[forkLding]

Afghanistan was a war of attrition that the locals felt the most of. Likely one of those wars that your dad and granddad fought (if you trace it back from the Soviet invasion) and somehow you also ended up fighting in. After a while everyone gets tired and they want to live in peace and not die in a war.

Can see why it ended the way it did.

[nullifidian]

It wasn't anywhere near close to a war of attrition. It was a war of different value systems, and one of these value systems simply can't win certain types of war. For Taliban it was not a problem to hide among the civil population, and for the Americans it was problematic to commit China-style ethnocide, or at the least institute authoritarianish high-security measures, depopulate the rural areas, to actually win this war.

[forkLding]

War of attrition encompasses guerrilla warfare which is what the Taliban used, see definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attrition_warfare

War of attrition does not mean casualty numbers, it means the goal of the war is to wear down the enemy so that their will to fight collapses which both the Taliban and the US tried to do, see: https://www.csis.org/analysis/afghan-war-attrition-peace-tal...

[forz877]

>War of attrition does not mean casualty numbers

War of attrition almost certainly requires high continual casualty numbers, it's literally in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article:

> Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel.

[darkerside]

Much like the Napoleonic invasion of Moscow, the key was home field advantage. Not in the classic Russian winter sense.

Once Napoleon's army arrived in Moscow, there was a "what now" aspect to the war. They'd accomplished the goal that was set out and defeated Russia, but they didn't actually want to live in Moscow. So, they eventually left to go fight the Russian army, which had seemingly and unbelievably abandoned its crown city to the invaders. But they hadn't. Because Moscow was home, whether it was filled with these unseemly visitors or not. There was no way Napoleon's forces could win unless the Russians actually decided to sign a piece of paper and let them.

[zarzavat]

That works if you want to win the land. China only wants the land in Xinjiang, they would be ecstatic if the whole place was Han Chinese.

The US by contrast has enough territory already, they don't want or need Afghan soil. Instead they went to war so that Afghanistan would have their chosen government. The only way to do that is to colonize it and exert direct control. They never committed to that (it's kind of frowned upon internationally), so it was a failure.

[kiba]

I don't believe these measures contrary to our values would be something that helps us "win" the war, especially not in way that we would have liked.

But I do believe that the American people's heart were not into the fight, especially when it became a "forgotten" war. If we commit our full effort and our mind, we might have won the way we would stomach.

In the end, if this is not the kind of war the American people are willing to fight, then we shouldn't entered them.

[sureglymop]

The goal was never to "win". It was to build up an army (the afghan army) that could eventually stand by itself and defend the government in place.

This was a largely failing effort even years ago, considering that most of the afghan army were made up of people from the north of Afghanistan and previous geopolitics (north/south) play a role. The people in the south would at times trust the taliban over sympathisers for the previous northern warlords which had influence over members of the afghan army.

See this documentary (from 8 years ago) about how utterly lost and helpless this situation has always been: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI

[int_19h]

Speaking of north/south divisions... I once spoke with a young adult Afghan refugee who got naturalized in New Zealand - this was a couple years after the Taliban fell. I asked him how he felt about that. I certainly didn't expect the response.

He said that Taliban were dangerous religious fanatics, but at least they were predictable fanatics - they had a set of laws, some very harsh, that you had to follow, or else. On the other hand, the Northern Alliance forces, in his telling, were basically just looters - they didn't bring better laws so much so as no laws, just a free-for-all where the guy with the gun takes whatever he wants. So his solution to that dilemma was to emigrate, but he told me that if he couldn't do that, he'd prefer Taliban.

[throwaway0a5e]

> The goal was never to "win". It was to build up an army (the afghan army) that could eventually stand by itself and defend the government in place.

And we've done just that.

We're just not willing to admit that at the 11th hour we threw up our hands, said fuck it and decided that army would be the Taliban.

We literally handed them a country and all the shit they need to not be somebody's puppet.

