This is going to be Saigon all over again. The pictures coming out of this will be remarkable. That being said, my thoughts go out to the Afghanis who helped us for decades as interpreters and other support roles. Both parties are failing those brave men and women in not expediting approval for them to come to the US, as their lives will assuredly be in danger if they stay in Afghanistan.
then let it be another Saigon, what alternative did the US have than pull out? If you know anybody in the military they all say it's worse than it was years ago and only continuing to get worse
so the only option was pull out or continue with the sunk cost fallacy of thinking we can somehow fix Afghanistan by doubling down with another troop surge. I'm glad we are finally admitting it was a failure
Unpopular suggestion: Actual imperial rule for a couple of generations.
Tax enough to pay for the effort but not for a "profit". Build infrastructure by bringing outside expertise to train and build local business. Take control of schools, make them safe and required for all children. Respect the local culture but smash hard some cultural practices.
Would it be incredibly hard to do without abuse? Absolutely. Is it questionably moral? Absolutely. Could it even be done at all? Questionable.
We keep acting that the outcome of every military conflict is going to be like the liberation of France in WWII, kill the "bad guys" and then champagne and croissant parades with the locals.
The repeated failed attempts at just handing self-government to nations after we depose their governments shows that you can't just win wars and fix problems with force alone. War is awful, it should happen as infrequently as possible, but if you're going to do it, you better have a plan for winning the peace. Corrupt, half-assed nation building doesn't cut it.
> Respect the local culture but smash hard some cultural practices.
If you want good self-government of a people, then you must eliminate tribal/clan structures so that advantages aren't given to uncles/cousins, but rather to people independent of their relations.
> Respect the local culture but smash hard some cultural practices.
These are not merely in tension, but actually completely incompatible. We can respect local culture or try to impose one that we like better, but you can't do the first and also the second.
> Would it be incredibly hard to do without abuse?
No, it would be abuse.
> Is it questionably moral?
No, again, it is unquestionably immoral.
> War is awful, it should happen as infrequently as possible, but if you're going to do it, you better have a plan for winning the peace.
Sometimes, you just need to accept winning the war. Disrupting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and providing a deterrent for the Taliban letting a similar group base out of there in the future was a win. The fantasy of then forcibly-but-on-the-cheap implanting a pro-Western liberal democratic regime and society in Afghanistan was...insane. Unrealistic fantasies about “winning the peace” we could do with fewer of.
You can very much respect the local culture while smashing out and cultural practices. For example, key to culture is language and so promoting local language is important. Likewise, the treatment of women in some middle East countries is oppressive and so promoting inclusion as an alternative (preferred) cultural norm is ideal. Same with child marriage.
You can’t change the treatment of women without changing the culture. I don’t think you understand how deeply embedded those values are. Values we consider barbaric are perfectly acceptable for the locals.
> You can very much respect the local culture while smashing out and cultural practices.
Know, you can't “smashing cultural practices” is not respecting local culture, its imposing your preferred alternative.
I’m not saying its wrong in all cases, I’m saying you are engaging in doublethink of the highest order if you maintain that it is compatible with respecting the culture.
The Taliban literally bans music and engages in cultural genocides.
Literally killing minority groups while destroying century old or millennia old artifacts and museums.
It's doublethink to suggest that the Americans were in the wrong here. The Taliban are a powerful for with local support, but I hope that the temporary peace we offered the Afghani for the past few years will be remembered.
We probably pushed too many of our values. We shouldn't have made a democracy or pushed women's rights as much. The bar was set to high. We should have been happy with simply the removal of the Taliban and laser focused upon that goal.
Those rights that we believe in (but they don't) will be the first thing to fall. So pushing their morals in our image is just a mistake entirely.
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The Taliban are a group that literally bans females from reading or using smartphones, and they get popular support from the people. At some point, we have to just admit that it's what their population prefers. And we are coming in talking about democracy and giving their mostly illiterate women the right to vote. Of course they won't like us.
> Respect some things, don't respect other things... is not doublethink.
Admitting that you are merely “respecting” the elements of the culture that don't conflict strongly with your cultural values but not the ones that do clash isn’t doublethink.
Thinking that you are respecting the cultural as a whole while you campaign to eliminate the elements of it that offend your cultural values, however, is.
Because those actions are favourable to Allah. If there are those who don’t like Allah, then you get rid of those people. When all in the populace are worshippers of Allah, then actions favourable to Allah will bring you respect.
> Japan and the Marshall plan are not a million miles from being an example of the change being proposed.
Neither the Marshall Plan nor the post-WWII occupations of Japan were within a million miles of “actual imperial rule for a couple of generations”. The post-war occupation of Germany on paper kind of resembles that, but that's largely a side effect of the subsequent Cold War.
> The comparison I was going for was the imposed system coming from an occupying US force.
We’ve tried an imposed system from an occupying US force in Afghanistan longer than we did i Japan. Or Germany, in any real way.
It might have worked if we had made the right decisions early on, but successful occupation is path-dependent, you screw it up and you don't get to start over with a clean slate, and the evidence is that we didn't do it right from the outset, if there was a “right” open in the particular circumstances.
Morality aside, as a practical matter sustaining an imperial occupation in Afghanistan would require also invading and occupying part of Pakistan. It's a package deal. Nothing could ever be accomplished in Afghanistan as long as insurgents have a safe just across the border.
Well, we already decided a long time ago that we knew better than the Afghans how to run their own society. This would be an improvement in that we’d actually have the decency to do something about it.
> Unpopular suggestion: Actual imperial rule for a couple of generations.
You are trying to breed out extremism? It's not like a fad... You can never breed it out. A couple generations? No. Not even 5 generations will be enough.
Potentially unpopular opinion, but here goes. Would an acceptable level of presence have been just to keep Bagram? It was a pretty key base for so many operations in the Middle East and could have been a huge force multiplier. Moreover, it could have a deterrent effect. For precedent, the US has a variety of bases across the world in Europe and Asia and many of those bases are not political nightmares. To just maintain Bagram could seemingly be done without really risking many personnel and serve as an air support base with faster response times to Afghan military requests for aid. Bagram could also be a strong piece in preventing this unrelenting push of the Taliban.
Right now we are sending 3000 troops in for evacuations, and I don't think this is the last time we'll have troops in there. If the Taliban completes a significant enough takeover of Afghanistan then (in my opinion) it's just a matter of time before some action prompts US or some coalition of forces to return.
