What happened? (In your opinion)
*Was it Joe Biden?
*Was it Trump?
*Was it intelligence?
*Did Jesus screw us yet again?
*Was it an attack from the FSM?
*Did Led Zepplin have anything to do with it in their song “Allah my Love?”
*or it was most definitely because of (enter opinion here)
Afghanistan is a theocracy. You cannot install a secular democracy in a centuries old theocracy.
Besides, you can never win occupying another country. Regardless of your intentions, you just don’t belong and you will always be seen as the occupier, the interloper.
Wikipedia should help. It’s an area that was always tribal. The warriors often don’t have loyalties to ideals, they just shift to whoever will feed their families. That’s not a statement on their intelligence. Then, Western powers drew lines arbitrarily in the area and told them to act they were part of the modern political world. It hasn’t worked yet.
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In the words of Bobcat Goldthwait:
“They Live in a #!$*%~ Desert!”
But let’s be honest. The US and Russia before didn’t care one bit about the country or the people. It’s about the resources, as in o i l. Any other debate is just debating the cover story.
It may have been in the past, do you think it is still? The US has increased production quite a bit lately.
Though nowadays the interest could be more in Rare Earth metals.
… but at what cost?
And it’s not like we can just march in there and take their resources.
I think it’s rare minerals now. This is pretty much a worldwide problem. We can 't make cellphones is we don’t have world peace. It would be great if at the time the world needed to come together, when we figured out how we all need each other and borders are harming us and we can accept each other’s quirks but share resources, we actually did that.
We started to fail in Afghanistan in 2003 when we shifted focus to Iraq – which allowed the nearly destroyed Al Qaida and Taliban to reassert themselves much stronger than they had been. Around 2006 or so the strategy in Afghanistan turned into nation building rather than finding Bin Laden, and nation building in a place like Afghanistan is impossible.
Afghanistan is not a oil producer.
As for the notion we’re there to take resources, nonsense. We never took any in 20 years and even if we wanted that, there are much easier ways. To start with, we can simply buy them.
Also, if we put mining operations in place we could just use mercenaries to provide security; it’s much cheaper and gives you plausible deniability. That’s how the diamond industry works in Africa, for example.
Why hasn’t anyone brought up Charlie Wilson?
Didn’t USA fail - when we went in there to begin with?
Wasn’t that original error simply compounded during coming decades?
Giving the wrong people too much money and power?
Not living up to our promises?
Abandonment and building resentment, themes to be supercharged in coming decades.
Charlie Wilson’s War : The Man Behind the CIA’s Biggest Covert Operation
Congressman Charlie Wilson was a champion for the covert op that affected the outcome of the Soviet-Afghan War.
OPEN ROAD MEDIA | By Shannon Raphael | Published Jul 11, 2018
We don’t “take”, but we need peace to conduct commerce. We don’t want a government that could hold resources hostage.
The way we conducted that war was quite brilliant, and you know I am not a war monger. The Soviets had a massive tech advantage, so we supplied local militia with small arms, and used horses instead of tanks. Once the Soviets had to fight on the terms of desert warriors, they couldn’t win. One guy could take down a couple helicopters.
Where we screwed up was the “end game”. We just left. We made no treaties, no agreements, spent zero dollars to help rebuild. We didn’t even use the victory as propaganda. Afghanistan was the Vietnam of the USSR, literally bankrupting them and bringing them down. We showed that if the world is against you, one powerful nation can be defeated.
My theory, it showed that a smaller, nibble army is a better weapon in modern warfare. It would have been an argument for reducing our massive military.
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Okay, nicely summarized.
Where did the situation in Afghanistan fail?
For the US it was the moment the commitment was made to have a large ground force present as occupiers.
The neocons nation building strategy through large numbers of troops is an expensive failure.
While not ideal, continuing to aid and supply the former Northern Alliance would have been a better strategy.
What a complicated and difficult question, “Why did we fail in Afghanistan?” In one sense we didn’t. Things happened as dictated by political incompetence, economic opportunism, a belligerent national mood of hubris, and a colossal military and political misjudgement of what we were getting into in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Four things played into bringing this disaster into fruition.
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911 set the stage for two decades of foreign policy blunders beginning with the criminal ineptitude of George Bush who took full advantage of the angry mood of the American people to invade a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 911. Once the ill-fated Iraq War began the entire middle east began an accelerated downward spiral. As a result, American credibility in the region and around the world evaporated. Public support for foreign wars dropped precipitously as thousands of body bags were shipped back home.
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Native populations know that when the American army invades they bring millions of dollars with them. Every Afghan and Iraqi quickly learned there were a lot of advantages to cooperating with the Americans including telling them whatever they wanted to hear whether true or not because money will always produce the activity, information and government policies it eagerly subsidizes, like the 1200 dollars I saw an American officer promise to an Iraqi citizen in a weapon buy back program in Bagdad. (weapons which may have been stolen from the American army to begin with) The “Powell Doctrine” also comes into play. After bombing a city or town to ruins, the natural urge to repair the damage and help the native population predominates. This takes enormous amounts of money, taxpayer money. This tendency morphs into a general effort to justify the war’s damage by the specious rationale that we’ll leave the country in better shape when we do eventually make our exit. It’s called “nation building.”
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Unseen actors who make staggeringly high profits from overseas wars are always more than ready to cultivate politicians who don’t mind sending young men and women into dangerous places knowing that many will lose their lives or be maimed for life, again the profit motive rules, and helping the most ethically malleable politicians get re-elected is a very profitable long-term strategy. These corporations keep a very low profile, and prefer to operate behind the scenes. You won’t see their commercials on the Hallmark Channel but they play a major role in influencing American foreign policy.
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The American people in matters of foreign policy have always been gullible and uninformed. Millions to this day still believe Saddam Hussein was behind the 911 attacks. An uninformed electorate is one that can be easily duped. If the Pentagon wants to keep that mile-wide river of money coming their way (a river that flows to the tune of two thousand million dollars a day, every day, year in and year out) it needs to peddle the self serving lie that our wonderful military heroes are the reason we’re a free people. It’s no more than a calculated fabrication to keep the money coming. All those careers with all those benefits, and all those very lucrative contracts with all those convenient multi-million dollar cost overruns need a plausible mythology to justify. Convincing gullible Americans that spending all this money is the only way to protect our way of life is that mythology and Americans can’t get enough. When mythology and reality clash with each other reality always wins and that’s what’s happening in Afghanistan.
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Invading a country and staying there as uninvited occupiers is why all imperialism fails in the long run. You cannot raise you tent in somebody else’s backyard.
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Very succinctly put,
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And now we see the focus of essentially all media attention being on a disastrous US exit and who is to blame.
Once again, they(the bulk of the media) are fixated on the shiny object in front of them and not asking more important questions.
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The disastrous exit is a fair thing to focus on. It’s a symptom of our overall decline in capabilities.
True enough, although Taliban isn’t allergic to money. We’ve done business with worse governments in the past.