[dotancohen]

  > last time I recall by taliban sheepherders

Part of the reason that Americans prefer to lose that war is because the enemy is called "sheepherders", implying innocent civilians, when the military is winning. The blurring of when a militant is referred to as a civilian has proven to be a very effective tactic to reduce the American population's tolerance for war.

[anonymars]

I'm confused, are you insinuating that the Taliban essentially ran a PR campaign to portray themselves as sheepherders to garner sympathy from the US population to reduce its appetite for fighting them?

[dotancohen]

No, I am stating that there are strong elements in popular media, news providers chief among them, who seek to weaken US influence and use US public opinion to drive that change.

[anonymars]

Why would the US news media seek to weaken US influence (or stop war)? Seems much simpler to assume that "sensationalism sells"

[dotancohen]

I suggest that you query for "Qatari influence in US media" in your favourite search engine or LLM. Many media bodies operating in the land of the free do not represent the interests of the people of that land.

[jazzypants]

The Qataris didn't force us to do stupid shit like invade Iraq and Afghanistan. Our feckless leaders did that. It's nice that you've invented this excuse for our terrible leadership, but it doesn't actually explain away any of our terrible foreign policy decisions of the last century.

[anonymars]

But I'm still not really seeing what the US would have been otherwise likely to do to "win" in Afghanistan? Is the implication that they somehow convinced Trump to prematurely withdraw from Afghanistan because the Taliban were merely sheepherders? Qatari influence certainly didn't seem to play much of a role in his actions this time around