Bagram isn't sustainable without a secure land supply route to bring in fuel, water, and other bulk items. The US military simply doesn't have the airlift capacity to sustain it while meeting their other global commitments. And without constant ground patrols through the surrounding area the base itself would be hit by daily rocket and mortar attacks.
> It was a pretty key base for so many operations in the Middle East
To what end? The security threat has been mitigated. The energy dynamic has changed with Aramco’s listing, fracking and bona fide renewable energy.
We are, first and foremost, a naval power. Afghanistan is a shitty buffer state. Our ports and coastal bases more than suffice for the foreseeable future in that region.
Historically, a bunch of really important (to the war/counter terrorism efforts; you can say the war effort was not important and that's a fair argument but Bagram was at least helpful in the war). For starters, the raid to kill Bin Laden originated in Bagram [1]. If quick response times were needed based on intel with limited usefulness (the location of a specific terrorist leader) or the Afghani military needs air support, then Bagram couldve helped cut down response times in those important circumstances. The distances from the nearest carrier locations are real in terms of response time.
I'm just guessing here and I'm no expert but it just seems like maintaining the base would cost not much when compared to its usefulness in even just counter terror operations (not in the broad sense where innocents are hurt but like actual raids on specific leaders, baghdadi, bin laden, etc [though i dont think the baghdadi raid originated from bagram])
For people that have led Soldiers, “keeping Bagram” is not akin to keeping Germany or Japan bases. It would always have been a 18-24 month, family-less deployment. South Korea is already known to be a fairly hard deployment for this reason. Bagram would be similar, but worse.
These risk calculations of “not many personnel” have American boys and girls on the receiving end, who spend 18-20 months to do what, maintain presence?
Two notes then:
- already been tried as a course of action in the last several years. The problem then and in this future hypothetical is that the mission creeps. If you watched American KIA in AFG the last few, youd start to notice deaths that come from patrolling and convoys. There is no scenario where Americans stay on Bagram only and ever. Even If Kabul is in fact surrounded, you’d have risks just the same but with a fighting force at Bagram completely unable to respond because it’s undermanned and without a clear mission (enter in: Somali 1992).
- let’s say it’s an accepted risk though. how that model works in reality is long term, sustained presence. The desire impact of a long term Bagram is achieved by lengthy relationships with locals. The army model is 18 month rotations. This doesn’t build that relationship. There is a reason the last instances the US had really succeeded at war was “go to Berlin, come back when the Nazis are gone.” This stuff takes a very sustained presence to achieve, including leadership not leaving every 18 months. So which unit gets to live in AFG full time, in this long term Bagram scenario? Bc if it’s not done that way, you get the life disrupting/ending shadow war of 2016-2021.
No argument on the questionable nature of a wide variety of such actions. I would posit, though, that individual, targeted raids by special forces on specific terrorist leaders (baghdadi and bin laden) are much clearer than many other such operations and actions. if a key base located in that region helps those targeted and collateral damage minimizing missions, then perhaps that factors into the decision of staying there.
> For precedent, the US has a variety of bases across the world in Europe and Asia and many of those bases are not political nightmares.
I think it is difficult to compare Germany and Afghanistan.
I am French and if we had a US base here people would not be happy but it ultimately would have been a topic during elections.
The soldiers wood blend in and the cultural difference between the US and Germany << US - Afghanistan.
South Corea is an exotic country for us, but this is many food, entertainment, on the surface at least.
I do not think that US soldiers wood blend in, or at least naturally incorporate into Afghanistan, there are too many differences.
Just compare how and where the youth spend their time. In France, Germany, SK out Japan this wood be tiktok, listening to pretty much the same music (we had the kpop wave here...). In Afghanistan this is probably vastly different
Another in a long line of US military failures since WW2. I suspect when history looks back at the fall of the US/rise of the East, a common theme will be how much of a lead the US blew as a result of multiple, unnecessary and excruciatingly resource-intensive wars of attrition
The only reason WW2 was a success because it was a real war aiming at total defeat and destruction of the enemy including civilian population. "Liberation" wars where the population is supposed to be saved from oppressive governments always fail. Failed in Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan. Military can't distinguish between "good" and "bad" and a big, confusing mess gets created.
WW2 would also have failed if the military had tried to avoid civilian deaths. You simply can't win a war that way,
I think the key difference is that the enemy in WW2 was centrally led conventional army while the Taliban wage Guerilla warfare, with entrenched structures and decades of experience.
The Taliban could easily be defeated if the occupying military didn't care about civilians and accepted destruction of the country.
What doesn't work is fighting while also trying to build up a country, After WW2 Germany and Japan only worked because there was basically no resistance and the occupying powers could focus completely on rebuilding civilian society.
What makes it even worse in countries like Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq is that the occupiers have no understanding of these societies and are trying to impose Western values on them.
Your latter points are exactly the problem with the US and western foreign policy in general. This belief that everyone just desperately wants the freedom to do a liberal arts degree and wear short shorts.
The average Afghan has never looked at US society and culture aspirationally. They admire our wealth - that's it.
The peak of the US "lead" would seem to be the fall of the Soviet Union. Vietnam etc. was long over by then.
Not saying Iraq and Afghanistan weren't unnecessary and expensive. The U.S. and the world would have been better off without them, probably. Saddam and the Taliban, Isis, Al Qaida don't look so dangerous in retrospect. But Islamic "extremism" was the big perceived threat back then, and you could argue that it is less of a threat today, so someones' version of a problem solved.
Please don't take my objection to how it's being handled as support for a forever war. I'm glad we're getting out, but as I said earlier, Afghanis that worked with us aren't receiving as much support as they should be.
I agree with you. That's why, IMO, we should be expediting their status as refugees, but also having a planned withdrawal so that an utter collapse doesn't happen, unlike now where it sure looks like there's a collapse coming.
I met a former Afghani interpreter working as an Uber driver in Minneapolis a few years ago, really nice guy. It was during the superbowl, we had a mutual misunderstanding of the appeal of American football. He was going to school and supporting himself driving. A few have had good outcomes but the stories you hear about those waiting years for immigration and many others who were killed for helping the US while waiting... it's just shameful.
It's really a travesty that we don't have a fast track for the family and friends of anyone who's directly helped us in a foreign nation. More people would be willing to work with us if it was the ticket to a life in the US. It's not like 100k people here or there really matters much in a nation of 300mil.