If we had accepted that we'd just be turning over the country to the same old bunch of hard line jerks 10yr ago we could have better prepped for this moment but leaving the place on unstable footing is simply the price of deluding ourselves. I hope for everyone's sake it doesn't turn into a war torn shithole again.

[kiba]

By "win", I meant whatever strategic goal, clearly defined, we hope to accomplish there. And then we spend our full effort to achieve that.

If we do not know our goals, and not willing to spend blood and treasure, then what are we doing there?

[arminiusreturns]

The problem is the real goals are not revealed to the public, so all the wishywashy stuff about unclear goals is just to fool onlookers while the real goals were accomplished. Anybody who bought into the whole "no such thing as the deep state" in the anti-Trump furor of the moment is foolishly naive in contrast with the reality behind both Afghaniatan but also Iraq and the GWOT generally.

In a land were so many self-appointed technocrats clamor for censorship, soon discussion of the real hefty topics at play will become badspeak and premptively banned, removed, silenced.

For example,have fun trying to say one thing about how Israel and Suadi Arabia both had more involvement in 9/11 than Afghanistan did without immediatedly being attacked.

Its easier to talk about 3-letter motivations like continued drug, gun money going into black book coffers so they dont have to account to congress only because its something more in the mainstream mind.

Another topic thats generally forbidden? Analysis of the media machine that pushed us into war(s) in the first place.

I could go on. The point is the real goals are not the presented goals. If you understand that you have a much better chance at real insight.

[AniseAbyss]

I disagree, in the beginning the Americans were hopeful they could impose a puppet state with permanent US military bases. Look at a map and you can see the allure. Nobody in the region was particularly enthusiastic with that idea.

[mcguire]

Nobody was particularly enthusiastic about the Taliban, either. Except perhaps the Pakistanis, who wanted a relatively friendly, stable country on their border (IIRC, there was an oil/gas pipeline involved.)

[merpnderp]

Afghanistan has always been poor and its people fractured because it was cut off from the world by its topography, but topography can be overcome.

If the US had spent the last 20 years building infrastructure, railroads, highways, mining operations, schools to train engineers, managers, and professionals, Afghanistan would likely look a lot different.

But the US missed even low hanging fruit like making poppies a legitimate crop by giving Afghanistan a cut of the legal opioid market.

[nemo44x]

60% of Afghanistan is illiterate. An improvement from when NATO forces invaded 20 years ago, but not too much better. I don’t think your infrastructure dreams would have had any efficacy.

[merpnderp]

What does someone working in a primitive mine need with literacy? It would be a job that paid a lot better than subsistence farming and might allow that person to send their kids to school to become engineers.

Without railroads and highways, Afghanistan will never move forward. It should have been the first thing we did, and not only to link up cities, but to locations with large amounts of natural resources to build up some wealth and industry.

[watwut]

It was making training army difficult for American troops for example. Soldiers complained about it.

Such high illiteracy rates will make it impossible to build enough of management and general bureaucracy needed to build anything large. It will make it hard to train workers in technology. You won't build railroads nor roads, you won't mainten them either.

Primitive mines are not competitive. They are not producing enough to feed you. And hungry people won't save money for school. You need technology.

[MichaelGroves]

> 20 years building infrastructure, railroads, highways, mining operations, schools to train engineers, managers, and professionals

20 years? Zahir Shah tried this for 40 years. Amanullah Khan also tried, as did several others. Numerous would-be reformers have thought as you do and tried to impose change on Afghanistan, and all their efforts have culminated in the situation we have now. It's been approached from a number of ideological/political directions. Some were monarchs, others proponents of republics. The PDPA/Soviets tried it from a Marxist/Leninist angle with lots of bloodshed, while Zahir Shah tried to create a constitutional monarchy and refrained from murdering his political opponents. Neither succeeded in the end.

What would you bring to the table that hasn't been tried before?

[chillwaves]

Modern technology? A trillion dollars?

