It’s hard to imagine any politician being able to sell their voters on “we’ll stay there as long as we feasibly can”, because that’s what the US signed up for after 9/11. The scope of the project crept almost immediately from kill AQ, punish Taliban to Nation Building because there was no standing state to punish and most of the leaders involved just melted away. Now, the way the US is pulling out, makes it very likely that Afghanistan will once again become a hub for Islamic terrorists from all over the world.
The root of it is this idea that war could be a "tool of liberation", looking backwards with rose-colored glasses at WWII. It was a brilliant compromise between neo-liberals (to whom the idea was very comforting) and the U.S. Military Industrial Complex (who has made trillions of dollars off of this flawed notion).
With all the money and resources spent in that country promoting something most of the people there never wanted, we probably could have been carbon neutral 3 or 4 times over.
We gave up so many of our freedoms at home - went collectively insane for two decades out of some abstract fear of "terrorism". The number of Americans _alone_ who died (and probably will die in the future) as a result of this miscalculation is a huge scalar multiple of the life and property lost on 9/11.
The Pax Americana that the post-Cold-War era promised is shattered. Even the one "silver lining": That this one poor little country would be a place where women would be more free and have a little better life... And maybe something good would come out of that. Even that is gone now.
I agree, it's just hard to salvage any kind of positive outcome from this - especially considering the huge opportunity costs.
> The root of it is this idea that war could be a "tool of liberation", looking backwards with rose-colored glasses at WWII.
You know, it's hard for war to be a "tool of liberation" if you do literally nothing to foster the basics of a free/liberal society in the places you went to war for. WWII is not a proper comparison at all; pre-WWII Europe did of course have a robust civil society, very much unlike Afghanistan. The thing about places like Afghanistan is that politicized religion is the closest they get to something even loosely comparable to what we'd call free/civil society in the West!
To be fair, it wasn't abstract, though one could argue that particular attack was a one-off that could never be successfully repeated. But there were other concerns of dirty bombs, anthrax, etc. at the time.
That said, it's truly a shame that the US abandoned Afghanistan to invade Iraq. Afghanistan seemed to have potential for nation-building had we not diverted and diluted our efforts with Iraq.
It's potentially possible that Bin Laden might have been extradited, if the US had provided evidence instead of bombs. Not sure how likely an extradition would have been though, even if strong evidence was provided.
Should we have kept 10,000 US soldiers on the ground permanently to prevent this? Seems like a very small cost.
Perhaps the US could have purchased land from Afghanistan, which isn't so much of a unified country anyway. They could have established permanent bases from which they could aid the Afghanistan government and project power against other regional adversaries (ie. China, Iran, and "ally" Pakistan). The monetary injection would have helped too.
There's no way this pull out doesn't look bad for the Biden administration. This is going to be a major election year topic and we're going to hear how Democrats "hate women" and freedom. What a quagmire.
No, that is the worst idea and the root of the problem.
Those "10,000 soldiers" are 18-year-old kids. With guns. In a place where they are scared, angry, bored and have no frame of reference understand the culture. What happens in that situation is about what you'd expect to happen, even when they are the "best trained in the world". The longer you keep them there, the more angry the locals are going to be.
Taliban aren't the locals. Nor do the locals like the Taliban. More so this argument makes no sense when the Taliban had been suicide bombing Afghan civilians for decades and causing many times more civilian casualties.
Lets assume you are American and please humour me.
Your Midwestern state government collapses and loses the ability to defend its territory and the Feds cannot help you for whatever reason.
Two rival factions move in
- a Canadian warlord and his men: They terrorize the locals but otherwise spend time drinking light beer, listening to Steppenwolf and driving around in Pontiac Trans Ams hooting and waving guns around. They promise guts and glory to young men kicking dust in town.
- a division of the Pakistani military: they are generally professional, minus friction with the occupied population. They think fast cars, beer and stadium rock are impediments to a moral society, so they suppress these things and try to impose their values on the local population.
Do you imagine the local population would be happy with having either faction around?
Do you think that they would all gravitate towards the more professional legitimate faction vs the Canadian warband?
The Taliban are hardline, repressive and familiar. There is most definitely an overlap between the worldview of the Taliban and the local population, including how they view the role of women. They are just more extreme and militarily organized.
The US are foreign and have very little in common with (or knowledge of) how the Pashtuns live. Maybe they have a small amount in common with urban, secular Afghan society.
If the Taliban were grossly unpopular across the entire society, how are they able to make the gains they are?
> Should we have kept 10,000 US soldiers on the ground permanently to prevent this? Seems like a very small cost.
Is this sarcasm?
> There's no way this pull out doesn't look bad for the Biden administration. This is going to be a major election year topic and we're going to hear how Democrats "hate women" and freedom. What a quagmire.
I think it looks pretty good for him. A president that finally stopped wasting US taxpayer money for people US taxpayers do not prioritize.
We've had much more troops in Japan, Korea, Germany for many more decades. The Taliban wasn't able to push into any major populated area with just 2,500 US troops.
Those troops are under essentially no threat with the exception of Korea and that is tiny. Having troops do more than occupy space is massively expensive and dangerous for them.
Keeping troops in developed, desirable countries is probably far cheaper than Afghanistan. Regardless, the point is what is the long term goal of keeping 2,500 troops, or even 1 troop in Afghanistan? There are lots of places in the world mired in conflict and poverty.
That's still 20 years of attempted infrastructure and education. I knew at least one person in graduate school that would not have been there. Just because this is a tragedy doesn't mean everything is dead.