"President Joe Biden announced this month that evacuation flights from Afghanistan would begin in late July. The Afghans are seeking refuge in the U.S. through the Special Immigrant Visa program, which has enjoyed bipartisan support since its creation for Afghan nationals in 2009.
The group heading to Fort Lee includes 700 who qualify for the SIV program; the remaining 1,800 Afghans are their family members."
I really hope it won't be another Saigon, the videos coming out of the final days are harrowing. A lot of other countries are also closing their embassies for now, and seem to be more willing to bring home Afghans who've helped. In Norway we're also bringing their families.
Rest assured, there won't be another Saigon. The videos coming out of Afghan countryside and Kabul will be erased by BigTech under some corporate speak reason or another. The masses will never see them. 'Covid Misinformation' (TM) is just the dry run.
> I really hope it won't be another Saigon, the videos coming out of the final days are harrowing.
Unless Biden changes course, it's going to be another Saigon, whether the pictures show it or not (e.g. they may get the Americans out before the Taliban is too close, and avoid pictures of throngs of desperate allies mobbing the embassy hoping to get evacuated with the last Americans, but most of those allies will still be stranded).
"That being said, my thoughts go out to the Afghanis who helped us for decades as interpreters and other support roles. Both parties are failing those brave men and women in not expediting approval for them to come to the US, as their lives will assuredly be in danger if they stay in Afghanistan."
The Germans are doing the same. They are leaving people that have helped them behind. Really shameful.
I remember the sentiment right after 9/11 and the country was baying for blood.
It seems like the most prudent thing to have done was to adopt a kind of Fabian Strategy where we don't invade a nation halfway around the globe and hope to change a culture that has stubbornly been able to avoid being conquered by the major empires in world history. When you really look at it, no major act of terrorism of the same scale was going to happen anyways. I mean really, mass shootings end up killing more people. And it's not like the hijack an airliner strategy is going to work again.
But here we are, 2+ Trillion burned and nothing to show for it.
For starters... any group thinking about attacking the US on it's homeland will have to contemplate a 20+ year conflict afterwards.
We also did educate a lot of people there, many of which are leaving the country right now for obvious reasons - but still, we did help a lot of people there.
Lastly, the way we're throwing money around these days, $2 Trillion is practically nothing when spread out over a 20 year period anyway.
>"any group thinking about attacking the US on it's homeland will have to contemplate a 20+ year conflict afterwards."
I don't know how true this is, but I heard that Bin Laden's goal was to get the US mired in an extremely expensive and prolonged war of attrition. It's the same strategy that helped bring down the Soviet Union. It makes sense, at face value, to get a vastly more powerful adversary bogged down in such a war.
>"Maybe I'm just searching for the silver lining..."
Really? I’ve read that seeing the US lose its shit and pull out of Somalia after losing a couple helicopters and a dozen or so troops gave him the idea that it culturally couldn’t handle losses. That he thought scaling up the losses would increase the scale of the withdrawal and that he could get the US to pull out of the Islamic world completely.
And as sad as it is, bin Laden completely won in that regard. The US and practically everyone else got so side tracked by Afghanistan that neither noticed the growing threat of Russia and China, plus local right wing people and parties were emboldened by an Islamophobic mindset in general (thus, in turn, leading Muslim communities into isolation instead of integration).
> The US and practically everyone else got so side tracked by Afghanistan
The US only momentarily devoted its attention to Afghanistan, until the Administration was able to redirect its energy to the preconceived war on Iraq it initially wanted to use the 9/11 attack to justify but was thwarted by the evidence leading elsewhere too clearly.
That's a big part of the reason the long occupation on Afghanistan was such a failure.
> plus local right wing people and parties were emboldened by an Islamophobic mindset in general
Uh, for the point of view of the right-wing party in America that launched that war and the next, that wasn't an unfortunate unintended consequence, its part of the reason many of the people in that Administration had been trying to get a war against Iraq off the ground since shortly after the previous one ended.
The Taliban's big mistake was actively refusing to turn over OBL.
The US's big mistake was not trying to make a back room deal with them to the tune of "we'll make you more secure than any south American tin-pot dictator so long as you make the kind of example out of Al-Qaeda that we can't make"
If either of those things had went through it would have saved both parties 20yr of money, blood and associated bullshit.
I’d be really interested in reading an in-depth breakdown of Taliban and US decision making during that time.
Supposedly the Taliban didn’t refuse to turn him over full stop but rather refused without evidence. I don’t know if that was them never planning to turn him over and just trying to buy time with a soft no, them -as a very young government with little international recognition- trying to demonstrate sovereignty with the intent to hand him over after an extradition trial, them genuinely not knowing he did it and really wanting evidence. Or given that organisations don’t make decisions but that individuals do, was it a combination of the above plus various other personal interests and biases.
Same with the US side. Did they suspect or know the Taliban wasn’t ever going to hand him over? Not willing to give them the political recognition and legitimacy that cooperating diplomatically would have? Was the resistance that the Taliban was fighting and that the US backed believed to be stronger and the Taliban weaker than in reality? Was Bush just getting information from his campaign team that if he didn’t retaliate militarily quickly then the electorate would see him as weak but if he did then they would rally behind him?
> any group thinking about attacking the US on it's homeland will have to contemplate a 20+ year conflict afterwards.
Several groups attacked the US Capitol 8 months ago and they got away with it with only 500 carged with federal crimes. Which isn't nothing, but is a far cry from 20+ year conflict.
UBL planned to draw the US into a multi-decade war of attrition because he knew that was the only way to beat a power that strong.
For all the people we "helped", a thousand more grew up to the sound of US drones shelling their extended family members.
The "War on Terror" dwarves Vietnam as the US's greatest military failure, and is singularly responsible for it's crippling presence on the world stage today.
I’m surprised no one has pulled off a hijackjng again. Has security really improved that much? Because listening to the comments here you’d think it was all farcical security theater.
Two important things came out of 9/11: cockpit doors are closed and locked now, and people fight back against hijackers. In 1968-72 there was a skyjacking every 6 days[0] but they were extortion attempts or plots to get a free flight to Cuba or some such thing. We now think that the endgame of a hijacking is that the hijackers will turn the plane into a suicide bomb, and passengers know NOT to be cooperative. These are real security improvements to air travel.
> TSA (Thousands Standing Around) is much more effective as a jobs program than a security program in my estimation.