[mcguire]

Keep in mind that, whether or not the initial invasion of Afghanistan was justified, it immediately became a football in the US political game. George W. Bush was elected on a platform that included "no nation building", and he certainly didn't. (I have a personal theory that the invasion of Iraq was solely due to the fact that the war in Afghanistan as of 2002-3 was not going to get Bush re-elected. Bush also failed to include the costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in his 2005 budget (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/03/us/president-s-budget-pro...).)

The war in Afghanistan was started badly, continued thoughtlessly, and, naturally, ended poorly. As it was originally destined to do.

[ramblenode]

> and one of these value systems simply can't win certain types of war.

You are suggesting that it is the US's gentlemanly morals that puts it at such a disadvantage as to make "winning" impossible. But what is "winning" absent those values? More dead Taliban at the cost of more dead civilians? If that is "winning" for the US, it is almost certainly not "winning" for the Afghans who live in the country and would prefer to be alive.

But say you kill more Taliban while generally tolerating civilian casualties, then what? The US is no longer a force protecting Afghans from the Taliban, but a force bent on conquering the land of Afghanistan. The Taliban will increasingly look like liberators against a bloodthirsty invader whose raison d'etre for occupying the country is not the livelihood of Afghans but to install a puppet government. The Taliban will regrow, resupplied by the friends and family of civilian dead, and emboldened with a moral mandate.

The more you "win", the more enemies you create for tomorrow. At the strategic level, there is no winning, only various ways to lose more slowly. But eventually the outcome is the same, as it has been in all Western colonies. The difference is that in the old days, the goal was just to extract wealth from a place, not to reconstitute its population (though the French did try).

[jeltz]

Then why did the Americans not accept the Taliban surrender? No, this was not a war of value systems, this is just proof of how hard someone can fight if you do not allow them to surrender.

[mcguire]

I can recommend 21st Century Ellis: Operational Art and Strategic Prophecy for the Modern Era, edited by B. A. Friedman. It is a collection of articles written by Ellis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Hancock_Ellis) starting with one on the Philippine-American War, an early example of a loose manual on how to handle counter-insurgency.

It also contains his "Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia" which was essentially the US Marines portion of the Navy's plans for WWII in the Pacific.

[MichaelGroves]

> commit China-style ethnocide, or at the least institute authoritarianish high-security measures, depopulate the rural areas

The PDPA and Soviets tried this, and it didn't work. Together they killed tens of thousands of combatants and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians. Millions more were displaced. And what did they get for that bloodshed? Certainly not the reform they sought.

You may as well try to crush a fistful of water.

[tonyedgecombe]

The West had some influence over that, we were busy propping up the opposition.

[xtian]

You’re saying the US was constrained by its strong sense of morality? https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-to...

[clipradiowallet]

> Can see why it ended the way it did.

If we learn from all that history, I would imagine it has not ended at all.

[NonContro]

After reading this article, Afghanistan doesn't seem inherently like a war of attrition at all.

"Men fought, men switched sides, men lined up and fought again. War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends"

It seems more like renaissance Europe, where armies of Condottiero would parade against eachother, and the smaller or less extravagant side would back down.

This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'.

"The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war"

- Julian Assange, 2011

Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of dragged out death and destruction is a fair outcome for the country.

[at-fates-hands]

>> This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'.

The role of the US went from hunting and killing Taliban to not allowing them a permanent base from which to launch terror attacks to "nation building" where the military was then building schools and gas stations. The US never wanted a "bloody war". If they did, they could end the Taliban in the span of a few weeks, just like they did ISIS. It wouldn't be a war, it would be a rampage for which many in the US population and politicians wouldn't have the stomach for. Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties.

>> Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of death and destruction is actually the best possible outcome for the country.

I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country."

[captain_price7]

> If they did, they could end the Taliban in the span of a few weeks, just like they did ISIS. It wouldn't be a war, it would be a rampage...

This whole paragraph seems utterly bizarre.

US did NOT "end" ISIS, certainly not alone. Most of the fighting and dying was done by Shia and Kurdi forces inside Iraq whose lives literally depended on stopping ISIS. US failed in Afghanistan precisely because no such ally existed.

