But, this is where people have to realize that “stay the course” thinking is the magical thinking. Objectively it’s as absurd to say that the US should straighten out Afghanistan as it would be for someone to say, “what we need is for the Taliban to come to the US and straighten our political problems”. In a Utopian version of the Universe maybe there’s a well-meaning powerful country that can go and help their Afghanistan, but in this Universe the US is not it and wishing for continued US occupation is just wishing for a status quo of corruption followed by the inevitable - what is happening now.
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I think you’re preaching to the choir here.
Even knowing we had to pull out someday, I’m still grieving for what’s happening to people in Afghanistan right now.
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Spend $50B helping 5 million Afghans come to the US seems like a no-brainer, but in addition to conservatives there’s
BUT HOW ARE WE GONNA PAY FOR IT?!?!?!
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Yeah that’s got to be a big crux of the problem. If the entire populace was against them, even the Taliban couldn’t dominate like they are. There has to be a large ground-swell of support from men and women who think a woman running around on her own outside without a burka is a scandalous offense against god.
It’s really sad. Maybe in 100 years they’ll pull out of the dark ages.
Those textbooks aren’t going to help. Maybe 200 years.
Maybe the next waning empire will be able to invade some sense into them. Sixteenth times the charm!
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China is definitely going to try to exert influence (see the video @Smacc_25 posted earlier), so give them maybe 50 years before they do something silly while trying to build/maintain Silk Road 2.0
I’m not looking forward to seeing hot takes from all the op-ed guys who were raging pro-war slappies 20 years ago.
I was going to say yesterday before that video clip appeared that no doubt with the way the Chinese seem to work is they’ll extract whatever they can charging an absolute fortune for the process saddling Afghans with far more debt and no doubt this will lead to conflict.
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But hasn’t been for years and random Reddits it tends to be more left than right in my experience.
I wouldn’t expect right wing stances being common in anything but clearly defined subreddits.
The general political subreddits have always leaned left.
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I can’t watch that.
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Yea whatever blame you want to put on Obama, Trump or Biden, the quick pivot from launching a war in Afghanistan to launching a war in a completely unrelated country for neocon delusions and/or hubris has to go down as one of the greatest strategic mistakes made in the last 50 years
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For the last 15 years or so, there has been a pretty common take that if we’d have just focused 100% on Afghanistan, we could have ended the Taliban.
Given the events of the last couple weeks, I’m dubious.
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I’m sure a non insignificant amount of current Taliban are sons of people we killed 18 years ago. The cycle is going to repeat forever. You can’t invade a country and fuck everything up without creating generations of enemies.
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I think the best goal should have been to crush the Al Qaeda camps and knock the Taliban around enough that they’d get the message that hosting terrorists with international ambitions would be a bad idea, but ultimately not do nation building, but even if you thought that nation building was achievable starting a completely non related war for reasons completely orthogonal to the overall strategical goal doomed any attempt at either.
The last 17 years has just been a glide path since that decision.
Given the evidence of US failures in countries with jungles or mountain ranges I’d say the odds are very much against it and in favour of a significant guerrilla war lasting for as long as they stay.
Agreed, but it’s more than just that though. We created enemies in Vietnam, The Philippines, Japan, Korea, Nicaragua, Hawaii, Mexico, Indian reservations, and a ton more places. Over time, people generally tend to move on rather than live in hatred.
It’s creating enemies + medieval fanatical religion imo. And in our case - helping create the fanatical religion because it suited our purposes in the cold war.
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