That’s where we disagree.
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south korea went from war to a place we think of as a democracy. it feels like it may have been one full generation, but aren’t they constantly in the state of war/cease-fire?
it’s kinda pointless to think of war/atrocities it as a chicken and egg, when they simply occur together all the time. war doesn’t always start with atrocities, and atrocities can start without war.
Can you give examples of authoritarian regimes ending peacefully? South Africa maybe? That took decades of outside pressure. Pakistan doesn’t look good. China has been at peace for a relatively long time.
The democratic part of Korea is the one where the US stayed involved. After 60 years without significant military engagements I don’t think that “state of war/cease-fire” mean very much even if technically true.
Democracy came to South Korea in 1987 sorta, but not really until 1993. For the generation after the Korean War it was a brutal dictatorship that happened to be aligned with the US/West.
A lot of changes in government happen after some kind of internal conflict, but the history of outside powers curing countries with war is horrible.
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afghanistan pre-soviet invasion was a soviet satellite that was ruled by one party under the premise of progress. it may have looked “relatively liberal” compared to USSR itself, but famous kabul women photo notwithstanding, it was not a democracy.
in the 70s, state power turned over from a monarchy in two successive coups only four years apart: one non-violent, other military. DPA itself fractured and radicalized (quite possibly encouraged soviet meddling), which prompted soviets to invade and try to save their influence in '79. it didn’t work obviously.
Yep - I obv care about my bil but am pretty ambivalent on Afghan politics if I’m being honest. No clue what the best way to handle the situation is, but am fairly certain we won’t get it right.
I know we’re not all into specific quality of life indicators, but I learned a lot from this:
Pages 31-34 were eye openers for me.
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That is assuming it’s true. If there’s one thing I’ll never ever take at face value it’s statistics produced during a US military occupation. They’ve literally never been anything but heavily manipulated propaganda. And I’m not pulling this out of my ass, this is the recorded history of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan… and the government has admitted to the bullshit in the figures in Vietnam and Iraq already. There’s no possible reason to think the Afghan numbers weren’t totally cooked as well.
They’ve been telling us that the Afghan military will be ready to fight this fight on their own in a few years since I was sixteen years old. I’m 36 now.
I would never trust the U.S. Military either.
Citations start on p. 45.
The report specifically cites “CIA World Factbook” on the statistics you mentioned from pages 31-34.
And the department of defense. And a bunch of entities that get their funding from the federal government. And the UN, who are very much on our side of this conflict.
This is kind of the problem with statistics from a war zone… they’re literally never accurate. There are no reliable narrators available.
This ‘no one has any credibility’ viewpoint is extremely toxic outside of war zones, but the reason it persists is that it is extremely useful inside of war zones.
So one of those indicators was life expectancy. How does that period compare to other periods, like between the end of Soviet occupation and the beginning of US occupation?
With the amount we spent on the war we could have instead given $50,000 to every single person in Afghanistan, a country where annual per capita GDP is somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 bucks. We absolutely could have done the thing we claimed we were going there to do if we had wanted to spend any money on actually improving Afghani lives.
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Yeah but how would that increase the stock prices of Northrup Grumman or Lockheed Martin?
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No, but what is the alternative here? It’s already the longest war in US history and we’ve burned unfathomable resources into the situation with nothing to show for it. Do we spend another 20 years mired in this shit?
When I was a kid we all as a country laughed our asses off at the USSR getting their asses kicked by the Afghanis. And it only took them 9 years to figure it out.
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Krakauer’s Pat Tillman book has a great primer on the history of Afghanistan (and a great book all around) if anyone is interested.
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Grunching. This is a bad take. For most of human history most territories have been ruled by people that the locals didn’t want. One group winning a military struggle has limited correlation with popular consent.
Its just a fundamental misunderstanding of how power works.
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