A jobs program for the private screeners that the TSA replaced.
It’s main original purpose (at least, of federalizing screening) was an excuse to transfer liability for future risks away from the airlines, which the airlines explicitly lobbied for in the immediate wake of 9/11.
The real security was locking the door to the cockpit alongside passengers being unwilling to let some dude with a knife hijack a plane anymore. The rest of the changes are security theater.
The security theater does nothing. They installed pilot doors that could only be opened from the inside. Can't exactly high jack a plane with box cutters anymore can you?
Prior to 911, hijackers took over planes for ransom. 911 was a zero day exploit. The opportunity to use hijacked planes as weapons ended with flight 93.
The primary security theater was the military personal that popped up around airports around 9/11 that carried guns but no ammunition because guns with ammunition could hurt people.
The TSA checkpoint is mostly a security theater. It stops people who don't try to hide and people who are unable to think of a way to get past it. It also limit the amount of weapons that airline personal need to see so that when they see it they can assume ill intent.
The "random" checks and blacklists seem to have mixed quality. According to some they actually worked when good investigators identified high risk people. According to other it was mostly just racism and personal vendettas. Hard to give it a definitive grade.
Locked doors and strict policy against people getting access to the cockpit seems to have worked.
OBL completely achieved his goal into trolling the west into a quagmire and got the US troops out of KSA within 16 months. Why would he need another hijacking?
There are additional restrictions for flight around DC after 9/11, but most are SFRA (Special Flight Rules Area) or FRZ (Flight Restriction Zone) and very little of it is a Prohibited Area or Restricted Area (P- and active R- areas being what most would understand to be “no-fly zones”)
I’ve gotten cleared to land in the “DC-3” airports and have landed at College Park (inside the FRZ) and Fort Meade (inside the SFRA) many times in light aircraft.
There are restrictions, but they’re quite far from being “no-fly zones”.
I can't help but feel that if we didn't also go into Iraq at roughly the same time there may have been more resources which could have drastically changed the outcome.
> When you really look at it, no major act of terrorism of the same scale was going to happen anyways
Why this is the case was a full court press on AQ across the globe by IC, and toppling the safety net in AFG was a (the) critical part of that occurring. It’s a fairly lengthy operation to succinctly cite, but starting with the CIA’a CTC activities between ‘97 and ‘03 will cover it.
It’s also important to keep in context that after the Embassy bombings in Tanzania/Kenya in ‘98 (200 dead) another attack of the same scale was never going to happen again. And after the USS Cole (17 KIA plus a decommissioned Naval Destroyer), another attack at that scale was deemed unlikely. 9/11 happened, and… all sourcing to a serious inability to directly target or gain Intel on AQ, which operated freely in AFG.
So, the initial invasion was critical in that narrow sense. AQ was toppled and never recovered globally. Should we have stayed, or instead given it to a United Front or heavily empowered/armed/funded Karzai? To your point - probably the latter was a good option, 20 years and a lot of dead Americans later.
Edit - downvote for over-acronym use makes sense, another user helpfully linked acronym <>wiki articles. That said, the above is well known history, but happened a very long time ago to a niche area of national security. If people are curious on “what the hell happened to Afghanistan for 20 years,” it’s important to know this part.
Your comment uses too many acronyms to understand, I'm sure others here feel the same. I know that CIA is the US Central Intelligence Agency, and KIA means killed in action ... by context I'm pretty sure AQ is Al-Qaeda and AFG is for some reason an acronym for Afghanistan? But I have no idea what IC, CTC, or the USS Cole are. Is "United Front" an organization that would justify the capitalization, or do you mean a united front in general?
Aside from that, what does an embassy bombing in Tanzania/Kenya have to do with Afghanistan or 9/11? Was it done by Al-Qaeda? And could you clarify or expand on most of the rest of your comment?
> It’s a fairly lengthy operation to succinctly cite
But also see other user’s post below.
In short, Afghanistan and Al Qaeda were on the map for a very long time, but no one listened.
By the time 9/11 occurred, AQ was a global, well coordinated organization with a single underfunded agency (CIA) tracking it. The agency was largely forbidden from accessing the only spot Al Qaeda really aggregated: Afghanistan. If you can orient to a pre-Internet time, it makes sense how much (realized) risk this black box caused - embassy and US navy ship bombings, and 9/11. The United Front is another term for the Northern Alliance, a ~tribal group in northern AFG. It was the CIA’s main access and information flow into AFG until 9/12. The state dept and official policy largely forbade interacting with them though. The leader of the UF who the CIA linked with starting back in the late 90s, guy named Massood, was assassinated by the Taliban/AQ on like 9/10 iirc (so days before 9/11).
This all goes to say that the invasion of AFG was tremendously important, but staying there once AQ was gone maybe was not. There are fairly tragic records of July and early Sept 2001 briefings from the CIA to the President on the imminent threat actual.
Maybe I am just from a different cultural background, but I do not understand half of the abbreviations here. Could you help clarifying what you are saying?
There was this illusion that the US was an unstoppable juggernaut. That image was damaged by the failures in Afghanistan/Iraq in middle and high school, followed by the GFC in college, and finally totally destroyed in the eyes of Gen Y and Z after Trump's election and the bungling of COVID and the second GFC as the generations try to start families/get their footing in the job market.
Your theory while very intriguing is something I can't possibly see ever happening just due to the hubris that occurs when you think you are unbeatable.
That is exactly what the sentiment was going into the war.
I am reminded of this scene from 2004's Slacker Uprising. This woman reminds me of the MAGA people of today. That same hubris is what got us Trump and it probably won't go away until the country stops being the singular world superpower.
The US has been a stoppable juggernaut since Korea. Vietnam certainly didn't help. In the 1970s, the country was unable to secure its own embassy or fly helicopters successfully, at least in public perception.
What the US can do is project power with precision (if not always accuracy), where that's politically and strategically possible, though bouncing rocks with cruise missiles and JDAMS may not actually achieve much after the nightly-news phosphers fade. The US is rather more hamstrung dealing with larger, or nuclear-armed, threats: Russia, China, North Korea. Iran have been taking notes.
>The US has been a stoppable juggernaut since Korea. Vietnam certainly didn't help. In the 1970s, the country was unable to secure its own embassy or fly helicopters successfully, at least in public perception.
Maybe? But the Boomers emerged from those conflicts to be the most prosperous generation in world history so I don't buy your argument.
