Afghanistan exit strategy

Meh. The Taliban itself was grown in the Madrassas of Pakistan and backed by Pakistani intelligence. The US didn't come in as an imperialistic nation, but instead was responding to an attack by a Taliban ally after they refused to turn over the architects of those attacks. Even then they cooperated with the remnants of the previous government that the Taliban overthrew by violence, the Northern Alliance. That democratic government would not now be in place without the US.

When Afghan President Hamid Kharzai refused to sign a security agreement with the US, Obama started drawing down troops. It went from 100K to 16K in his tenure. It's down to 2500 now.

To put it in context, about 4,000 Americans lost their lives in Afghanistan in the last 20 years. The Afghan government's security forces working with the US and NATO to secure their own government have lost 62,000 by their own estimate.

Here's an even crazier thought, give it back to the people.

I meant to get back to this. Anc is exactly right here, it's because we turned our backs on Afghanistan after helping the Mujaheddin kick out the Soviets that things went the way they did. If we had just stayed engaged, spent some money in the place, the whole area would probably be a lot more calm these days.

build hospitals or schools at home or in Afghanistan? If it's Afghanistan that sounds good in theory, but corruption at many levels made that very difficult.

Don't kid yourself it's much different in the US.

No, at home.

Stay well clear of Afghanistan.

Of course there's corruption in the US - and the UK too, for that matter.

No, it doesn't rise to the level of what's in Afghanistan. In 2017, it ranked 177th out of 180 countries in corruption, the allies of Karzai had siphoned off a billion dollars of US investment for their personal use, drug use is ubiquitous throughout their army, their police almost universally supplement their income through bribes, and even government works are almost entirely dependent on a bribery system. And don't get me started on the roving pedophilia rings in their military.

Afghans themselves rate their judiciary as the most corrupt of all their institutions, so there's little chance of any of this being addressed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corru...n Afghanistan is a,place out of 180 countries.

This is why the Taliban remain a viable force - their purity message, however militaristic and misguided, rings true to many in Afghan society because there is so much overt crime committed by those in charge.

I'd absolutely call that imperialism, but more importantly so would an awful lot of Afghans, because they've seen it all before both first hand and throughout their history.

Every imperialist nation acts with pretext, some stronger than others. Sometimes they can even appear justified if you squint and ignore the whiff of hypocrisy, especially if their leaders actually believe in what they are selling.

The US (preceded by Russia and Christendom) invaded as a punitive measure for not handing over a wanted fugitive. Regardless of the scale of that individual's crime it was never a proportionate (or even likely productive) response to occupy their country for twenty years costing all those lives and billions, contributing to the rise of ISIS and yet again destabilising the region.

When you build schools and hospitals that's exactly what you are doing.

The mercenaries (who outnumber US troops 7 to 1) aren't leaving. They're not going to stop bombing Afghanistan at will. Sounds like much ado about very little, this.

I was thinking more like a tax rebate or something like that.

Sadly a tax rebate doesn't raise education standards or healthcare. Nor does it help the homeless or unemployed.

Were other imperial powers propping up a peacefully elected government of the Afghanis? Did they leave when asked?

Hell, we didn't even exploit the oil and natural gas reserves - the Afghan government signed a contract with US competitors in the PRC for a combined oil company between the two nations. Would Russia have allowed that? Would the UK for that matter?

The US was there to ensure another attack wasn't implemented from Afghan soil against the US homeland. At least for the near future, that seems unlikely, even if the Taliban are likely to take over in the long term.

If the leaders actually believe what they are doing, then it isn't hypocrisy. Damn, you have a limited viewpoint, which seems to boil down to 'anything the US does is bad.'

Yes, the Soviets attempted to prop up a communist state. No, they did not do so in the same manner, and that state had no recourse to differ with Soviet strategy. Amin was a dutiful member of the Communist party and believed in their alliance with the Soviets - he was overthrown in the Soviet invasion and killed because he was implementing policies they didn't want. That was the beginning of the Soviet Afghan war. Tell me, when did we drag Kharzai out in the streets to assassinate him?

Amin was replaced by Najibullah. As Gorbachev himself said, "We're still doing everything ourselves .... That's all our people know how to do. They've tied Najibullah hand and foot."

If your view of Imperialism is simply the expansion of influence, then quite frankly every country is an imperialist power, some are just better at it than others. It makes the term meaningless.

NATO invoked article 5, the attack on 9/11 was seen internationally as an act of war.