And, what exactly do you mean by "rampage"? There seems to be an awful implication- "if US forces didn't bother about civilian casualties, Taliban could be surely defeated". Which I suppose is true, there can't be any Taliban if there isn't any more afghan.

[chillwaves]

That's the product of American exceptionalism, the dominance of war culture in our media and (perhaps) a poor history curriculum in public schools.

[ramblenode]

You're oversimplifying. It took the US a full decade, with countless military intelligence resources, to find and kill their #1 target, OBL. But somehow if we were just more aggressive, all the enemies could have been quickly swept up?

These are soldiers who don't wear uniforms. There is no standing army or targets to "rampage" through, unless you mean entire villages. You're saying if the US had just been less tolerant of civilians, more Taliban would be dead. And what of the relatives of the civilian dead? Now they are your enemy, and the Taliban regrows like a hydra. Keep killing without regard, and now whole tribes side with the Taliban against the clear enemy. Provinces flip, and eventually the whole country is filled with an enemy you created.

The mission changes character once a critical mass of the country supports the other side. Certainly it would not be "nation building", just outright occupation, which works exactly as long as an overwhelming force is present. The conclusion would have been the same in the end.

[jessaustin]

It took the US a full decade, with countless military intelligence resources, to find and kill their #1 target, OBL.

ObL might have been at "Tora Bora" at some point in 2001. After that, he wasn't even in Afghanistan. How hard could they really have been looking, if they didn't even look in the right country?

[watwut]

> Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties.

While US army is significantly better then Taliban, the surgical strikes killed civilians fairly regularly and wish to protect civilians is not exactly "above and beyond".

> I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country."

I think that OP meant "compare to 2 years long war after which Taliban takes power anyway". That was the estimation as America was leaving - that ANA will be able to hold off for two years. They were not expected to win, but they were not expected to fold that fast.

[ilammy]

> They were not expected to win, but they were not expected to fold that fast.

There was no way they did not know US assessment of the capabilities. Why would you fight a war that you know you're not likely to win anyway?

Only if you genuinely believe US advisers are delusional and your side will certainly prevail.

[watwut]

US advisors were delusional, that seem to be sure now.

I mean, I agree with that logic, theoretically. Theoretically, if you know you will loose in 2 years, it is better to not fight and hope your treatment will be better as result.

But, groups did hold up and fought lost or seemingly lost wars. It is not just that they logically concluded it is all helpless and gave up. That does not seem to be the only or primary factor here.

[at-fates-hands]

>> US advisors were delusional, that seem to be sure now.

The numbers the military were giving them were completely inaccurate.

Biden said the Afghan army was 400K strong. It was not. It wasn't even close. The most recent figures put the Afghan army conservatively at 170K. Imagine touting a 4:1 advantage and then realizing, it's more like a 1:1 contest.

The Taliban numbers were way off too. The media and politicians were saying they had 50-75K, when in reality their numbers are closer to 100K if not more. Even back in 2018 they were saying they were 85K+.

The military chiefs saying they had trained that many Afghans was also wildly inaccurate. One of my family members was part of the Marines who were tasked with training the Afghans. He said it was nearly impossible to train them because they never took it seriously. They never expected the US to leave them. For many, it was a cushy paycheck that put them on easy street - it was never about defending their country, or having a sense of patriotism or duty. He repeatedly called them "clowns" and after a year, he asked to be reassigned and told his superiors the training was useless and there was no way these men would fight anybody, even with the best equipment and training they provided.

The assessments being made were incredibly off base and not even close to being accurate. The information that should've been coming out of there was the Afghan force was very small, barely trainable, and would never fight the Taliban or any other group regardless of how much you pay them or equip them or train them. Instead, politicians were repeatedly fed a fantasy about how the Afghans had a huge force, were trained by the best and fully capable to defend their country when the draw down or withdrawal happened.

When you talk to people who were over there and ask them what they saw and experienced? None of them are surprised by what happened. When you ask the Joint Chiefs and politicians in Washington? Total confusion and shock.