[sudosysgen]

What is conventional war? Do you think that the Chinese or Russians will play nice and play war ship for ship, plane for plane and tank for tank against the US like the Iraqis did at the beginning?

The US military generally has a very "meh" track record.

[xxpor]

Otoh, the us was able to maintain the status quo with the taliban being relegated to the mountains with 3500 troops against ~75000 taliban. The DOD has over 1 million troops at their disposal. If you seriously think Afganistan was more about absolute power vs political willingness.. I just don't know what to say.

[sudosysgen]

That isn't actually right. Yes there were 3500 actual soldiers on the ground, but they also had tens of thousands of afghans they would use for a lot of the dirty work, and multiple thousands of other support personnel necessary outside of Afghanistan. And that was just during the drawdown, during surges there were even more at various points in time.

As for sheer numbers of troops, the US doesn't have the capability to actually outfit, support, and deploy anywhere near a million troops in, for example, the middle east.

[saxonww]

I guess it's arguable what the actual whole truth is in Afghanistan, but a lot of writing on it paints the Afghan troops themselves as being unprepared to defend themselves and in many cases unreliable. We were ostensibly trying to help organize and train them, but just being there doesn't mean people will be inspired to take the risks and do the job.

It's also not the first time a highly motivated group of rebels won a guerrilla conflict in Afghanistan. The USSR fought a 9 year unsuccessful war in Afghanistan too, if you don't recall, after probably helping destabilize and overthrow the government; the current Taliban leadership grew out of factions of the mujahideen that ousted the Soviets back in the 1980s.

I'm no military expert, but it does seem like the US is not geared towards massive troop deployments right now. I've always thought that's because the expectation is that we won't have a massive troop war like WW1/WW2 again.

[sudosysgen]

The USSR was actually fairly successful once they figured out that brute force was never going to work, and executed the crazy leader of the national government to replace him with a more moderate leader. Their puppet state survived over a year without Soviet support, until Yeltsin sanctioned them. That's something the US never managed to do, not even close, and it took them 9 years instead of 20. Likely if the USSR wasn't moribund the puppet government could have pulled through long enough to start a process of consolidation.

And that's despite massive and direct US support to the Mujahideen, which the US didn't have to worry about.

Afghanistan was a winnable war. The way to win the war was, from the outset, to build a strong state that is fairly self-sufficient and motivated to defend itself, without too much corruption. The US military wasn't able to do that. At every turn they were ineffective in rooting out corruption and moral decay, didn't have anywhere near a workable vision for a path out of the Afghan disaster, and lacked the ability to implement a stable political system.

I agree that the US isn't geared towards massive troop deployments. That's why it's absurd to trot out troop numbers as the person I was replying to did.

[dragonwriter]

> after probably helping destabilize and overthrow the government

“Probably”?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Storm-333

[saxonww]

Yeah I was trying to be more neutral bc I have not studied the history in detail, I just know the high points.