Destabilizing the region from the active war that was happening in Afghanistan at the time between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban? Allowing Al Qaeda to run a shadow government in Afghanistan? The US alliance with the remnants of the previous legitimate government that had been overthrown by force, lead by the previous President Rabbani, who were also being backed by India, Russia, Tajikistan, and Turkey, against the Taliban who was backed by the ISI out of Pakistan and Al Qaeda? There was war ongoing there, and the point was there were factions in Afghanistan that explicitly wanted to export that war throughout the world. After all, Bin Laden's stated goal was to overthrow the government of the US, was it not?

I'd say you'd have more than legitimate criticism of US actions in many, many places in the Middle East, not the least of which are Syria and Iraq.

Fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda is not one of them.

Then why are we giving direct cash payments to the unemployed? If we stopped playing world police, we could give back that money to people so they can choose how they want to spend it. Raising our education standards is whole other topic completely.

You do know what unemployment insurance is, right?

Yes.

Then why would you bring up unemployment insurance when arguing for a tax break?

I'm not getting into an argument with you so read my statement again and get back to me. I didn't argue for a tax break.

NM. This is getting to close to discussions I've had with .... someone else.

TGOCH didn't really word things very well, but a "tax break" and a "tax rebate" are not tghe same thing.

A "tax break" generally means you don't have to pay as much when it's all tallied up.

A "tax rebate" is literally the government sending you back some money. Like the stimulus checks. It's a government payment, and it's pretty clear that's what he meant.

I also included, "or something like that" because there might be other ideas that other people might think of that I did not. A direct payment would be ideal, IMO.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/imperialism

Yes, most nations are guilty of imperialist policies and land acquisition is only one high profile means of achieving those goals. If that were the topic being discussed then I'd make a case that the US absolutely acts as a rebranded Imperial state.

But it isn't the topic.

My point, which you have neatly sidestepped, is that comparing post war Germany and Afghanistan is a false equivalence and thus misleading because the Afghan people are in no way inclined or predisposed to see a foreign invader as occupying a moral high ground as many Germans cowed by losing WW11 were.

I argued the repeated pattern going back millennia has created a culture of defiance. Not sure where you get the idea I'm blaming the US here given I'm referring in no small part to events which occurred before Europeans discovered the Americas. You seem to have either jumped to conclusions or misread the exchange.

In either case my argument that the US occupation was ill advised and doomed to fail on those grounds alone stands. There was simply no way any outcome was on the table which didn't create more extremism than it prevented.

Given subsequent events I believe that position has been borne out in practise. The formal relationship between the Taliban and ISIS may not be clear cut but the background of anti western sentiment caused by fighting one and in turn leading to the other would require wilful ignorance to deny.

That is not a new phenomenon, we can go back the Crusades for the roots of Middle Eastern antipathy towards the West and extremist organisations anywhere have always flourished in the face of perceived external threats. Afghanistan is one of thousands of instances of the same phenomenon being repeated throughout human history from the Byzantine empire onwards.

So here is my point, invading Afghanistan was not only foolishly disproportionate, it was unproductive and it cost thousands of lives along with billions of dollars to no appreciable gain.

That is a debate we could have, certainly. However, the immediate question is if we stop acting in that role, who takes it over? I guarantee most of the world would not like the answer.

Yep. Vacuums have a tendency to get filled. And the other powers (states or otherwise) that are eager to fill them are, by and large, not very nice people.

And therein lies the dilemma...

I wouldn't agree with that at all - it refocused externally focused extremism into a struggle to maintain their own power blocs, with the resulting decrease in mass casaulty attacks in the West. They never approached anything even remotely the scale of the 9/11 attacks again.

Now you could argue the cost wasn't worth that result, and I could see the answer falling on either side, but certainly OBL's dream of Afghanistan as the death bed of yet another superpower was not realized. Ultimatelyh whatever the fate of the 21st century, middle eastern extremism isn't going to determine the players. But then, OBL believed that Afghanistan was the cause of the decline of the Soviet Union, but that was more focused on internal issues than any true problem with Afghanistan.

While I don't disagree with your premise that factors on the ground were different in the postwar setting of Germany than Iran, I did disagree with your insistence that this was yet another in a long line of Imperial powers, at least in any tangible way.

They've watered down the concept of Imperialism so totally that opening a Kids Gap in Kabul could be considered Imperialism by that definition - hence making that definition irrelevant for any purpose at all.

Now, THAT sounds familiar.

That made me laugh out loud when I saw it on Facebook the other day.