape of Nanjing in 1938 (there are probably better
examples but I'm not a historian).

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BalinKing
Independent of the morality, etc. of America’s involvement: equating it to the
Rape of Nanking, and drawing conclusions from there, is absurd.

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hrdwdmrbl
Perhaps I should have just said "Japanese occupation". I did also say my
example probably wasn't great as I know very little history.

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dmode
So after 20 years of waging war with the Taliban and spending trillions of
dollars, we sign a peace deal ? At the same time, we always seem to be eager
to cut food stamps, refugee support, healthcare.

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pjc50
The peace deal is the best opportunity to stop pouring money into graves.

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drdeadringer
Honest Question: What if we started pouring that money into food stamps and
similar instead of "not and graves"?

Or am I missing a something like "these are apples and oranges"?

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pbhjpbhj
Putting money into buying weapons puts money in the elite arms company owners
pockets, and the politician lapdogs pockets by extension.

If you can work out how supporting food stamps can make those same people
filthy rich, and maintain their hegemony, then I'm sure they'll go for it.

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3pt14159
Counterfactuals are hard. If Nato had stepped in after Syria used chemical
weapons we may not have had a global refugee crisis. America has kept the
peace pretty much everywhere but the middle east, and even there, I'd wager
that Saudi Arabia would have nukes by now were it not for the American
presence in the region.

~~~
pjc50
Russia made it quite clear that they would defend the Assad regime, and ending
that was the only way to realistically end the refugee crisis. Turkey has
stepped in to fight Russia in Syria instead. I'm not sure how many Russian
aircraft NATO intervention would have been able to shoot down before Putin
explicitly brought up the nuke threat?

The US is currently quietly supporting Saudi Arabi in their war against the
Houthis.

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3pt14159
Again, hard to say with counterfactuals. Obama made the red line quite clear
and he backed down anyway. In my view, Russia isn't going to start a nuclear
war because they lost a few servicepersons in a unimportant regional ally.

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iambateman
Other comments have taken shots at the foreign policy for Bush and Obama. We
should remember how messy and complicated the region is, not to mention the
home front.

“Add 100,000 troops and blast them all”, “get our boys home now”, “get revenge
for 9/11”, “don’t repeat Soviet mistakes”. There’s a lot of clamoring at home,
and a lot of long-standing tensions abroad.

We can assume for both the Bush and Obama administrations that most people
were basically trying to do the best they could to solve intractable problems.

Foreign policy is really hard.

And despite my concern about the political motivations surrounding this deal,
hints of peace are welcome.

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squarefoot
...while still hunting for Snowden and Assange.

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baobabKoodaa
So what happened to "we don't negotiate with terrorists"?

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0xfeeddeadbeef
Homeland season 8 predicted this.

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option
what was achieved there? will anyone be held responsible for dragging us into
that mess?

~~~
pirate_dev
Nothing and no. It served as a jobs program of sorts to a lot of places that
have nothing else, so that's about all it has boiled down to in the past 20
years. The people who started it all will die peacefully, though I hope I am
wrong.

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thinkingemote
I like thinking about how today would look like from the perspective of
someone 100 years in the future. For example Bill Gates might be more well
known for his philanthropy (like Carnegie now) or, on some kind of level Trump
might be listed as the most peaceful president. Sounds bizarre - I guess
theres a paradox of intervention and non intervention at work.

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cheese4242
What an absolute mess this whole situation has been.

Sadly no one will be held accountable.

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donatj
A well-armed militia took on the most powerful military in the world and won?

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ALittleLight
In what sense did they take on the US military or win? Some of them continue
to exist, I suppose, but that's rather like a defeated boxer claiming to have
won simply for surviving the bout.

The various militas of Afghanistan were bombed and engaged haphazardly for
years and now, it seems, we're withdrawing. That's hardly an Afghani victory
in my mind.

One reason I have a problem with this kind of statement is that we should
encourage the cessation of pointless wars, and not try to equate ending them
with losing or being defeated.

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droithomme
The Afghans win because they successfully repelled the invaders after a long
and terrible war. Repelling the invaders is a winning end state in a war where
the start state was invasion by a foreign country.

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ALittleLight
Repelling the invaders may be a victory, but just enduring occupation,
bombing, attacks, etc until your occupiers decide to leave isn't.

~~~
droithomme
Here's another victory: caused 2 trillion in damages to the enemy and
thoroughly demoralized them.

Primitive stone age goat herders vs the "world's most powerful" military. Who
will win?

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ALittleLight
This is as poor a "victory" as the others suggested in this thread. "We won
because you spent so much money on bombs and missiles exploding on us, and
soldiers occupying us" is a line I'd expect from Zap Brannigan and not anyone
residing in reality. They didn't inflict anywhere near that dollar amount in
damages, instead it was paid to American soldiers and contractors.

The simple fact is that the US occupied their country for years. Bombed and
killed with complete impunity, and then decided to withdrawal. It's absurd to
call that a victory for the Taliban or Afghanistan. Their claim to victory is
that they aren't entirely dead at the time we wanted to withdraw and the
reason for that is that we knew it would be immoral to use the force required
to completely kill them, not any strategy or cunning from them.

It's bad rhetorically and morally to pretend like this is an American loss
because that implicitly says that in order to "win" we'd need to stay in
Afghanistan indefinitely. We shouldn't have been there anywhere near as long
as we were, we shouldn't have done anywhere near as much as we did, and it's
great news that we're withdrawing. Calling it a loss, or a Taliban victory,
isn't just immoral because it implicitly argues for perpetuation of the war,
it's also completely delusional.

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droithomme
You believe the US won?

> we wanted to withdraw and the reason for that is that we knew it would be
> immoral to use the force required to completely kill them

We won because we didn't commit total genocide, only partial genocide? Due to
our very high sense of morality and goodness?

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ALittleLight
That's not what I said, but I certainly don't think Afghanistan or the Taliban
won.

The war had no clear objectives. It just continued until people decided to
stop it and stopping it is a good thing.

Regarding your question about why we didn't commit genocide, yes, it's because
we realize that would be immoral and the American people wouldn't support it.

~~~
droithomme
> 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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ALittleLight
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.

~~~
droithomme
"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.

~~~
ALittleLight
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.

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detaro
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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mercora
whats up with the "text only" version? is it somehow required to deliver any
service at all if i decline the consent dialog and this is what they came up
with?

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pixxel
I don’t know, but if declining tracking consent serves a plain text view I’d
love all websites to adopt it. Saves clicking reader mode which doesn’t always
work. I’m on mobile though which wraps text nicely. What happens on desktop?
Browser full width?

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oneplane
Works fine on desktop. I think most people that have a problem with it didn't
use the internet in the 90's.

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yumraj
Peace deal with Taliban sounds like an oxymoron

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buboard
So there will no longer be a war in afghanistan? So those thousands of people
fleeing to Europe are no longer refugees?

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postingawayonhn
I expect there will be many more refugees. Once the Taliban regains control of
the country I'm sure there will be many reprisals against those who supported
the elected government.

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jacquesm
Of course there won't be. I just watched Trump in a press conference say that
(literal quote) "If bad things happen there after we leave we will be back
with a huge force". You really can't make this stuff up.

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RestAndVest
Big, huge embarrassment for USA. They should've kept it going at all cost.

~~~
donatj
And in order news the Vietnam War continues to rage.

