[spamizbad]

The US brought the practice of Bacha bazi[1] back into the mainstream with the tasset approval of the US military (basically US service members aren't permitted to interfere or discourage it). It was banned and severely punished under the Taliban.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi

[bostonsre]

Again, not saying both sides are without fault, but everyone seems to ignore the fact that the taliban do horrible shit too. What do the taliban do to girls that go to school?

The war is not black and white; good versus evil. Almost nothing in the world is that simple and straightforward. Do you honestly think it would become a great place to live if the US just withdrew?

This is not a competition to count up who did more worse stuff. We as a country have been caught in a slippery slope with no easy completely morally correct way out. The fact is that we are in the war now and playing monday morning quarter back does nothing.

I'm sure that our country didn't think their actions of having americans in saudi arabia would have pissed off Osama and the countless other hijackers bad enough that they attacked us on 9/11. But the fact is they did, then the Taliban provided safe haven for them and our only option to try to avoid similar attacks in the future was to go in and get rid of the safe haven. If we leave now, the taliban will take over and it will be a safe haven again. If we stay, our fellow americans continue to die in an ugly horrible war.

Where was the easy right morally correct answer in any of that that was readily apparent at the time?

[082349872349872]

Maybe one easy right morally correct answer would have been to have not given manpads to the Taliban in the 80's?

[bostonsre]

Maybe, but I think its debatable and not exactly black and white. We were terrified of communism and communist countries haven't exactly turned out to be a bastion of humanity. Again, I think it was a shit situation with shit choices. They were our allies. Russia was invading and slaughtering them. Would the "right" thing to do really be to let it continue and not help them?

[aebtebeten]

Certainly debatable, by all means. As to a bastion of humanity, I see that the people of the Warsaw Pact countries managed, once they decided their System wasn't doing what they'd been brought up to believe it should, to change it with very little violence.

In a better world, the soviets would have done all the hard work to introduce minor things like school for girls[1] to afghanistan in the early eighties, and then it would have gone capitalist along with the rest of the ex-soviet -stans, nearly bloodlessly, in the early nineties.

Help afghanis, yes. Help the taliban? That was a poor, even a foreseeably poor, decision.

[1] for an idea of the variation in that part of asia, compare music videos from tajikistan and from iran, for example...

[bostonsre]

Yes, those countries absolutely turned out well, but at the time it wasn't clear that communism was going to fall and that the outcome for any of those countries could be positive at all. The counter point to the countries that exited communism well are the autocratic countries like Russia, Belarus and China. Also, at the time, I can understand the extreme fear of communism that the leaders in America had at the time. It was the cold war, we know of nothing similar to the persistent existential threat of armageddon that people on both sides of the conflict experienced every day. People were scared, it seems rational that both sides pushed hard to prevail and they each tried to pick the least shitty option out of a set of shitty options.

Also, what other options did we have to help afghanis at the time? There were definitely numerous cons to supporting the taliban, but weren't they the most capable organization at waging war in the area at the time? I guess we could have tried to find more moderate opposition to the Russians but that would have come at the cost of having less capable opposition to the Russians.

I'm sure that some of our leaders, members of the CIA, and soldiers may have been corrupt and self serving in their decisions but I would argue that a majority of them were rational and honorable individuals who were doing their best to uphold the oaths they made to protect America. They were figuratively and some times literally giving their lives to something they truly believed in. It doesn't seem right to cast them all under the bus and say they were corrupt evil individuals without exercising empathy and contemplating what they knew at the time and the choices that were laid out in front of them.

[aebtebeten]

Yeah, I tend to forget that anti-communism was so strong and so reflexive a tenet of US foreign policy that they were willing to support the Khmer Rouge on that basis.

(I'm not attempting to say that people were making corrupt decisions, I'm sure they were trying to do their best. What I'm attempting to say is that "providing advanced technology to people whose values are entirely contrary to yours" is not only in retrospect stupid, but should have been notably stupid at the time as well.)