Millennials and Gen Z didn't really live through the events you described and from their point of view, all they saw was optimism...until they grew up and saw the fire at their doorstep in the form of the events I mentioned.
>The US is rather more hamstrung dealing with larger, or nuclear-armed, threats: Russia, China, North Korea. Iran have been taking notes.
We will see. I think it is too early to tell. I don't disagree but this may just be a symptom of a fading US superpower but the underlying causes are unrelated to these countries and anything specific they have done.
Boomer prosperity and juggernaut (un)stoppbability read as orthogonal functions on my chart.
It's fair to say that in major conflicts since 1992, and perhaps going back earlier (1980s, Grenada invasion), the US was generally more successful, though even that's somewhat conditioned. During the 1990s especially, it picked its fights and especially in Gulf War I didn't fight to occupation.
At the same time, it did see several notable failures. GWI was prompted by a failure to respond in an appropriate or timely nature to Iraq's beligerance toward Kuwait, despite a very obvious intent. There was the Blackhawk Down incident in Mogadishu, Somalia (1993), a largely successful though not unmarred campaign in the Bosnian-Kosovo civil war, the failure to intervene in Rawanda.
And then there was 9/11. The single deadliest attack by a foreign power on US soil in history, and against which the entirety of the US defence and intelligence establishment proved utterly ineffective. (A gay rugby player and a few civillians provided a more effective protective force.)
Since 9/11 the US has been engaged in a legitimate though ultimately futile conflict in Afghanistan, as well as the utterly illegitimate and disasterous Iraq campaign, as its principle boots-on-the-ground conflicts.
There've been numerous other engagements (Nepal, horn of Africa, Syria, Maghreb, Pakistan, Indian Ocean / Somali pirates, Somalia, Libya, Uganda, Yemen, and subsequent actions in Iraq, but all have been limited engagements, most strongly reliant on airpower (manned and unmanned) or advisory roles, geared more at suppression than conquest and control.
The conflicts in which the US walked in and kicked ass are largely limited to the Spanish-American War (1898), WWI (as a late and limited participant), and WWII (as a major and decisive participant). Unless you'd like to count numerous labour disputes in which US armed forces attacked labour on behalf of industrial and investment interests.
On nuclear / WMD adversaries, "MAD" is in fact the principle doctrine of the atomic-weapons era: mutual assurred destruction.
Anyone have theories/guesses on how the Taliban are able to pull this off?
I would expect that a group that has been hunted for 2 decades to be only just barely managing to survive - how do they have weapons, transportation, logistics etc to be able to basically get their act together like the past 20 years never happened?
The Taliban simply need to show up, and the locals are submitting to them. Why?
* Because everybody can see which way the balance of power is tipping. The US is too weak to stay, and unlikely to ever come back. The Talibans are right there, hungry for blood.
* Because many would rather have Sharia law than US backed corruption. Mullah Omar was publicly executing bacha bazi perpetrators. 'One of the original factors mobilizing the rise of the Taliban was their opposition to the practice.' The US was turning a blind eye if not actively protecting them. In an infamous case, they pushed out a SOF captain and almost fired a decorated SOF sergeant for doing something about it.
It doesn't sound like they had to do much of anything. The repeated complaint from defending troops is running out of food and ammo. They didn't really even have the option to fight.
Every soldier is also 100% certain their government is unbelievably corrupt, which can't help. If you read about Castro and his men taking over Cuba, they got people to give up military outposts just by firing at them few times. They had no real interest in fighting for their leadership.
Because they haven't been just barely managing to survive for two decades.
They got their asses kicked in 2001-02, retreated to relatively safe territory in Pakistan. And then have been fighting for the past 20 years. They've occupied territory in Afghanistan for over a decade. It's just never included cities before now.
While their land in Pakistan isn't totally safe, it's their refuge. They have to worry about drone strikes and hush-hush raids, but they are relatively safe there.
The Taliban are the people of Afghanistan (obviously not all of them, but a substantial portion). We could have avoided this had we learned a lesson by watching the Soviet Union go through this same exercise a few decades ago. When you invade and occupy a hostile nation, you can either stay forever at tremendous cost in blood and treasure or eventually leave and watch the native inhabitants regain control.
Exception to that being the non-Pashtun minorities, who actually will fight, in numbers big enough to matter. A plan might have been devised to carve off a new, defensible state, a la Kurdistan. But that would have required bureaucracies to admit partial defeat - an acknowledgment of reality unnatural to them. So instead we have total defeat: collapse, massacres, oppression.
The Taliban are not the people of Afghanistan. Less than 20% of the population supports them.
The rest of the population just isn't strong enough and coordinated enough to beat a highly motivated and organized minority.
While I didn't support continuation of the war because I don't see how it benefits the USA, it wasn't an unjust war. Quite the opposite. We were allies of the democratically elected Afghan government, fighting against the tyranny of a small group of religious fanatics.
It was a predictable disaster from the very beginning - there was never any other possible outcome then the one we see today. We don't have the ability (let alone the right) to invade a country on the other side of the world with a completely alien culture and turn it into some sort of 51st state with our values. This would be true even if Afghanistan wasn't a hodgepodge of cultures and different peoples, most of which never recognized a central government of any kind and exist in a tribal system. Then consider the fact that our so-called allies in Pakistan (the ones who harbored Bin Laden) support the Taliban as a proxy force, and have all along. We could have (and should have) pursued those who attacked us on 9/11 (Al Qaeda - not the Taliban) without launching any misguided, expensive and disastrous foreign invasions with delusions that we could remake the world in our image.
1. The Western nations didn't do much in terms of actual nation building and giving the country perspective beyond daily drone strikes, poverty and opium harvesting. Yes, there were a couple of schools built, but that doesn't give a country any perspective.
2. The Taliban come in and promise a return back to old times, and no drone strikes any more, which means they at least don't get resistance any more.
3. The government is corrupt as hell, the army soldiers don't see anything worth fighting for, and they don't have working heavy arms (planes, tanks). That drastically reduces how much resources the Taliban need to take over.
>1. The Western nations didn't do much in terms of actual nation building and giving the country perspective beyond daily drone strikes, poverty and opium harvesting. Yes, there were a couple of schools built, but that doesn't give a country any perspective.
That's true if you don't think adding the female half of the nation to the pool of available talent helps build a nation.
Russia funding the Taliban. Ok.. run that playbook again for how the US funded the muj to undermine Russian investments in Afghanistan. Many thousands of young Russian conscripts died in Russia's Vietnam war. It fundamentally undermined the integrity of belief in the USSR and led directly to the end of soviet rule along with Chernobyl.
I'm not really sure I can make Russia funding the Taliban work. Do you have any actual evidence because this would be like the CIA funding Al queda, in many ways..
I'm insufficiently cynical. All I can say is, this will come back to bite them, if true. Just as US aid for the anti najibulla insurgency fuelled the problems of today.
A lot of Taliban funding comes from Pakistan's ISI, as well as individual elements in Arab countries (prominently Saudi Arabia - wealthy ultra religious folks who might even be distant members of the royal family, but not affiliated to government). Apart from that, the Taliban do have the drug trade to keep them afloat.
There are a few enough Russians in Afghanistan, but afaik, the Taliban are mostly ambivalent to them now. The Taliban mostly targets 3 types of folks - US and NATO people, Afghan government people, and open allies of the Afghan government (countries like India). Uzbekistan and Iran maintain very tight borders with Afghanistan so that the fighting doesn't spill over.
For a very interesting tidbit, even very recently, Taliban was fighting ISIS near Badakhshan and Nuristan.
> I would expect that a group that has been hunted for 2 decades to be only just barely managing to survive - how do they have weapons, transportation, logistics etc to be able to basically get their act together like the past 20 years never happened?
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> Afghanistan's opium poppy harvest produces more than 90% of illicit heroin globally, and more than 95% of the European supply. As of 2017, opium production provides about 400,000 jobs in Afghanistan, more than the Afghan National Security Forces [0]
> In 2020, the area under opium cultivation expanded to 224,000 hectares from 163,000 hectares - overwhelmingly in areas under Taliban control. [1] [2]
> Meth is even more profitable than heroin—and is turbocharging the insurgency.
> The officials described the Taliban as the world’s biggest drug cartel and said the group is using heroin transshipment routes to push methamphetamine into new markets in Australia, Asia, North America, Europe and Africa.[4]
> Later, a NATO report, accessed by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, claimed that Taliban's annual budget had increased to USD 1.6 billion in the financial year 2019-20. It said that the militant group had increased its profits through illicit drug trade, illegal mining, and exports. [3]
The Chinese Communist Party is prepared to recognize the Taliban if (when) they overtake the government.[1][2]
This is a truly historic fuck-up. It's not about it being right to withdraw (it is), but how it's done. We've wasted unfathomable money and time, not to mention lives. Now we have truly nothing gained, we're embarrassed and humiliated, and our enemies emboldened. It's pathetic.
The Chinese and Russians just completed joint military exercises for the first time on Chinese mainland soil. It’s a ratcheting up of their version of NATO - the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
My pet theory is Russia is playing both sides of this. The SCO has been around for 20 some odd years. But recently China and Russia have been fucking with each other and it primarily involves inviting India and Pakistan to join the pact. Anyhow, I imagine Putin is arming and possibly coordinating funding to the Taliban. Once in power the Taliban will become China’s problem in the region and may very well have some excursions past their border with China. So Putin will be able to swoop in to assist with additional military might. It may even become a showcase for the SCO as a NATO-like coalition.
It’ll achieve two objectives: showing that China now is a regional military influence in a former US sphere of influence, and that Russia is still itself a military power that can throw its weight around. And just like the US in Afghanistan and the Soviets before it, this will become China’s problem to deal with long term.
The news coverage has a bit of a vibe of "Things are going south, what are we going to do about it?"
I think the "What are we going to do about it" is implied by not having a conclusion attached to all the "bad" news. But isn't the rapid Taliban takeover 100% proof that we didn't build any sort of sustainable alternative while we were there?
> I think the "What are we going to do about it" is implied by not having a conclusion attached to all the "bad" news. But isn't the rapid Taliban takeover 100% proof that we didn't build any sort of sustainable alternative while we were there?
IIRC, the US pulled too much of the rug out from under the Afghani government too quickly. For instance, I've read the US long ago evacuated the maintenance contractors that maintained the Afghan Air Force, which means they can't fly even if they have the pilots.
How many politicians built their careers on the blood spilt in this pointless and expensive exercise?
Overthrowing governments is awful foreign policy. This was never going to work, just like it didn't in Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, the Congo, Guatemala, Syria and elsewhere.
Here's the kicker: the invasion of Iraq was based on a convenient lie by hawks who had been keen to overthrow Saddam Hussein ever since the First Gulf War. This convenient lie was easily debunked to. It's really simple.
If Saddam Hussein had WMD, why wouldn't he give them up to save himself and his regime? Invasion clearly wasn't an empty threat and that would not end well for him. Hussein was never a religious ideologue. He didn't dream of martyrdom or jihad. He was a self-serving dictator (creates by the US I might add as a tool against Iran in the 1980s in a war that resulted from a revolution against the Shah, a government created by the US; are you beginning to see the pattern?). The only explanation was that Iraq did not in fact have WMDs.
People pointed out in the early days after 9/11 so this isn't some kind of historical revisionism. None of this ever made sense.
The lesson of Gaddafi is that if you ever have even just chemical WMDs, never ever EVER give them up.
The United States will not attack a country that can actually deploy a WMD on it's forces and especially not on its homeland. Even back in the day it was obvious Saddam didnt have WMDs because he didnt use them when America invaded.
> Overthrowing governments is awful foreign policy. This was never going to work, just like it didn't in Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, the Congo, Guatemala, Syria and elsewhere.
The US didn't directly overthrow the government of South Vietnam, but the US did tell the South Vietnamese army that they would lose funding and support if they didn't overthrow Diem in 1963. Given that the army of South Vietnam was basically an appendage of the American military at that point it was a threat the South Vietnamese generals couldn't afford to ignore.
> Overthrowing governments is awful foreign policy. This was never going to work, just like it didn't in Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, the Congo, Guatemala, Syria and elsewhere.
It worked perfectly for the people who implemented the policies and their patrons. The point was never to make average Westerners more secure. It was to hand billions to contractors and oil companies, practice new forms of counterinsurgency and drone warfare, and make token moves against the latest bogeyman used to distract from the empire's exploitation and subjugation of its own people.
All the examples you cite similarly benefitted the elites calling the shots in one way or another.
> creates by the US I might add as a tool against Iran in the 1980s
No, earlier than that as a tool against Communism in Iraq. Later, the US rushed to support him (including in his use of chemical weapons) when he got bogged down in war with Iran that he launched expecting a quick territorial gain, but that's not where US involvement with him started.
Is all material digital at this point? It reminds me of the “Argo” movie(that is supposed to be quite accurate) where the Iranians manage to reconstruct shredded documents that expose the identities of the persons of interest.
They also destroyed a device for encrypted communications. That part must be the easy part these days.
It reminds me of Civ series where you could destroy advanced armies with large enough primitive ones. I used to dismiss it as unrealistic but apparently it wasn’t that unrealistic.
I was never privy to the true details but I suspect that they are making good use of torx screwdrivers and abrasives (wire brush, sandpaper, etc) right about now. It's slower but they have a fairly good amount of time to deal with it.
If they have time they're wiping things first.
You can also just burn them. It's not the Taliban they're worried about, it's the Russian and Chinese spies who will sneak in and pocket stuff, but that's mostly dealt with with policies that keep the kind of info those people would want off of hard drives in an unrelated nation.
Most defense contractor infosec departments will accept video evidence of HDD destruction so long as they do a walk through showing serial numbers so they know which drives are accounted for.
As a result there's tons of videos that the public will never see of the world's heaviest presses, shears and brakes being used to decimate lines of hard drives. When you run a shipyard it's cheaper to just bend hard drives than it is to ship them back to HQ and have infosec deal with them.
One of my jobs as an intern was to take a list of serial numbers and watch the video walk-through and confirm the list matched the drives.
Aircrafts are notoriously fickle. For a helicopter, I heard 4 hours maintenance / 1 hour of flight. There is about zero chance the Taliban have the personnel and parts to actually do something with them other than photo ops.
Even digital material exists in the physical world. Disk drives, flash memory and other storage hardware could still exist and must be destroyed to prevent capture by adversaries.
It's a lot easier to instruct a rack of servers, or even a set of (centrally managed) desktop machines, to wipe itself than it is to physically destroy it, let alone the equivalent amount of information on paper.
Moreover, assuming encryption is in place, destroying the keys without touching the actual data is generally sufficient.
You will probably want to wipe the data then destroy the hardware as defense in depth, but in a dire emergency, taking the one thermite charge to the central key management server and its backup and cutting the power feed to the rest of the infrastructure is going to be good enough.
With human readable information on paper, you simply have no other option than physical destruction, which is an extremely slow and labor-intensive and manual process. Even with preparation, you can't really accelerate it much, whereas with digital information prepared for the possibility of needing emergency destruction, it's a matter of pushing a button and the data is gone less than a second later.
The flipside of that is that the worst crimes of a future surveillance state will likely stay hidden even after it gets toppled, unlike the East German Stasi that failed to destroy many of its documents in time.
If allegations of Russian and Chinese support of the Taliban is true, it’s reasonable to be wary that foreign nation-state agents could acquire the hardware. Better to sabotage the hardware just in case they have the compute resources to break the encryption.
Because it still protects against certain threats. For example it could protect against the case where a laptop is stolen by a petty thief who didn’t realize the device had valuable intelligence.
Gotta love the old style of writing where they prime you by explaining the underlying theory. These days technical documents like this (both government and private industry) just say "do X because we said so, trust us".
>if the drum is tipped over at this point, a greenish liquid slag flows out. This quickly hardens to a cement-like mass.
Knocking the drum over with the forklift was probably the highlight of that private's month.
I particularly like the humor that seems to be universally woven into older NSA documents. I can see why people would want to work there, if you have no moral issues with the nature of the job, it must be (have been?) an interesting, challenging job in a pretty good environment.
During this same day, there were several ominous articles about Afghanistan, yet the one article about Iraq was about a washing machine donation.
This does help tell us something about what went wrong: For all its faults, the Iraq war was better politically conceived than the Afghanistan war - note that I do not say justified. Getting rid of the Sunni Ba'ath and giving power to Iraqi Shiites was a coherent and realistic political objective*, and once the new order was stabilized there was no real chance of going back (no, ISIS could never have realistically threatened Baghdad).
The Afghanistan war never had a coherent political objective, or a realistic idea of the new order it meant to instill. Also, the US never bothered with cutting off the Taliban's support, but instead funded their main sponsor... Add in a spiteful withdrawal almost as if designed to maximize Taliban power and you get this.
In general, political objectives are what decides if you can win these kinds of wars or whether they last forever, but the US let its generals run the war, and generals are bad at political and cultural understanding.
P.S. Did I mention the USSR also did better? Its local flunkies actually held well after the USSR's withdrawal[0], it was only the USSR itself collapsing that eventually did them in.
* Yeah, yeah, America went in for democracy. Right. What do you think democracy means where the country had a Shiite majority? Besides, there's no other way to explain getting rid of all Ba'ath military officers on day 1.
So what was this whole war, its death toll (particularly in "collateral damage" i.e. civilian deaths), its costs good for? Is anyone being held accountable? Will we learn anything from it? Of course not. We need to keep the war machine well oiled so something has to come up.
>So what was this whole war, its death toll its costs good for?
It's a message.
For the next several hundred years every warlord and extremist groups that's about to consolidate power over a nation is going to point at the Taliban and say "we want to run this nation, we don't want our sons to be running it" when kicking out particularly odious house guests who have dreams of attacking the 1st world.
Was it worth it? IDK, doubt it. But that's what we bought at the end of the day. We bought a precedent.
You put forth a quasi-patriotic interpretation and a false premise, as the true benefactors of attacks on the 1st world have long been indicated (though not officially confirmed) to state sponsored groups in Saudi Arabia. Yet there they still stand, completely untouched by the quagmire that was Afghanistan and Iraq for the past 20 years.
Secondly, we gave an entire generation of orphaned children (now adults at this point) all the more reason to focus their rage and frustration at the United States.
I'm not sure what the net effect of all this is down the road, but I don't think it will be a case of these nations fearing the first world. Quite the opposite I think.
I agree with you in principle but in reality it was the US who was deterred, more than Afghanistan (which does not really seem to exist in any sovereign capacity). Warlords can operate with relative impunity knowing the US public would not let another Afghanistan take place.
Well, the thing with religious extremists, who want to leave this world anyway - is that they do not really want to be running things, but they want the world they despise to burn.
One suicide attack - one major war. Mission accomplished for the extremists/terrorists.
And as for the Taliban ... well, they sort of won, didn't they?
Of course they do. They want their country back. They want to pick up where they left off in 2001. And frankly I think they deserve their country back. But I doubt they'll harbor people who attack the first world again. That venture was nothing but a waste of 20yr and blood to them, same as it was to us.
This seems like wishful thinking. If anything they will be egged on to conduct even more sophisticated attacks on the West knowing full well that an invasion will never be politically viable anymore. A whole generation of orphaned and suffering populace will probably also just cheer them on and view them as heroes.
Their country? Tell that to the Hazars. Honestly, the ignorance is baffling. Taliban is a modern construct, and not only did the stand to gain from a civil war, they have also found a common enemy to unite against and also support from their previous enemies the Pakistani Talibans.
There aren’t many ways to cope with this realization. The tipping point was Colin Powell’s “definitive proof” at the UN Counsel that Irak had WMD. As long as such criminals are free, we are not.
Citizen may even too aware of this, as half melt into guilt of what the USA has done, the other half still have hope but also cynicism, even despair.
As for other nations, if I were Iran, Irak, the Talibans, the Afghans, I’d fund efforts to destabilize USA. If I were China, I’d even organize it to ensure it weakens them without weakening the commercial exchanges. If I were Russia I’d tip into the jar too. USA made many enemies, it may be the target of coordinated spy work.
And I say this as a staunch partisan of the USA. We should spend more on looking benevolent.
Cynically? The executive branch got a bunch of new powers in the Patriot act, Halliburton shares soared for a few years, and the only people who were punished were a handful of traditional republicans associated with the Bush administration not already retired before isolationists like Trump took over the party. The main architects all did very well.
I can only hope that the next generation learned not to trust government as quickly, but Vietnam wasn't that long ago so I don't know how realistic that hope is.
the alternative would be US citizens placing no trust in the media or US government, because they became a "blood thirsty mob" under their influence.
people wonder why today so many people are skeptical when it comes to the pandemic and anything else the government says, the government constantly lying to them is the primary cause
With a quarter of a million dead[1], I'm not sure I can agree with "better" for the families of those impacted. On a "Dollars Per Amount of Joy Conferred" metric for success (which I like!), I think this one gets a pretty big negative score.
Feel free to deduct another point or two. That seems to be the case with my comments recently. Welcome to an open discussion on HN ( ...and here's anothecpoint gone for criticism).
I just don't understand why you'd make this comment literally 2 minutes after writing the original one.
1) you can still edit the original to add this remark if you really want to, although it's frowned upon
2) initial downvotes mean nothing, I've had comments go to -10 before jumping back up to +30 few hours later. Why would you complain about it within 3 minutes of posting is beyond me.
My first read on your comment was the tone in it is inflammatory and designed to provoke vs make a point or a validate argument. That is likely why you were downvoted. I can very much be accused of doing the same thing in some of my comments on emotional topics and in general the results are not as good as if I had framed things as a statement or a question without being emotional. YMMV.
3,000 troops to evacuate an embassy seems excessive? How many diplomats are there?
Nonetheless A terrible situation for Afghanistan; I wish the world could help them but I'm not sure what else could be done after trying for two decades.
The 3000 troops aren't solely to hold the embassy, they're to hold the Kabul airport, and to handle the evacuation of diplomats and Afghans who assisted the US, such as translators and non-diplomatic embassy staff.
3000 staff is tiny percentage of the staff of an international airport, even a small one.
> The troops, consisting of two Marine battalions and one Army battalion, will be based at the Kabul airport. They will provide security for an airlift that will fly out U.S. diplomats, as well as Afghans who have worked with the U.S., and the family members of those Afghans.
The US Embassy in Afghanistan is absolutely massive. From July 6 2021:
> the embassy is currently down to 1,400 U.S. citizens and about 4,000 staff working inside the compound the size of a small town.
It's a huge complex and those are the reduced staff numbers. Granted they may or may not actually be evacuating all the local staff (the US has been... not great about getting people who risked their lives to help the US in Afghanistan).
If I recall correctly, some US embassies that have been built in turbulent areas are more accurately described as military bases that just happen to host an embassy. They're heavily fortified and don't resemble what we'd typically think of as an embassy.
"Victory will not be claimed by Pakistan, but tacitly the Taliban will owe it to Pakistan", says Nazir, a retired brigadier and defense analyst in Islamabad.
Pakistan has been allowing Taliban leaders free movement into and out of the country and continues to serve as a safe haven where fighters and their families can receive medical care. With the U.S. intention to leave publicly declared, Pakistan did away with any semblance of denial that the Taliban leadership was sheltering there.
This pullout is so incredibly hasty and poorly thought out. For weeks now, this has been a fast-moving disaster and the media coverage had been so limited until provincial capitals started falling. For those not aware, the first atrocity was that the US failed to think about all the Afghani allies who risked life to work with Americans, such as translators. While the US later scrambled to evacuate some of them (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/us/politics/afghanistan-i...), others were left to fend for themselves and faced brutal consequences like beheadings (https://nypost.com/2021/07/24/translator-who-worked-for-us-a...). For the last two weeks, the Taliban's militias have been systematically taking over one provincial capital after the next, as the Afghani government sees desertions from their uncommitted and relatively untrained military forces.
The US really needs to reverse the pull out and think about what it means to cooperate with a people and nation build. Yes, there have been numerous past missteps and money wasted with little accountability - but nation building, particularly after a war, was always going to be expensive and time-consuming. Leaving the project halfway after all these sunk costs feels like a hasty PR move that is now going to turn into an absolutely disastrous legacy for Biden and for America. I'm glad to see the decision to send 3000 troops into Afghanistan (https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-middle-east-evacuations...), but am concerned that the US's commitment ends at evacuating embassies rather than supporting a nation that clearly needs help if we want a future ally in the region, instead of a future adversary. Let's not return to square one.
We’ve been nation building in Afghanistan for 20 years. It didn’t work and we’ve failed to train a military capable of holding the country even after dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into it.
Have we really been managing that well though? I feel like we haven’t made a great effort at this in a systematic way, with proper accountability of funds, and so forth. I also think this kind of effort may take more like 50 years (more than a one generation thing) to have a voting population and leadership that is ready to carry a stable nation forward.
Especially when neither the terrorists nor the masterminds of 9/11 were Afghani. And especially when Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires for good f*cking reason.
